Ep. 390 Martin Shaw - Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us

We live in a world flooded with stories, opinions, and noise, and I find myself wondering which ones are actually worth giving our attention to. In this conversation, I sit down with mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw to explore why some stories shape us toward life while others quietly hollow us out. We talk about myths that function like prayers rather than spells, why Jesus taught through parables, and how stories still have the power to form us into more loving, grounded human beings.

Martin shares his own unexpected journey back to Christianity through a long wilderness vigil and reflects on grief, evil, beauty, and the kind of attention that makes something holy. This is a conversation about becoming human again, about learning how to see clearly, and about allowing the story of Jesus to break our enchantments and draw us toward love.

Martin Shaw is a writer, mythographer and Christian thinker. He’s Visiting Scholar at the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University, and a Fellow of the Temenos Academy. Author of seventeen books, Dr Shaw is the director of the Westcountry School of Myth and founder of the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University. His book Bardskull was described as “rich and transgressive” by Erica Wagner in The Sunday Times and was Book of the Day in The Guardian. A hugely respected oral storyteller, Shaw has toured internationally numerous times, and led symposiums at both Oxford and Cambridge University, Robert Bly describing him as “a true master, one of the very greatest storytellers we have.” 

His more recent work is what he describes as a developing “Christian mythopoetics”—a reminder of the depth and mysticism latent in this middle-eastern mystery religion. Shaw converted to Eastern Orthodoxy after a 101-day vigil in a Dartmoor forest. He still lives nearby to the wood, writing and teaching. The Irish Times call Martin “a seanchaí, an interloper from the medieval.”, Charles Foster adding, “there’s Shaw and there’s everyone else.”

Martin’s Book:

Liturgies of the Wild

Martin’s Recommendation:

Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives

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Transcript

Martin Shaw: 0:46

When a culture is very lost, they will waggle their pen around in the wound and call it art. But in the ancient world, the world of myth, that wasn't enough. It's the third bit of the redemptive arc of the myth, until something has been sacrificed and corn has grown from that sacrifice and gift away, given away. It is simply not a myth worth remembering.

Joshua Johnson: 1:24

Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast. Once we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make, we long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, there are stories that entertain us, and then there are stories that change the shape of our lives. We live in a world flooded with narratives, endless feeds, endless opinions, endless noise, stories designed to grab us, outrage us, seduce us, keep us scrolling. And somewhere along the way, many of us have lost trust that stories can still tell the truth, or that they can actually save us. In this conversation, I sit down with Martin Shaw, a mythologist, storyteller and unexpected Christian convert, to ask a deeper question, what kind of stories are worth giving our attention to? We talk about myths that pray instead of cast spells, stories that don't numb us but awaken us, stories that prepare us for love, for loss, for death, for courage and joy. Martin shares the story of 101 day vigil in the woods that changed everything we explore why Jesus spoke in parables, why the Bible still has power when we let it become strange again, and why some stories form us into real human beings while others slowly hollow us out. This is a conversation about attention, about initiation, about evil, beauty, grief and the fierce hope of resurrection. If you've ever felt spiritually restless, if you're tired of shallow answers and spell like stories, if you're longing for a faith that has teeth and tenderness and depth, this is a conversation that you want to sit in. So join us. Here is my conversation with Martin Shaw. Martin, welcome to shifting culture. Really excited to have you on thank you for joining me. Oh, thank you for having me. It seems like we live in a world where stories are everywhere. We're inundated with stories. Stories for a lot of people, have lost some meaning, because there's just so many of them rapidly coming our way, and we don't know which ones to pay attention to, which ones will ground us and lead us do stories still matter today in our attention economy that we live in.

Unknown: 3:48

The right kind of stories matter. But you've said two or three really interesting things right off the bat, that actually now there's a sort of tyranny of choice when it comes to stories. It's an entirely different universe, even to when I was growing up in the 1970s it's a different world. So as a mythologist, as someone that studies stories, I'm always thinking about, what are the what are the component parts in a story that make it memorable and nutritional, and what are the stories that we should steer away from? And simply put the stories we tend to remember the myths and folktales that stand up for centuries. They have this really interesting combination of what I've been calling the timeless and the time bound. Now, the timeless is all the sort of perennial wisdoms that move through cultures for 1000s of years, and we all feel deep in our bones are wise. However, if it's just perennial wisdoms, then the problem with that, of course, is that we've got a pamphlet, not a story, a mission statement, not a story. And so you're looking for a moment where those perennial wisdoms get a zip code. They but they bang into something, and and that's where the time bound is. So the time bound is us. It's our lives, our struggles. One of the things in Greek myth you notice is that the real pathos and soul in those stories is rarely in the realm of the gods, because the gods never die, and because they never die, they're oddly weightless, but all the real attention is on us with our finiteness and the weird twist that that finiteness makes everything more charged, more poignant, more beautiful, so the timeless, the time bound. But you also said, in this kind of flood. Eight of stories, I think we have to be discerning about the kind of stories that we're going to decide to give our attention to, because I've said before, we make things holy by the type of attention we give them. So when we really look focus at something, whether we are ostensibly religious or not, something happens, and that becomes the temple that you're serving in. And the problem is some stories seem to want to seduce us rather than court us, and that is a big idea. Some stories are spells, and some stories are prayers. And as a Christian, I'm interested in the praying, not the spelling, you know. So I'm using metaphors to describe, really the question you're asking, yeah,

Joshua Johnson: 6:34

Jesus used a lot of metaphors. The Bible is full of metaphors. The Christian story is as metaphor. Why do you think that this story, like the Jesus story, the god story, comes in metaphors to us. How does that help us embody the story and not just see it as a story?

Unknown: 6:56

Well, what we have, I suppose, and I've only been thinking about this in depth recently, is we get the in you know, if we think of the story of Christ, we think of the Gospels. On the one hand, you have this very strange, peculiar narrative of a man that seems to live, born, a fugitive, dies, an outlaw, returns, very, very wild, strange, compassionate, disturbing, mind altering story, and there's something about the telling of it, especially in, say, the gospel of Mark, where you get a sense that something is actually being reported. It hasn't been distilled into the, you know, the incredible metaphysics of Johnson gospel yet, but there's a kind of storytellers vivacity to mark. There's a drive to mark, and it was Mark's gospel that made me feel extremely uneasy as a non Christian, because as someone that spent their life putting myths and stories together and telling them, I thought this reads like that, but it sort of doesn't read like that. This reads like something happened. So on the one level, you get the facts of the matter as it were in the story of somebody like Jesus or Jesus, because he's very particular. But then underneath that, there is this symbolic and metaphoric, metaphorical range to absolutely everything that he does. And wonderfully as Christians, we don't have to choose one over the other. We really don't. And I really love that someone was saying to me the other day with a with a slightly raised eyebrow, they said, Dr Shaw, you know you've taught in the great universities, you've written 17 books. You surely don't mean to tell me that you actually believe in a physical resurrection. I mean, surely this is an elaborate metaphor. And I said, Well, I said, I think it is an elaborate metaphor. And I think it actually really happened like signs and wonders, guy, one doesn't cancel out the other. And I think in a journey of faith, there are times when we need nuts and bolts, and there are times when we need deep mystery. Christianity is so vast it can cater for all of it.

Joshua Johnson: 9:04

I mean, you open your book up with your story. You have a sign and wonder that really shapes you and shakes you and brings you back into into something. I find something like a conversion experience like you had, comes through the mystery to the sign to the wonder, and it comes through that instead of coming through a well told story as a storyteller, you think maybe it may be a well told story. You as you were on 101 day trip into the forest, you were kind of embodying this story itself and embodying the myth and being part of it, and not just letting it be told to you. I find it interesting there. That's when signs and wonders came. Can you just tell me the story of that and that, those moments, and how are you starting to grapple with that still?

Unknown: 11:04

Well, I think I'll be grappling with it for the rest of my life as as as you know. Thank you for reading it, and you'll know that what happens in the at the beginning of the book, which is absolutely what happened to me, I elected to go on 101 day vigil in a Dartmoor wood in England. And I wasn't in the forest all day long and all night, but I was there every day at dusk for a few hours alone, and it culminated with me spending an entire night there in an old Celtic Hill fort in the center. Now, when I reflect back, I think to myself, why did you want to do that? I was approaching 50. I have a background in something called Wilderness rites of passage. So I spent. An enormous amount of time outdoors. I lived in a tent for four years, so there's a bit of that, but predominantly, I was going out, not as a Christian at that time, but certainly somebody that in midlife wanted to have a profound period of listening and reflection in the wild. And then, as we got to the last night of that, I had an extraordinary set of encounters that were profoundly Well, on the one one hand, they seemed extremely supernatural, and on another level, they seemed completely natural. They weren't frightening. But one way or another, I got very shaken up, and when I came back, interestingly, immediately, lockdown happened, so I couldn't then leave where I lived for about a year and a half, not for any real length of time, and I had all of this time to just state. Have I actually had an encounter with the God of my childhood. Have a because it seems that way, there were things in dreams, there were things in words, and things that had happened that seemed to be pushing towards that strange Middle Eastern mystery cult called Christianity. Took about 18 months for the penny to really drop, believe it or not, but around 50, it was about four days before my 50th birthday, I realized that this phrase, it's a lovely phrase, the indwelling presence, that this presence that had announced itself while I was in the woods, was now nearer than my own breath, and I shouldn't let opportunity like that go by since then, that has been that was, believe it or not, that was four years ago, and the time in the woods would have been almost five and a half, six years ago. Since then, I've entered the enormity of the Christian tradition. I found a home in Eastern Orthodoxy. So I've been very happy there. But I I'm a guy the great totems of my family when I was growing up were Tolkien and CS Lewis. If Lewis was anything, he was not a sectarian Christian. He speaking to the universe, you know, gather around the Creed and like, let's, let's, let's have at it. And I and my family are like that. And in my family, we have Catholics. We have Baptists, really, we have evangelicals, and then we have this strange fellow at the end, which is myself, and so we have to talk over the fence to each other. And I think that's really good, because whatever denomination you're in, interestingly, I see the same issues coming up in a lot of people. Most people seem to want a deeper engagement with their faith one way or another, and one of the ways you can do that is through contemplation and vigils and prayer. But there are others as well. So yeah, that's where I find myself. But I'm a, I'm a dreadful Christian. You know? I'm, I'm the worst of, as we say in Orthodox, of all sinners, I am the first. I am the first, unfortunately. But do I love Jesus? Yeah, I do. I really do. And and the weird side effect of trying to be a Christian is that although I'm still as neurotic and vindictive as ever, I find myself loving people fairly frequently, in a way that I really couldn't anticipated half a decade before.

Joshua Johnson: 15:13

That's an interesting distinction that you make, right is that you're a dreadful Christian, but you're finding yourself loving people. I think there's the a lot of Christians would say I'm a great Christian, but they don't find themselves loving people. Why do you think the Jesus and loving Jesus is the thing that is drawing you and leading you and starting to seep inside your bones?

Unknown: 15:39

I don't know. I think, interestingly, I don't have visually a clear picture of Jesus. So in other words, I know people, especially friends of mine, look at icons for long periods of time, an icon always looking directly at you. It's not looking from the side, it's looking directly at you. But Jesus, for me, is not a figure that I can see clearly. I would have a feeling for what we call the Holy Spirit. I can I have a I have a kind of sensitivity to that. But Jesus, as has been said by other people actually in the past, is a figure, kind of moving in the tree line that I glimpse and I'm almost alarmed by and then again, and he's this strange character that is willing to talk to anybody, but be very careful if you do start chatting to him, because you know what he's opening up is seeming seemingly so incredibly counter cultural. Five years ago, if you'd said to me, Oh, you can go into the past. Is there anybody you want to meet? I'd have probably been quite keen to meet Jimi Hendrix or William Blake or somebody. But I'd really like to have a look at the fellow. I would like to have that Galilee and have a real look just through the crowd. I can't get a I can't get a handle on Jesus. In a way, he's like a fish that I hold in my hand for a second, and then he fly. He goes back down. And so I'm, you know, I'm like Paul, really, or aspiring, you know, I want to fall ever deeper into the mind of Christ.

Joshua Johnson: 17:09

As a mythologist and as a storyteller, you know that all of these fairy tales and these great myths that we have, these stories, they reveal truths about our lives that you have actually then helped walk people through, through storytelling, that they can see themselves and picture themselves and get wisdom from that and knowing that, hey, now I have to learn how to live in a story like this as well. How do you think that stories start to reveal truth about who we are and bring us the wisdom that we need to live well,

Unknown: 17:50

they always do it in a in a similar way, actually, and and they that involves having the rug pulled from underneath the main character. So in other words, a story where just good things happen doesn't tend to get us near the rub of a phrase I use frequently with myth, no pressure, no diamond. It is only when there is a betrayal, there's a trip to the underworld, there's some type of duress. It's only when there's a squeeze of some kind do we see the essential character of the personality step forward and even be matured. So within myth, there's usually three stages, severance, threshold, return. You leave the familiar. You go through a period of, you know, duress and illumination, and as you survive that, you come back with a gift for the people that you left behind. And that is not a bad rhythm. You will find that that does, it does exist in many cultures. It's not identical, but something like that exists in many cultures, and it really hasn't gone away. A lot of what I do in my work is work with modern people and ancient technologies of story. I think that myth is a kind of an ancient technology of how we work ourselves into eventually becoming a real human being. And the myth that I've been telling now for about 30 years, which could be Greek, they could be Russian, Siberian, Irish, a lot of Celtic material, the stories that I tell lay out the conditions of life, really, really, fantastically. And then in Christianity, it's amped up even more, because you now have someone a who is a living myth, who walks into time and space in a way that we can comprehend, and B doesn't just show us the conditions of life, but shows us how to then live that life. And that, me, was alarming, because even as a young man, I could sort of sense the difference. And I thought, you know, I'm more comfortable with Odysseus, I'm more comfortable with Bail I'm more comfortable with anything other than this rather strange man turning all my natural ambitions on their head. He's a he says he's a very strange figure. So, yeah, but, but actually, of course, now in my mid 50s, those two worlds have come together, and I find it very interesting, because obviously, on the one hand, I'm now exposed to lots and lots of Christians that are interested in what I'm up to which I love, but I'm also exposed to lots of people who've been reading my work for years thought I had literally had Some sort of nervous breakdown when when Christian thing came along, but are now, with the advent of liturgies of the wild, going well, we do trust him, and he kind of looks all right, that he kind of has more energy now than he had before. Maybe we can maybe the Door of Mercy is not entirely closed. And so this really lovely conversation is going on and tremendous openness. And so I think the book is arriving at kind of just the right moment.

Joshua Johnson: 21:13

I mean, you walk people through the stages. I mean, you just said, Okay, severance threshold and return. You talk about the colors of myth as well, the red, black and white, and we get into it. And then you walk people through some different initiations of death and passion and passivity and prayer and all sorts of initiations that help move us through. Say, I have a loved one about to pass over, about to die, and I'm starting to grapple with, is it their time? Is it. Time yet. How do myths and stories help us in those initiation moments and maybe the place of dealing with death and grief and loss?

Unknown: 22:00

Well, one of the ways they do it is not by hiding it, and they understand that we are in a way, we symbolically face death frequently in our lives, things pass away, fall, die, come back, revive. But on the other hand, dying itself, that experience, that particular doorway, cultures worth their salt from all over the world say that the process of dying is not about living until you die. So you know, it's not after a long battle with what such and such a disease they then died. It's like, actually, maybe those last month shouldn't be a battle. Maybe should be turning to the doorway that is trying to open. I'm sure people that are watching this have had the experience of being with a loved one or so, if you ever watch somebody that's very close to death, if you're with them, for me, they often seem like babies. They seem like they've grown smaller. And kind of in that whole air in the house is really different. Everything is very, very different. And I thought, Oh, they're about to get born. Just very odd thoughts, irrational. I was like, Oh, I'm watching a birth, but they're about to be born into something else. And that gives me kind of excitement, because I, you know, no one told me that that's not something that's been laying on me as a belief system. You just the evidence is writ large. So to go back to your question, stories, prepare you with many, many little deaths. I mean, you mentioned a word a minute ago, Initiation. Initiation is something, again, that we find all over the world, the in any tribal group, you would understand that life is going to throw duress, depression, challenge and catastrophe at you at certain points, and if you have not been prepared in some way for the dark underbelly of life, you're going to be woefully unprepared for that. And so an initiation, say, going out into the wild, fasting, wrestling a wild animal. It's an opportunity, interestingly, to grow to walk nearer to death. So you then live more fully, but you then limp back with an awareness of that side of life. And the trouble now is we have enough technology around us. We have enough if we want, we can keep all of that at bay until we are in, you know, Dire Straits ourself, whereas any culture that really understands its stories and its ceremonies and its history knows it's a funny phrase from a fairy tale. You have to invite the witch to the wedding. You have to have a place for that reality amongst us, and the scarcity of that is quite frightening

Joshua Johnson: 25:06

all over the world, we're dealing with evil and we're dealing with with good, and we don't know how to deal with it very well. We argue about good and evil, we argue about right and wrong. We argue. We just argue and talk over each other. Are there myths and stories to help us confront evil, confront what's happening in the world, that are not just dogmatic arguments to try and convince people we may need to move in a different direction.

Unknown: 25:41

Yeah, there are. And what I would also say is cultures where myths have arisen from, and they're sort of a healthy story culture. Almost all of them would believe that there is an there is an energy at work in the world, independent of human beings, that does not wish us well. So there's a reality of evil, in the same way there be a reality of God. So that's for a start, it's not just the worst excesses of the human mind at play. So for example, for example, in a Greek myth, it is understood if you are encountering a demon, you are not to look the demon endlessly directly in the eye. What you are to do is look at its reflection on a shield. And if you look at the reflection on the shield, that gives you enough of the shape, but without being absolutely hollowed out by that encounter, we always have to remember, of course, that every demon was once an angel. So that's an interesting thing. There's a, you know, that there's a, there's a within that demon. There is still some little being of God, it despite its terrible shape now, but the thing to do, the shield, is a symbol or a metaphor of our own artfulness and imagination. When I meet younger people, especially often kids who've got really caught up in activism or politics, they become tremendously disillusioned by it and are sort of incinerated by the time they're 30, because they've had no shield. They've gazed at the horror of existence without any kind of buffer for it. I have a friend of mine recently that's written a book about technology, and he's come at the other end of it pretty wiped. And one of the things we were reflecting on is, you know, you need, if you keep looking at the if you keep handling the Dark Materials, you have to be careful that that doesn't actually kind of generate an energy that is too big handled. You're not meant to handle that. God handles that. As Christian still the good news. So you want to be going, I think, to something that is redemptive and nourishing and bigger than you. Otherwise, your your knees are going to totter under what's being faced at you. So in literature's the wild, there's a chapter on evil. Initially there were three chapters on evil, but my wise editor said three chapters on evil is a bit much. Either write a book on evil or we're going to have to condense this a bit. But yeah, there are myths, there are stories. I think another thing, though, and this is sometimes complex for Christians, is that, especially in the fairy tale tradition, there are scary characters, but they're not evil characters, Baba Yaga in Russian myth. So Baba Yaga is going to push you. She may even she may, you know you have an encounter with Baba Yaga down in the underworld. She's not Lucy Eric, she's not she's not she there's no real wickedness in her. This is the distinction that Russians would make. They say some characters are death in service to life, and some characters are death in service to death. So Yaga comes in to petrify you into living right and thinking ingeniously and inventively and out of the box. That is absolutely not the same thing as a Luciferic character. And one of the things that I have to do with folk and fairy tales is when I often when I'm talking to Christian friends of mine, and they're going so all of these characters are manifestations of the devil. And I say, I don't, I don't think so. No, I don't think they are what you call tricks to figures. And tricks to figures are, you know, they're, they're not the same thing as this growing perennial energy that changes and develops, that we pick up through the Bible,

Joshua Johnson: 29:46

the Bible itself. For many people who have grown up in the faith and have been reading the Bible, it seems very familiar, and the story doesn't, doesn't hit them, in a way, because I know this, I don't really feel like it's unfamiliar anymore. So I'm not going to, like really struggle to figure out what it's trying to say. What's the texture behind this? How does the Bible stay true to its form and what it's trying to say in its meaning and sacredness, but then become unfamiliar enough to us where we can start to discover what is hidden in it

Unknown: 30:29

brilliant question, and it's a very creative question. It's a very inviting question, and it's kind of difficult, because, actually, I don't think many of us really want to stray very far from the chapter and verse that is so nourishing to us. I don't want to hear, you know, a new version of, in the beginning was the word I really like that, you know, that has power, that's that's it that makes the hair go up on my on my neck, but, but in the same breath as an oral storyteller, somebody that tells stories, one of the things I'm doing at the moment is telling The story of Ruth and Naomi, or telling the story of Joseph in Egypt, or telling the story of Jacob and Esau, telling the story of Abraham, telling the story of the garden, but I have to do that in a non chapter and verse style. I have to I have to do it as if I'm describing to you, and I haven't learned it like a recital. I'm imagining it in front of you. I have to hand what storytellers do is we handle the bones of things, and then we blow on them with the Ruach. You know, we blow so something emerges. And if you are used to a very literary. A very written down version of those stories. The problem is, as you have rightly said, they remind me of the animals in the Narnia stories that have become frozen long winter. And actually, we all need a bit of aslan's breath, you know we all need, because those stories are just waiting to come back to life, to waiting to find themselves holy, spirited again. And I think wonderfully, this is an amazing opportunity. I my deep prayer in my own work would be to be part of a generation of Christian storytellers. Wouldn't that be amazing every church, every church could have a guy who goes, Okay, I don't think about these things exactly like a pastor, but I don't psychologize them like Jordan Peterson, but I'm going to tell them with a from a really loving place, and then we don't go, and what that meant was we go, wow. Okay, my goodness me, that was the story of Noah Crikey. Where are you in the story? And suddenly we have, we're we're in, we're in. And I'm not remotely, I don't think that that. I think that's just one, one part of how we keep things fresh and alive. But I think it's a great opportunity for all of us in different ways,

Joshua Johnson: 33:08

as we're planning Easter at our church, we've been planning three nights of storytelling to tell the Jesus story of like it is Jesus storytelling nights we're going to tell the story of Jesus, and that is probably the most excited I've been about what we want to be doing Here at church that I have been a long time is that we're gonna It's storytelling nights. I think it's powerful to have those nights.

Unknown: 33:36

Yeah, yeah, you gave me goosebumps. Then I wish I was there. I can't believe it. I can't just sounds so fantastic. It's great.

Joshua Johnson: 33:46

Yeah, we just talked about evil. You know Greek myths that you want to see the shadow of evil on the shield. Yeah, and what I was thinking, if we're looking at the face of evil, you talked at the very beginning of a conversation, that you want to be telling the myths of prayer and not myths of spell. And there could be spell. Do you think that we get seduced by evil, and the stories of evil, they become spells for us, if we are looking at straight in the face.

Unknown: 34:19

Yeah, I also think that we live in an age of the anti hero, so I think straight heroism and goodness is out of fashion. And I think we we need to return to some fundamental moral courage, some real decency of character, and for that to be modeled for younger people, especially, there's a TV show on Netflix called Stranger Things, and that's just sort of, that is dark. It's dark, and there is no redemptive arc to it that I can fashion at all. And it's, it's the budget is huge, massive creativity, I'm sure, from the people that are creating it, but it leaves me with a feeling of tremendous lostness, actually, that when when a culture is very lost, they will waggle their pen around in the wound and call it art. And that's what I think those programs are like. But in the ancient world, the world of myth that was not that wasn't enough. It's the third bit of the redemptive arc of the myth, until something has been sacrificed and corn has grown from that sacrifice and given away, given away. It is simply not a myth worth remembering. And so there is, I think, I think we are a culture in spelled, it's interesting to me a word that is used a lot, and it's often used in my own where people say, Oh, you're, you're so enchanting. Don't you think we should all be enchanted? And I get, I get very I don't like that at all, because for me, Christ is the great breaker of enchantments, but he's but he doesn't mean he's not fulsome awesome in his mystery is all of those things, but the enchanted thing hasn't has a bit of the quality of trance about it. I've been thinking about this today. My great sabotage is too much self absorption, and it's very important for me to be in the world and talking to other people in and paying attention to things that are not just my inner condition and the problem with a lot of us growing up and younger ones coming up with all these devices we have around us now, all these screens we have. Around Us Now we're just kind of interiorized all the time. That becomes individuation, and that becomes what people associate with a religious journey, which is terrible.

Joshua Johnson: 36:59

You just mentioned attention at the very end of your book says, We have Christ's full attention. Let's not wasted. And it says, In the end, it's surrendered to that loving attention that will get us home. So as you're wrestling with the attention that you're giving, what does surrender to the loving attention of Christ look like for you?

Unknown: 37:22

It looks I tell you what, I don't know what it looks like. I know what it feels like, what it feels like. And it's interesting to me, people say, you know, okay, you're, you're a few years into this. Now, what does, what does being a Christian feel like? And I say often, for me, it's a feeling of relentless exposure. It's exposure to something that is bigger, mightier and stranger than I am and I can't let myself off certain hooks that when I was younger, I, you know, I wouldn't have given it, given it a thought. So yeah, for me being being a Christian and and not just being a Christian, but trying to slowly get a sense of the mind of the God that I have surrendered to, getting a sense of the mind of that God, which I think the Bible really, really helps, because you get a sense. I don't know if I think I would probably be naive to say it's as if that mind of God evolves over the Bible, but it it certainly seems to move depending on which author and what is happening. It seems to develop. I was talking, I was talking to a pastor the other day, said the most hilarious thing, and he didn't really mean it, but he said, he said, he said, with the New Testament, He said, I feel like God has a conversion experience. It's like, you know, you've got the Old Testament in all all, it's kind of wild wonder. And then God's like, hold on a minute, you know? And then bang, it's just, it was a very smart thing that the fella said. So anyway, I feel exposed. The image that I've given many times is that I feel when Jesus enters the temple and starts kicking things over and get I feel that my whole inner system is that temple filled with things that he doesn't care for. And there's a kind of attracted audit where he's going around with his lamp saying, Hey, dude, we've talked about this before, and up goes the lamp. So I don't he's not reassuring. He doesn't endlessly pat me on the head and tell me what a great job I'm doing.

Joshua Johnson: 39:37

Do you have a story rumbling through your mind? I'm sure you have hundreds of them, right? But do you have a story rumbling through your mind that could could help us grab a hold of some of the stuff that we've been talking about.

Unknown: 39:49

Yeah, okay, I'll tell you. I'll tell you stories. Not, it's not a Bible story, but, but if you're, if you'll, you'll feel what it's about. Once upon a time, there was a village, and in the village, on a Friday, everybody got together and they'd sing songs, tell stories, do a dance, brilliant. It's a wonderful village, if you were gifted like that. But there's a young lad who tries. He might just cannot sing. He really wants to sing, but it's just not working. And so they give him a name. The village, your boy's about 1516, they give him this name, no song. Imagine that, carrying that around as a teenage kid, no song, and so he ends up living on the edge of the village, and he doesn't go to the Friday night parties anymore, but he's always aware, oh, it's Friday night. Everybody's in there, singing, dancing, telling stories, and he's cooking a meal out in the he's just out where the forest begins, where it's cold and snowy, and he's cooking this. He's a good cook. He's got this meal going on, this lovely stew, and out of the woods comes a fox. And the fox says, Oh, I really like the smell of your stew. I tell you what. I'm a magical kind of Fox. If you give me the stew, I'll give you something. What would you like in exchange for the stew? Well, the boy wastes no time whatsoever. He says, Give me big song. Give me a song when I sing it, the old men think of God, and the women think of love. Give me a song that big and you can have the stew. And the fox says, Well, I know that song, actually, yes, an old song, but it doesn't come from humans. It's older and more powerful that comes from the other place. It's like a heavenly sound. I'll give it to you, but you must promise me that you will only sing it in the most sacred. Of occasions. You can sing big song when a child is being born or when somebody is dying, or there's a marriage, that's about it. You know, times of great celebration or grieving, you do remember these are the, these are the this is, this is the restrictions of big song. Says, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he blows big song into the boy, the lad wastes no time. It's Friday night. Runs down into the middle of the, you know, Market Square, runs into the village hall, starts to sing. Sure enough, everything stops. He really has the gift. It's like Robert Johnson, the blues player, going out to the crossroads, but in a really he could not play. And now he's very, very good, really weird. So they give him a new name. They say, Oh, we got it wrong. You're not no song. You are. Sings beautifully well. Sings beautifully is a more dangerous name, even than no song, and what happens is the lad starts to sing, and the years pass, and of course, they now bring him into the center of the community, because they never want that sound to stop. He sings at the weddings, he sings at the funerals. He sings at the grieving times. He sings at the celebratory times. But after about 10 years the strangest thing happens, he forgets there was ever a time that he couldn't do it, and he forgets the conditions with which he was given the song. So if he's on a date, and the date is beginning to dip, and the woman is not interested. Out comes a bit of big song. Her eyes light up, and come on, baby, light my fire. You know, the evening goes in an entirely interesting direction. Or if he's in the tavern and he's holding up his CS, Lewis was a great fan of a pint in the afternoon. Loved a beer in the afternoon, a drinker, and if you're running it and he just sing a couple of notes, and they pour another pint, and it was wonderful. So now he's franchising this sacred gift. He's got the website, he's got the app, he's got the motivational t shirt. You know big song.com, you know hashtag, big song, and he sings it, and he has no memory of the old conditions. And watching from the tree line is the Fox, and the fox says, Indeed, indeed, indeed. And one night when the man is sleeping, the fox comes and he takes the song away, and that is the story. That's it. It's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. You can talk, you can talk for hours about that story. Now, the key with storytelling is, whatever you do handle a story like that really gently, because it's awful. You say, What it means is this, it just just just don't do it. Because, actually, we don't quite know what is going on, but everybody has an instinct that, oh yeah, we've all done that. We've probably, we've all reneged on some great gift. And if you the key is always to say, I really would suggest, in your wonderful Jesus evenings that are coming up your Jesus storytelling, the question to ask everybody is just, where do you find yourself? In the tail, it's lovely. Not, you know, did you notice this point? This point, the three points, you know, three points, just, where do you find yourself? And then suddenly people are piping up all over the place, and dogs are howling, and you're like, wow. Okay, we thought we understood this. Maybe we don't understand this. Maybe something is alive in the room. And so that playfulness and wonder and the belief as Christians that this is a sacred story, and when you start to tell those stories, you know God is present. God is present. So no song, that little song, that little story, I can tell that in five minutes, but I could tell it in an hour. So you can squeeze it, you can stretch it, but I just wanted to offer it for yourself or for anywhere. Just you know, because you could learn it in two minutes. You can learn it in two minutes, but just thinking going through and writing down the one or two moments in that story where your your heart or your soul or your consternation opened,

Joshua Johnson: 46:41

it probably hit in different ways to me, and it made me think about different things in my own. Life and who I am and my relationship to the world and to gift and probably then other people. So take me into the wilderness around the fire, telling stories. When you tell a story, are you asking questions after the story to spark conversation, and if so, what kind of questions are you asking?

Unknown: 47:10

What I do is, first of all, I just gage the response in the way I've just described. So for 10 minutes, you just have people round the fire. I mean, to be fair, I'm often now in large halls with 1000 people in so I can't do this in the way I used to, but you can be around a fire with eight people, six people, nine people, and you can get a fairly solid so you'd say to them, where do you find yourself in the story? And one of them would say, Well, I'm actually walking out into the snow with the with the name, no song, ringing in my ears, and I feel humiliated and upset. Someone else is walking in from the tree line with the fox, someone else is hearing him sing in the longhouse for the first time. So I do a lot of just honoring, in a way, just what's emerging. Then when I feel that everybody feels heard and UN lectured at. I might begin to walk through some of the themes, and I'd say, Isn't it interesting? However, in your life, have you ever had a gift that you knew in your heart wasn't just a technique that you learn, it was, it was a true blessing from someone else. Have you always honored it? Or have there been times where you maybe have ended up feeling a little bit like sings beautifully, and people will go, Yeah, I guess there was this time then you get personal stories from people, and they go, okay, yeah, yeah. This is my this is my no song moment. And then when that's happened, you might and I say, Has anybody got a question? And someone would say, Well, what genre of story does this belong to? And then that's an opportunity for more of the teacher to come out in me, and more of the mythologist to come out and say, Well, it's a little bit of a trickster story. It's a bit of this. It's a bit of that. It's a story we find all over the world that's interesting. What's this about? And so over about an hour, you have lots of what the psychologist James Hillman used to call felt experience, things that you feel you can hang your heart on in the story, but you also gradually get fermented in the wider associations and traditions of that kind of thing. It's a really delicate act of of the two.

Joshua Johnson: 49:38

Well, Martin, if you could talk to your readers, the people who pick up liturgies of the wild, what hope do you have for your book and for the readers? What do you want for this.

Unknown: 49:48

In a nutshell, the book is asking a question. And the question is, how do how do myths and stories help us grow into real human beings? And what does that look like? How do we become a real human being? It seems such a basic question, but oddly, I think we live in a culture of half adults. You know, as my old mentor, Robert Bly, say we're kind of adolescent. We're very needy, we're very gimme, gimme, gimme. We're very me first. And so I'm interested in the stories that help us grow into true old growth human beings, and this book is jam packed with everything that I can locate over the last 30 years of my own life into each chapter, as you said earlier on, a chapter on passion, a chapter on limit, a chapter on death, a chapter on the capacity to Make praise. That's what the book is about. So if you're interested in, you know, deepening as a human, having a rummage around what what soul could mean. If you're particularly interested in, you know, where the Christian journey meets the wider myths, this is that book.

Joshua Johnson: 51:07

I have a couple quick questions here at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give

Unknown: 51:15

Don't worry about anything till you're 30. That would be, probably be number one, it's like whatever people are laying on you, sonny. You know, you're still kind of young when you're 30, and so so allow, if you can do, you know, do some voyaging. Don't, don't be afraid when your life doesn't necessarily look like your friends who maybe immediately had children or immediately became successful or immediately became wealthy. You are perfectly safe. It's a really odd thing to. A but you're perfectly safe in a way, and luckily, maybe enough people did do that to me that I didn't end up in a situation. The key to any feeble success I've had is simple, no plan B. I just have no plan I have no practical skills. I could I can only do this. That's it, and that's good, because I have no I have no feeling for mechanics, I have no feeling for plumbing. I have no feeling for sport, but I admire people that do. But because I couldn't do any of that, and I didn't have a mathematical mind or a scientific mind, all the eggs were absolutely in one basket. So if you can find something, do you remember the I'm just thinking of Joseph Campbell. Now, used to say, Follow your bliss. But what Campbell said that became so popular, he said, towards the end of his life, he said, If I could, if I could refine the sentence, now I'd say, Follow your bliss, but then be an adult and figure out that, how that can be be a sustainable life for you. That's the bit he would kind of added to it, because that's, you know, that's the great challenge. But I think if we're parents, we hope that our kids will grow up, or our nephews and our nieces will grow up going, okay, an adult does sacrifice things. An adult does work hard, but an adult also has a capacity to for joy and passion and vocation. Yeah, that that's the kind of thing I'd be saying.

Joshua Johnson: 53:20

Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend I'm

Unknown: 53:23

always reading. I have a massive like, 1000s and 1000s of books, and I'm lucky, it will give me books all the time as well. I would like to I've been recommending this book a lot. It's called, it's by a fairly obscure Eastern Orthodox teacher called elder fadius. And the book is called, our thoughts determine our lives. And it's a very he's a man that struggled with a bit of mental health himself on occasion, but he's a profound Christian, and if anybody, for example, my a lot of my friends, we're in we're in winter now we're finding this a particularly difficult winter. I'm not sure why, particularly difficult, and elder Thaddeus points us towards this terribly disturbing thing that Jesus says. Will you stop worrying? He says it more than once, and so one of the things he says is, listen your thoughts the way you if you indulge your thoughts, especially catastrophic and doom laden thoughts, if you indulge that that will become, that will become your demonic reality. So get, get a grip with your thoughts earlier on and and attend to it. So that's the book I would recommend.

Joshua Johnson: 54:40

Well, Martin, this book, liturgies of the wild, is the best book I've read in a while. I love it. I really, after reading this, I don't know if there's gonna be another book that's better this year that I read. I read a lot of books, and I'm just, I love your book like I felt like I wanted to crawl inside of it and live inside of of this. It's so good. So I do want people to go and get it, I really will be shouting it from the rooftops, like this is something everybody needs to go and get and live and figure out what does it look like to be human in this world, and how these these myths and stories can shape us, and how we could learn how to tell better stories so that we can pay attention to the stories that really matter in our lives. Fantastic. I love it. So people could get this anywhere books are sold, it'll be out, it'll be available. Is there anywhere else that you'd like to point people to? How can they connect with what you're doing? Anywhere specifically you'd like to people

Unknown: 55:43

do things look for Dr Martin shaw.com that's a place, so it's a great repository of all the books I've already written. You can, you can attempt to find me, to book me for an event, although it's not easy. But there's a there's an address, this woman called Tina, you can write to. So Dr, Martin shaw.com, would be a place to go. And then finally, every Sunday, I have something called a sub stack, which is like a kind of newsletter, but I record it as well as read it. So you can have it. You can have me on droning every week, and it's always the freshest stuff. It's it's the bread that's just out of the oven. So whatever I'm thinking that week, it's called the House of beasts and vines. Please subscribe. You say if anybody that subscribes is saving me from a career in academia, so I really appreciate that means I don't do too much of that work only when I want to. So sub stack has to be some vines. Dr Martin shield, calm and yeah, thank you for your kind words. I'm not used to the fact that anybody's. Read the book yet. So talking to you and feeling your warmth is tremendous. I mean, it took three years. So thank you. You know, appreciate it.

Joshua Johnson: 56:58

Yeah, well, thank you for your work, and you are a gift to the world. This work is a gift to the world. So I loved our conversation. It was a pleasure and privilege to be able to walk through this with you so thank you so much pleasure. No problem. You.