The God who raises Jesus from the dead surely desires only what is good for the body. (Gustaf Wingren)
This conversation between two Englishmen, Mark Vernon and Martin Shaw, was making the rounds the other month. In it, Martin Shaw—whose work in traditional storytelling and mythology has heretofore borne a neo-paganish and shamanic cast—describes a visionary encounter at the end of a 100-day vigil in a forest with what he calls “the mossy face of Christ.” (Actually the experience he describes is a little different than that eye-catching phrase—which Vernon uses for the title of the episode—might suggest: something weirder and more various and definitely worth checking out.) It transpires in the conversation that Shaw, in his recent search to find a niche for himself among the various sects and denominations and traditions of Christianity, to which he seems to be converting, was most moved when visiting an Eastern Orthodox church.
Whether Martin Shaw will formally, sacramentally become an Orthodox or any other particular kind of Christian remains to be seen. But if he goes the way of Orthodoxy, he will certainly have some eminent precedent among modern Englishmen. Perhaps the one whose work I know best is Philip Sherrard (1922-1995): his books hugely influenced me about a decade ago and are particularly valuable, I find, for elucidating the link between cosmology and transcendence, on the one hand, and ecology on the other—or perhaps I should say the degradation of the former that leads to the despoliation of the latter.
But Martin Shaw is not as scholarly as Sherrard nor a philhellene expatriate. Rather he is a master of ancient storytelling committed most—and newly so, if I understand him right—to some of the legendary material surrounding the early saints of Britain and Ireland. That is a rich literary deposit indeed, one that seems to capture the imaginations of diverse people. The legendary and hagiographical literature of early medieval Britain and Ireland has such power that it long ago enticed me to study the languages of the early medieval British Isles. I’ve used Helen Waddell’s Beasts and Saints to teach some of the material Shaw says he will be (re)turning to, though I have to say that for myself the results have been mixed at best, due to the post-Christian condition of American culture. College students are not primed to grasp the virtues and wonder tales are meant to demonstrate. Nevertheless I teach the tales, because I hope someday their like will be written again—and in my part of the world.
A much more recent convert to Orthodoxy among English writers is Martin Shaw’s friend Paul Kingsnorth. I recommend his work, especially his trilogy of fiction, which I read as a quasi-fantastical epic of conversion and a fascinating reworking of deep Arthurian imagery, the total effect of which is to transfigure the geography of England. But if you don’t have time for a trilogy of fiction, you could start with the beautiful essay Kingsnorth wrote about his conversion. Like Shaw, he speaks of visionary experiences and Road-to-Damascus moments. And this all seems quite right to me: a critical number of artists and intellectuals must undergo epiphanies of some sort if the West stands any chance of salvaging from its own heritage a sense of the sacred order that is the source and guarantor of the natural and moral orders. We will not argue ourselves back to sanity, for it is argument—rather, a hypertrophied and undisciplined rationality—that has driven us insane in the first place.
In fact reason is not to be discarded. We simply must learn to use it again as the tool it ought to be, rather than acquiesce uncritically to its seeming dictates. The visionary and the analytical, the fantastical and the factual, must unite in contemplation. This is the burden of Iain McGilchrist’s colossal new work, The Matter with Things, which is the kind of book one hopes a later stage of the culture will look back on and declare “ahead of its time.” I don’t know and I suppose we can never know if few have visionary experiences, epiphanies in which the living and interconnected nature of reality is revealed, or if many do but few are able to express even a fragment of the insight they are vouchsafed in such moments. I am a religious man, as I understand such things, and very much one out of doors like Kingsnorth and Shaw, one who read his first scripture in the green world. I have kept my vigils in the woods—heck, I spent the last few nights looking at the Milky Way spread over a campfire in a remote holler in Ohio—and I’ve even been up in the mountains of the west of Ireland that Kingsnorth writes about with regard to his conversion. But have I ever had an epiphany?
I’m really not sure how to answer. But I lean to saying that rapture of a kind, which is related to moving in the “flow state,” might just be an ordinary and healthy part of human life when human life is properly structured. I believe I experienced epiphanic, rapturous moments while playing music in my youth. I have occasionally entered that state while writing or translating. But I think we transcend egotism most naturally when we are most fully embodied. For most of us, it’s rare these days. We don’t live as our ancestors lived, and it could be that we are therefore missing out on a variety of consciousness that was once a widespread subtle influence of goodness.
In the middle of June I traveled with my family to Washington Island, Wisconsin so that my wife could begin to learn to weave on a floor loom at the Sievers School of Fabric Arts. The feeling I have been talking about, which for convenience I’m calling epiphany, is above all, as I think of it, an experience of reality as flowing energy arrayed in an unfathomably complex yet seemly pattern—perhaps indeed something woven, a great web or like Indra’s Net, in which each node and interstice reflects all others. When one takes one’s rightful place in this pattern, one is doing, but the nature of such effort is such that it feels as if one is not doing but is rather oneself an instrument of the pattern, which is what is doing the work.
I am happy to call it the Pattern, in part because that word comes from patron, which is to say, father: i.e. it contains the idea of generation or creation. I’m just as happy, as a Westerner, to call it the Holy Spirit, which Christianity confesses as “the Lord, the giver of life”—again the sense of life-giving. Always we are looking for that vital energy, the life force. You know it when you’re tapped into it. You could also call it the Tao, and the classical Chinese term for doing-by-not-doing (or doing nothing yet leaving nothing undone), which is what one feels when riding this current, is wu wei. You can come into this way of being through movement arts (tai chi, yoga, dance), by hiking, cycling or paddling over the surface of the earth, and by playing sports. The erotic encounter and the martial can rise to this level.
But because, in this feeling of connection to a living, moving cosmos, we do not lose sight of the specificity and real presence of individual things, places, persons—the nodes or jewels of Indra’s net—I wonder if the best (and once upon a time the most common) way to come into the feeling is by actually making something tangible and discrete with your own hands, and with your own power or the power of animals—other living creatures you must know in the way of persons in order to cooperate and live companionably with them. All the activities I’ve mentioned so far are creative (or procreative!) in a way, but I’m thinking now of literal manufacture, making with hands, and of the product being something that, even though it might seem to have been fashioned from non-living matter, has been taken up into the world of the living, into a current of vital energy, by dint of being made directly by a living being. I will never forget standing between Wendell Berry’s draught horses Nick and Jed (this was many years ago and those fine beasts may have departed this life by now) and feeling an undeniable current of energy. This is what the Chinese term qi means. No machine, however cunningly devised and useful, possesses this kind of energy and presence.
I was watching a Reading Rainbow episode with my kids the other week in which the host, LeVar Burton, visits Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. The episode was based on a children’s book called Ox-Cart Man, and it was about regular life in America before the Industrial Revolution. This episode must have been from the 1980s, and what LeVar said toward the end struck me as the kind of thing you rarely hear anymore. He said that life could be harder for people in those pre-industrial days, but that they felt closer to their world, because they had made it all with their own hands.
It’s easy for someone like me, who possesses no handicraft, to idealize such skills and the ways of life they support. But I am also suspicious of that suspicion, so to speak. We are trained to distrust our own “romantic” tendencies and to be ashamed of anything that smacks of “nostalgia.” What if these traits may be our saving grace now? Surely every sentiment and disposition has its right place and time, even (if only in very limited circumstances) romantic or nostalgic views. Anyway I hope not to spend the rest of my life as unskilled as I am now. I would like to learn a resourcefulness like what my wife encountered in the Sievers School. That strikes me as a worthier and more realizable aim than the pursuit of a grand but purely psychological or intellectual revelation. The epiphanies we most need now, I think, are about how to actually live face-to-face with each other on this earth. Which forms and practices of life and art are right, and which lead us further astray into virtuality, the idol with which we have replaced so much of creation?
(I will have more to say down the line relating this line of thought about the embodiment of creativity to J R R Tolkien’s seminal but still inadequately studied essay “On Fairy-Stories” and to the idea of the extra-utile in the work of his contemporary, the great modernist poet and artist David Jones. And particularly I want to say more about music-making as an interpersonal activity and as handicraft. But for now this is enough for one letter.)
Back to my family’s journey northward. To get to Washington Island we traveled on ferries: a great big car ferry across Lake Michigan (the S S Badger), then a smaller ferry from the end of the Door Peninsula to Washington Island (the Madonna). And we took one day a tiny boat to Rock Island, further out in the archipelago, where no vehicles are allowed, not even bikes. That ferry had the surprising name Karfi, which, as far as I know, is of Cretan origin.
My children seemed to find ferries as exciting as I’ve always found them: the first I can remember was to the Lake Erie islands when I was twelve, and then, the next summer, a much larger ship across the English Channel. I had been to the oceanside a good deal as a small boy in New England, and in Florida. And I had been in plenty of canoes. But to traverse the swells of open water in a large vessel—a bona fide ship rather than a boat—can be its own sort of experience. The element of water takes on new significance then, and you start to get a glimpse of just how awesome and difficult and yet primordial seafaring is. And yes, the Great Lakes of North America count as seas—they are sweetwater seas, often host to great storms and dangerous fogs (like on the day we crossed), and the lore of shipwreck on the Great Lakes is fascinating stuff.
Some time ago, in a used book shop in Chicago, I stumbled across three volumes from the mid-twentieth century by a man named Dana Thomas Bowen: Lore of the Lakes, Memories of the Lakes, and Shipwrecks of the Lakes. These books are replete with stories of daring, peril, and mishap, and contain many photos of sailing and steam ships. My kids are just getting old enough to be inspired by them. Reading from them—and looking at the black-and-white (and therefore mysterious) photos, especially in the shipwreck volume—has been great fun, and contributed to my children’s thrill at riding in the ferries. I don’t know how I know but I do know that it is right to be thrilled at such things. One of the greatest boons of children is their living reminder of how much wonder adults live without. There are perhaps no lines in the Gospels I understand better since I became a father than those Jesus speaks of children:
Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 19:14).
Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 18:3).
I have never heard these lines explained in a compelling way without reference to wonder and fantasy; but they must also be about about a kind of innocence. Those books about the Great Lakes that are such fodder for the imagination were written before we understood how fragile the Lakes are, and how much damage we have done them: the real cost of the lust for wealth and dominion that has so often driven seafaring. I cannot read the books, even to my kids, without that knowledge. In this trivial detail I read an emblem of the new loss of innocence which the ecological crisis forces upon us. It is that loss, and not only the injuries sustained by the biosphere, which makes the crisis so staggering: but it is also what makes the crisis fundamentally religious or spiritual, for it makes clear that what is at stake, beyond practical knowledge, is repentance, atonement, redemption. The extent to which people now are suffering anxiety and despair because of the ecological crisis—to the point where they forego having children—is due, I think, to the fact that the ecological crisis is spiritual and religious, but the heritage religions of the West have lost their vital power for most people. I’m not convinced we find a way forward without recuperating some of that heritage.
But whether that can mean picking up a discarded world-image and piecing it back together, perhaps to expand and revise, I do not know. Or should it mean revisiting the ancient saints of the places we find ourselves, such as Kingsnorth and Shaw are inclined to do? But here in North America, we have no such deep sacred history. I don’t mean that we have no native saints and heroes, no folklore of our own here that is not imported. I will be writing about a recent visit to the shrine of a North American saint, Kateri Tekakwitha, and to the home of another of our saints, H D Thoreau, in the third part of this Triad. And for another example, the sui generis R A Lafferty, whom I’ve spent a long time studying and pondering, drew much of his best fantasy from the spirit of American tall tales and American Indian history. But as the historian Francis Parkman long ago pointed out, the mythical age of this continent is lost to us: we have no Aeneas or Cú Chulainn, no Brunhild or Helen of Troy. Our origins in North America—those of us, at any rate, whose ancestors came (or were forcibly brought) here from the Old World—are all too recent and transparent.
Yet here we are and must remain, and we have the land itself, suffused with its own aura, its suggestion of possible mythos, even if we lack the sense of deep history that is available to Europeans (and other Old Worlders) and which is such an important ingredient in the literature of mythopoeia (what we now call fantasy), which literature has always seemed to me the last refuge of religious faith and an enchanted cosmos.
On Washington Island I was delighted to be in a different kind of forest than we have around Ann Arbor, one full of birches, beeches and northern white cedar. Where I live feels northern—as distinct from the Ohio Valley where I mostly grew up—but it is the southernmost tier, so to speak, of northernness. Washington Island is farther up in the North Country. And I have to say, I’ve always felt an inward northern orientation. I like cold, windswept, bleak. I like rocky shores and befrosted gloomy forests. I like the kinds of things northern cultures eat and drink, and I like the kinds of stories they tell. I like the Ulster Cycle and the Kalevala, and one of my favorite pieces of writing in any language from any time is Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North. You get the idea.
I also have a thing for islands and lakes. The British expatriate novelist Lawrence Durrell claimed there is a word for someone of the first sort and that it described him as well: islomane, a maniac for islands. There ought, then, to be the word lacomane for someone who feels this way about lakes (and best of all lakes with islands in them!), because as I realized up there on Washington Island, lakes and islands are mirrors of each other: the outlines of islands and of lakes are often similar in shape. The Earth is made of such fractal poetry as this. Islands are little worlds unto themselves, though also inevitably connected—perhaps sporadically or perilously—to the wider world. The inhabitants around a lake are turned toward each other and connected to each other by means of the water they share, thus making a little world. If there’s one thing a fantasist (or any writer of fiction) is into, it’s world-building. For me, islands and lakes are mysterious and inviting, whether small or large.
And yet I was in a bad mood on Washington Island until an event I’ll describe—perhaps a kind of epiphany in the more usual sense, like what Martin Shaw and Paul Kingsnorth talk about, a moment of sudden insight that effects a shift in one’s inward disposition and outward orientation. It’s hard to say why I felt bad, and had been feeling that way for a while, but I think it comes down to this: You must save the world. This is the odd commandment we internalize in the post-religious West. Perhaps it does not seem so wrong, but I believe it is, with disastrous results. Because we have lost the sense—and I mean in terms of the collective culture at large, not what we might profess individually or within particular communities—have lost the sense that this cosmos including ourselves is a single living, created thing, and the sense that it is fallen but also redeemed, we labor under the impossible burden of feeling we ought to cure and control what it is not within our power to cure and control.
You must save the world is the opposite, though it can be hard to recognize this, of Rilke’s famous epiphany when faced with the headless torso of Apollo: You must change your life. The encounter with transcendent beauty which comes about through art (or in the making of art) or through worship, liturgy, rite and solemnity of all kinds (including falling in love), can bring us to genuine and strangely egoless self-consciousness and, upon reflection, to conversion: seeing the world in a new way and thus resolving to live differently.
And You must save the world is the opposite of wu wei. It is the opposite of Mary’s Let it be done to me according to thy word. The right way is the way of self-emptying, humility, but also spry readiness and not so much the weakness of limitation as the productiveness of constraint. There is no epiphany, certainly no redemption, without openness like Mary’s.
Well, as I say, I had reached the fevered pitch of despair over my inability to save the world, even to contribute to saving the world, and this despair fouled everything, even my chance to spend time with my family in what is basically terrestrial paradise for me: a northern island. I had become convinced that my work as a scholar of literature, as a writer and teacher of writing, was of no practical value in the face of the great crises of our time and I ought to get some job that was.
And then I visited the Stavkirke and something happened. It was not a grand event. It was subtle, and its effects have been only gradually manifesting. The Stavkirke, pictured at the head of this letter, looks ancient but it was built by the Trinity Lutheran Church (next door on the island) with the skills of local craftsmen in the 1990s. The style of building with wood that the church embodies is denoted by the name—stav refers to the post and lintel construction, and it is of course the same as our word staff (Old English staef). All around this particular stavkirke is a woods with a path winding through it and biblical quotations on little posts set along the path. Many of the biblical passages employ nautical and seafaring imagery, naturally enough on an island, and many express the gentle and enduring sort of epiphany I’ve been discussing (these make up much of the Sermon on the Mount), such as Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof and Consider the birds of the air… Inside the church is not ornate, but I did see this one icon: Christ surrounded by the tetramorph, i.e. the four Evangelists as beasts: angel (Matthew), lion (Mark), Ox (Luke) and Eagle (John).
It’s past time I explain what I felt sitting in that empty Lutheran church and walking the pathways in the woods around it, but it is by nature something almost impossible to state in dispositive terms. It is an instance of apophasis, where only negative direct statement is possible, because it is fundamentally a feeling of relief or disburdening.—
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
We are so very heavy laden, labor so much, yet find no solace nor surcease from care, for we each hear from our first years in countless forms (change the world, be a leader, innovate, etc etc) that cruel commandment of a godless society: You must save the world. But somehow in that northern woods, and in that woodworked church, I stopped being consciously and subconsciously tormented by that imperative. Yes, we must discover anew how to conform ourselves to the Way. But this world is not ours: it is creature like ourselves. We are not masters of our fate. Captains of ships, perhaps, but not makers of the storm and the seas. Slowly we are beginning to remember.
Since coming back from Washington Island, I’ve been reading Gustaf Wingren and other authors of Scandinavian creation theology, as I’ve learned it’s called. I had no idea such a body of thought came into being in the last century, but I’m glad I’ve discovered it. I allow myself to be influenced by places in this way. I could not go into the Stavkirke and not think that the culture from which such an edifice of care and skill came would be without wisdom of value in this moment. And my plunge into modern Scandinavian creation theology has broadened into research into the Protestant (chiefly Calvinist) origins of American environmentalism—a direction I never thought I would take. I’m discovering more affinity than I expected between, say, Jonathan Edwards and H D Thoreau. More in that vein, perhaps, in the final (and shorter!) part of this Triad.
Beautiful, thank you
Beautiful reflections, Jonathan. When you contrast the Marian consent that is so different from the titanic quest to “save the world,” I am reminded of Desmond’s distinction between the gentle, almost invisible passio essendi, the receptive gift of being that is metaphysically prior, i.e., “before” but not in a temporal sense, to all becoming, and the conatus essendi, the striving in which all our modern projects of improvement, whether individual or political, are treated as comprehensive of human action. And it is lovely, too, the meditation on craft, and the intimacy of the hands and the earth, a freshness and a bond from which a different, sacred song may emerge. There is deep wisdom in actions that require slowness, contemplative care. The tales of wonder that simply appear quaint and perhaps impossibly distant to an age brought up in the virtual world become less so when silence is suddenly revealed to be a dark plenitude. Funny how the mundane world that fancies itself free of celestial daydreams and spiritual wool gathering more and more finds itself lost in disincarnation where the soul slumbers in soporific electric dreams. The gamut of enthusiasms fostered on social media never rise to the high dream, the oneiric realm where depths and height coincide. But I believe the poets are beginning to discover a new spring of hope, even as we wrestle with demons and apocalyptic anxiety.