MARTIN SHAW is a bit like one of those advocates of rewilding who want us to allow nature to be itself, who believe that manicured suburban lawns and the over-fertilisation of agricultural land are killing the soil and undermining biodiversity. But he is talking about our spirituality, which, he feels, has become too tidy.
Shaw is a storyteller and mythologist, someone who spends time in the forests and the mountains, contemplating the elements and communing with the earth. He grew up a Baptist, but as a youngster fell out of love with church and its prosaic limits, lured by the romance of the folk tale and the outdoor life. It was in his fifties, after a 101-day forest vigil, that he felt challenged — much to his own surprise — to re-explore his Christian roots. He finally settled in the ancient riches of the Orthodox Church, partly because it made no attempt to sell itself to him.
Liturgies of the Wild is a means to give us “wiggle room for the imagination”. He retells myths and legends and applies them to our current ailments and preoccupations. He is an affable, vernacular guide. His narrative is rich, textured, and rambling — as you might expect from a professional storyteller. Underpinning everything is his dedication to the extravagance and mystery of the universe, and the immensity of his feelings.
His search in all this is for “the Ancient Good” that has to be “furtively groped towards by all of us”. He adds, “it’s bad storytelling to knock you over the head with it.” That said, as the son of a preacher, he does have a tendency to over-exposition of the meaning of the myths that he tells, a bit like the way in which some of the Gospel-writers insist on mansplaining Jesus’s parables. It might be better sometimes to allow us simply to sit with these rich narratives and find our own resonances in them.
But the book is a glorious paean to the essential open-endedness of visions, myths, and stories. He rightly observes that “Christianity has often forgotten that it is a dream, to its own peril.”
The Revd Malcolm Doney is an artist, writer, and Anglican priest, who lives in Suffolk.
Liturgies of the Wild: Myths that make us
Martin Shaw
Ebury £22
(978-1-84604-891-3)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80
