# Martin Shaw | What Part of You Has Come to Die? (Preview of Commitment to Reality)

An episode of [Bible Answer Man Podcast with Hank Hanegraaff](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/569236334), 9 Jun 2026, 40 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/72367992/hup_ctr_preview_3.mp3

Martin Shaw is one of those people who challenges you by asking provocative questions like “what part of you has come here to die?” Shaw offers these kinds of provocations to a world where Christianity has been domesticated and desperately needs to recover its wildness. This is a preview of an episode of Commitment to Reality, where Martin Shaw joins Dave Hanegraaff to explore how to recover a wild Christianity in a world where faith for many has become cold, abstract, and domesticated. To hear the full conversation, search for Commitment to Reality wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode. You can also watch full episodes and clips on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ACommitmenttoReality

## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 1: This is Dave Hannigraf, and you were listening to Hank Unplugged.
[0:05] Speaker 1: What you're about to hear is a preview from the
[0:08] Speaker 1: podcast that I host for the Christian Research Institute called
[0:13] Speaker 1: Commitment to Reality, a show dedicated to conversations that take
[0:18] Speaker 1: truth seriesly. Make sure to check out the full episode
[0:22] Speaker 1: of Commitment to Reality wherever you get your podcasts.
[0:26] Speaker 2: Enjoy.
[0:28] Speaker 1: Mister Martin Shaw, thank you for joining me on Commitment
[0:31] Speaker 1: to Reality.
[0:32] Speaker 2: Thank you, Dave. Very pleased to be here.
[0:35] Speaker 1: Yeah, So, as I was reading your book, I was
[0:39] Speaker 1: sitting there thinking we have to have friends in common.
[0:44] Speaker 1: And the English speaking Orthodox world is pretty small. I'm
[0:48] Speaker 1: sure you've discovered that. And so I was sitting there
[0:51] Speaker 1: thinking there was something about your fire, your fireside chats,
[0:56] Speaker 1: your vigils. I said, this reminds me of john here.
[1:00] Speaker 1: So I grabbed my phone and I texted Johnna, said
[1:03] Speaker 1: you have to know Martin. He said, oh, yeah, we've
[1:07] Speaker 1: sat for a couple parts together. He sat at a
[1:10] Speaker 1: super Tell him I love him so.
[1:14] Speaker 2: Well. I please send that right back to him. He's
[1:17] Speaker 2: a great character, big, effusive, funny, deep man. So yeah,
[1:22] Speaker 2: we do have friends in common for sure.
[1:24] Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think you guys are both part of
[1:26] Speaker 1: the same kind of group. I'm sure you've had this before,
[1:31] Speaker 1: a group of artists, storytellers, people who appreciate beauty, you know,
[1:36] Speaker 1: beauty will save the world, or doing their part to
[1:41] Speaker 1: reconnect Christianity to its bush soul as you've referred to it.
[1:45] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was only a few hours ago.
[1:50] Speaker 2: There was the Canadian sinker with me, Jonathan Bugout, who's
[1:54] Speaker 2: also a friend of John's, so we were drinking whiskey
[1:58] Speaker 2: into the night before he caught the last train back
[2:00] Speaker 2: to London, which is very daring of him, was the
[2:02] Speaker 2: last train with no one else on it. But he
[2:05] Speaker 2: has a lot of pluck. And it does seem a
[2:09] Speaker 2: really interesting moment where suddenly from the strangest of places, artists, writers, thinkers, priests,
[2:16] Speaker 2: single mothers, all sorts of people are just sort of erupting,
[2:19] Speaker 2: and we all seem to be looking for the contemplative
[2:24] Speaker 2: dimensions of the Christian experience. I mean, I grew up
[2:27] Speaker 2: in a wonderful kind of Baptist church, which was strongly
[2:32] Speaker 2: muscled sermons, but the sense of a liturgically heavy experience.
[2:39] Speaker 2: I really wasn't familiar with this especially because as a
[2:42] Speaker 2: kid I wasn't wouldn't have been taking communion, I suppose,
[2:44] Speaker 2: as I think about it now. So it is interesting
[2:48] Speaker 2: in England, for example. I don't know if it's happening
[2:50] Speaker 2: in America, but there's this enormous upsurge in young people
[2:55] Speaker 2: coming to church and specifically becoming Orthodox. It's incredible.
[3:01] Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I've attributed to a couple of things. One,
[3:04] Speaker 1: I think when anything goes, the last true rebellion is
[3:08] Speaker 1: some sort of ascetic discipline.
[3:10] Speaker 2: You're constraining yourself to point.
[3:13] Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think that people are you know, you
[3:17] Speaker 1: see it in restaurants and cafes, how everything's farmed the table.
[3:21] Speaker 1: It's heirloom, right, And so I started to think about
[3:24] Speaker 1: any form of liturgical worship in Christianity as the heirloom.
[3:29] Speaker 1: And people, you know, don't give me the filler. I
[3:31] Speaker 1: want the natural, that the or I want to know
[3:34] Speaker 1: where this came from, tracing the roots. And I've tied
[3:38] Speaker 1: a lot of it to that. As you know, the
[3:40] Speaker 1: most punk rock thing is to to believe in something.
[3:44] Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I have a I know of someone whose
[3:49] Speaker 2: son has recently been baptized very unexpectedly. He's a very
[3:53] Speaker 2: hip young kid, and when his father sort of inquired
[3:58] Speaker 2: about why you were doing this, he said, well, atheism
[4:00] Speaker 2: is for old people. It's wonderful, isn't it that we've
[4:06] Speaker 2: reached a point now where atheism is for opable. It's
[4:08] Speaker 2: actually associated with a certain kind of cynicism that younger
[4:13] Speaker 2: folks recognize, is, you know, sort of devilish in design.
[4:19] Speaker 2: And as you say, are looking for the direct encounter.
[4:23] Speaker 2: They seem less interested in theory about the encounter. They
[4:26] Speaker 2: want to have the encounter.
[4:28] Speaker 1: Yeah, and your book Liturgies of the Wild, it got
[4:33] Speaker 1: me thinking about what the opposite might be. And so
[4:40] Speaker 1: I think we've become what James K. Smith calls I
[4:44] Speaker 1: think this is original to him, just heads on sticks.
[4:48] Speaker 1: We're just thinking things and so everything is that, you know,
[4:52] Speaker 1: mental assent. It's this idea and getting the idea right
[4:56] Speaker 1: in your head is the most important thing, as opposed
[4:59] Speaker 1: to the the thing itself right. At the end of
[5:02] Speaker 1: the day, orthodoxy smartto is only meant to exist to
[5:07] Speaker 1: lead to orthopraxy. On its own, it's nothing. Yeah, So
[5:15] Speaker 1: is that kind of what you're getting at with Liturgies
[5:18] Speaker 1: of the Wild and this whole concept of aesthetic arrest.
[5:22] Speaker 2: Yeah, Ascetic arrest is a phrase that was made famous
[5:27] Speaker 2: by James Joyce, and the sentiment of asthetic arrest is
[5:33] Speaker 2: an image or an experience where you feel almost claimed
[5:37] Speaker 2: by the power of it. So, in other words, it's
[5:41] Speaker 2: not a sophisticated taste that you gradually learned to appreciate.
[5:45] Speaker 2: It's something that grabs you by the scruff of the neck.
[5:49] Speaker 2: I remember Joseph Campbell, who's a mythologist from the last century,
[5:53] Speaker 2: said be careful that your religion isn't a defense against
[5:58] Speaker 2: having a religious experience. So there's a there's a wisdom
[6:02] Speaker 2: in that. You know, you want to go, Okay, I'm
[6:04] Speaker 2: getting to know an awful lot about church history. But
[6:08] Speaker 2: am I regularly praying? Am I in the presence? You know,
[6:12] Speaker 2: you can't not be in the presence of God? Actually,
[6:15] Speaker 2: but am I? Am I consciously aware that I'm there
[6:18] Speaker 2: and I'm really having that conversation. So yeah, asthetic arrest
[6:23] Speaker 2: is a word that's very important to me when I
[6:26] Speaker 2: when I have students for say, up to eight months
[6:28] Speaker 2: at a time, I'll say to them, for this period,
[6:33] Speaker 2: really think about the clothes you're going to wear, the food,
[6:35] Speaker 2: you're going to eat, the paintings that you're going to
[6:39] Speaker 2: look at, the records that you're going to play. If
[6:42] Speaker 2: it isn't, if it isn't directly speaking to what we
[6:45] Speaker 2: call the soul, have a hiatus from it. Trust, asthetic, arrest,
[6:50] Speaker 2: trust the things that are really claiming your your interest,
[6:53] Speaker 2: in your heart and take it from there.
[6:56] Speaker 1: Yeah, and the story that it tells about you. Right, Yeah,
[7:02] Speaker 1: I feel like we've lost that ability to join part
[7:09] Speaker 1: of a communal story.
[7:11] Speaker 2: Right.
[7:12] Speaker 1: We live in such an atomized age where everything is
[7:15] Speaker 1: about your identity and your ability to construct it. But
[7:19] Speaker 1: what have we lost when we detach from that communal
[7:23] Speaker 1: story that's so important.
[7:26] Speaker 2: Well, the problem is we're talking about personality or identity.
[7:32] Speaker 2: Another word really for that is persona and what we know.
[7:37] Speaker 2: And this is not an original thought to me. There's
[7:39] Speaker 2: many people that have had this kind of kind of
[7:43] Speaker 2: thinking for the first half of life when you're younger.
[7:47] Speaker 2: In a way, it's quite useful and important to have
[7:51] Speaker 2: a persona of some kind because you are vulnerable in
[7:54] Speaker 2: the world. And if you're good at art, or you're
[7:58] Speaker 2: good at maths, or you have a propensity for being
[8:01] Speaker 2: a wood carver, that is something that you can almost
[8:05] Speaker 2: be defended by. It gives you that sense of identity. However,
[8:10] Speaker 2: if you're not careful by midlife, that kind of hardened
[8:15] Speaker 2: into a persona. And what we seem to get from
[8:21] Speaker 2: the deepest of religious practices is not persona but presence.
[8:25] Speaker 2: You want presents. And in my own work, I've been
[8:30] Speaker 2: a wilderness rights to passage guide for thirty years, So
[8:34] Speaker 2: that often involves taking people out to wild places and
[8:36] Speaker 2: fasting for four days and nights because they are aware
[8:42] Speaker 2: that there's something in them that needs cracking open and
[8:45] Speaker 2: something vitle wants to announce itself. And interestingly, you get
[8:50] Speaker 2: nearer that through diminishment rather than endless opportunities. So actually,
[8:56] Speaker 2: by making what I call a covenant with limit, you
[8:59] Speaker 2: get growth for depth, and you go deeper and you
[9:04] Speaker 2: have a more profound sense of actually the genuine shape
[9:08] Speaker 2: of who you are.
[9:10] Speaker 1: Yeah, your chapter on limit, I loved it. I mean,
[9:14] Speaker 1: the road to excess leads to the Palace of wisdom.
[9:16] Speaker 1: Right as a young man, I you know, well, there
[9:24] Speaker 1: are a couple directions that I want to go in.
[9:25] Speaker 1: So one I want to talk about your father was
[9:29] Speaker 1: a pastor, a preacher.
[9:31] Speaker 2: Yeah, and as still is actually, yeah, okay, so I
[9:35] Speaker 2: want to talk about that, but on limit.
[9:39] Speaker 1: Yeah, as the son of a preacher, man of sorts,
[9:43] Speaker 1: I grew up in the same way you test that,
[9:47] Speaker 1: you push that right, you kind of walk away. And
[9:51] Speaker 1: I was a self ascribed Libertine, which meant that just
[9:55] Speaker 1: anything went for me. And I really tested the boundaries
[9:59] Speaker 1: of limit, right. And I remember living I was living
[10:04] Speaker 1: in New York City, and I was holding on to
[10:06] Speaker 1: one of those subway polls and just thinking about whatever
[10:10] Speaker 1: transpired the night before, and I thought to myself, there's
[10:15] Speaker 1: absolutely no limit to the outrageousness of an untethered existence,
[10:22] Speaker 1: an existence that's that's just I felt like I was
[10:26] Speaker 1: continuously floating into the ether and that if I kept
[10:29] Speaker 1: on that path, there's no describing how how outrageous it
[10:35] Speaker 1: could get. And I would say that that wasn't a
[10:37] Speaker 1: come to Jesus moment. It was more of a leave
[10:40] Speaker 1: the devil moment.
[10:42] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. But Lewis talks about c. S.
[10:49] Speaker 2: Lewis talks about his imagination being baptized some distance before
[10:54] Speaker 2: he became a Christian. So it's the steps in other words.
[10:58] Speaker 2: And Blake also says, you don't know when you've had
[11:04] Speaker 2: enough un till you've had more than enough. And a
[11:08] Speaker 2: real suphull ric encounter, a real encounter with with the
[11:12] Speaker 2: darkness is tremendously sobering if there's any goodness left in
[11:17] Speaker 2: you and you go, Okay, I may not know what
[11:20] Speaker 2: I know, I may not know, I may not know much,
[11:22] Speaker 2: but I know that it's not a road I need
[11:25] Speaker 2: to investigate for a nanosecond more exactly.
[11:29] Speaker 1: I mean that felt that chapter in my Barnes that
[11:31] Speaker 1: just that whole thing, that limit can be an extraordinary ally.
[11:37] Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In orthodoxes, You're You're, You'll be familiar,
[11:41] Speaker 2: we put quite a lot of attention on fasting. The
[11:45] Speaker 2: idea would be that culturally we are addicted to feasting,
[11:49] Speaker 2: and feasting is all well and good, and it's tremendous
[11:52] Speaker 2: when there's something to celebrate, but as a reactive principle,
[11:57] Speaker 2: endlessly gorging is completely not healthy in any way. So
[12:01] Speaker 2: it's an interesting thing to do to your body to
[12:04] Speaker 2: bring in limits and restrictions of one kind or another. Yeah.
[12:10] Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think another friend of yours has a
[12:13] Speaker 1: quote that I absolutely adore. Kings North says that a
[12:19] Speaker 1: feast without a fast is a strange half finished thing.
[12:24] Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and he'd know, you know, Paul would know.
[12:27] Speaker 2: He's I mean, he's just very good with the fasting.
[12:30] Speaker 2: You know, he's quite a he's stringent. He's more stringent
[12:33] Speaker 2: than I am in that regard. My diet is already
[12:36] Speaker 2: odd and I only really exist on sort of nuts,
[12:40] Speaker 2: berries and meat like a bear. So to sort of
[12:43] Speaker 2: suddenly take the meat out of that could be a
[12:45] Speaker 2: bit of a problem. But but yeah, no, it's true. Yeah,
[12:49] Speaker 2: it is. One is talking to another for sure, and
[12:52] Speaker 2: we are we have very one sided conversations these days. Yeah,
[12:55] Speaker 2: that was well put.
[12:57] Speaker 1: Well, especially when you think about not fair thing as
[13:00] Speaker 1: a legalistic thing. But it's a form of preparation for
[13:05] Speaker 1: a feast, right. So the two biggest fasts and the
[13:08] Speaker 1: Christian calendar are the Nativity and the lenten Fest. And
[13:13] Speaker 1: when you only do the celebratory part, it does feel
[13:17] Speaker 1: a little bit empty once you've experienced the fasting element
[13:20] Speaker 1: that leads up to it.
[13:24] Speaker 2: Yes, and there's a you know, there's a you know,
[13:28] Speaker 2: a tremendous sense of anticipation. One of the difficult things
[13:31] Speaker 2: in all honesty, if you follow the old calendar, like
[13:34] Speaker 2: I do. You know, our Christmas is in January the seventh,
[13:38] Speaker 2: around January seventh, and that means you've already been in
[13:43] Speaker 2: the slipstream of some form of celebration if you have
[13:46] Speaker 2: Western neighbors and family and friends for about a month
[13:50] Speaker 2: by the time it comes along, and most of us
[13:52] Speaker 2: have crumbled at this point and eaten that, you know something.
[13:56] Speaker 2: So that's the kind of yeah, the never ending Chrismus
[14:00] Speaker 2: of Orthodox and it gets stretched out for a bit
[14:02] Speaker 2: of a But in the real tradition, you know, the
[14:05] Speaker 2: twelve days of Christmas, Christmas was much longer. It wasn't.
[14:09] Speaker 2: It wasn't you know, it wasn't a weekend, It was
[14:11] Speaker 2: a It was a full thing, because winter itself could
[14:13] Speaker 2: be so harrowing. Yeah.
[14:16] Speaker 1: Well, the longer that I've been Orthodox, the less litigious
[14:20] Speaker 1: I've become about you know, the first fasting season, I
[14:23] Speaker 1: was looking at every ingredient. Uh no, dried milk can't
[14:27] Speaker 1: do that. And then you start to realize that it's
[14:30] Speaker 1: much more about the spiritual formation than the actual food
[14:33] Speaker 1: that's going in your belly.
[14:34] Speaker 2: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I would always
[14:37] Speaker 2: talk to my priest and he would be aware of certain,
[14:41] Speaker 2: as I said, certain disciplines that I was already There
[14:46] Speaker 2: was an awful lot of things I'd already put to
[14:48] Speaker 2: one side, and so he would. You know, what he'd
[14:51] Speaker 2: be looking at is not quite what you're doing, but
[14:55] Speaker 2: why you're doing it. And if the y is kosher,
[14:58] Speaker 2: if the wy is good, then yeah, there's a bit
[15:01] Speaker 2: of room for negotiation.
[15:04] Speaker 1: So you weren't the son of a preacher man. You
[15:06] Speaker 1: are the son of a preacher man.
[15:08] Speaker 2: I am the son of a preacher man. Yeah, he's
[15:10] Speaker 2: about to give he's about to preach, you know, in
[15:12] Speaker 2: the next few weeks. Yeah.
[15:13] Speaker 1: Yeah, And so I told you I had a similar experience.
[15:17] Speaker 1: But that never leaves you. I wonder how that formed you.
[15:21] Speaker 1: And if you think about that often, if that's something
[15:24] Speaker 1: that you held tightly or ran away from, or because
[15:28] Speaker 1: that spiritual formations in you.
[15:31] Speaker 2: That's very well put. It's something that I now feel
[15:34] Speaker 2: deeply grateful for because both my mum and my dad
[15:39] Speaker 2: are comparatively youthful. Really, he was only about twenty when
[15:45] Speaker 2: I was born, so at this age doesn't seem to
[15:49] Speaker 2: be an enormous quantum difference between us. In age, there's
[15:53] Speaker 2: a bit, so my memory was thinking, I will never
[15:59] Speaker 2: be a public speaker. This is awful. I will never
[16:02] Speaker 2: ever be a public speaker. I think partially because I
[16:05] Speaker 2: could see the ringer that it put my father through
[16:09] Speaker 2: to give these sermons, and it meant that everything was
[16:14] Speaker 2: kind of hanging. The mood of the house really hung
[16:17] Speaker 2: on how that sermon was experienced, and he how he
[16:21] Speaker 2: experienced giving it. What I know now is as somebody
[16:27] Speaker 2: that travels and is known for speaking, it would have
[16:32] Speaker 2: been great, actually if he'd done five days of the
[16:35] Speaker 2: same sermon, because then it doesn't just hinge on the
[16:38] Speaker 2: Sunday and it's a great success or it's not or whatever.
[16:42] Speaker 2: It's like, well, actually I'm doing it again on Monday,
[16:45] Speaker 2: doing again on Tuesday, and you get a much broader
[16:47] Speaker 2: sense of what's going on. But yeah, of course I
[16:51] Speaker 2: decided now I would never speak in public. I wasn't
[16:54] Speaker 2: going to do that. And I was a musician for
[16:56] Speaker 2: many years, ironically, which he also which is an extremely
[16:59] Speaker 2: good drummer. But of course, now forty five years after that,
[17:08] Speaker 2: after initially seeing my dad in the pulpit, he's never
[17:13] Speaker 2: he was never boring. There's a lot to learn from
[17:17] Speaker 2: and I remain, you know, listening to his insights and
[17:23] Speaker 2: whatever he's up to. We're very different. I mean I
[17:26] Speaker 2: would be known for spontaneity, whereas my dad digs into
[17:30] Speaker 2: what I would call a visionary recital. Now that doesn't
[17:34] Speaker 2: mean that he can't improvise. He absolutely can. But there's
[17:37] Speaker 2: a way in which he approaches a sermon where he
[17:40] Speaker 2: polishes it to a really beautiful shine, like a stone.
[17:44] Speaker 2: And that's just his way, and some of the best
[17:46] Speaker 2: storytellers in the world work that way. But when I
[17:50] Speaker 2: came into speaking storytelling teaching, I knew that I was
[17:55] Speaker 2: very interested in the notion of wondering out loud, thinking,
[17:59] Speaker 2: you know, thinking on the tongue. So we have a
[18:02] Speaker 2: different way in But if you met him, you would
[18:05] Speaker 2: instantaneously recognize that I was his son. Interesting, and I'm
[18:10] Speaker 2: proud to be. Yeah.
[18:12] Speaker 1: Well, that's the thing about apples and trees, right.
[18:15] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but apples can decompose. But I'd really like.
[18:23] Speaker 1: To go a little bit further into there, if you will.
[18:26] Speaker 1: Because you grew up in the faith, but then you
[18:28] Speaker 1: left for.
[18:29] Speaker 2: A long time.
[18:30] Speaker 1: Yeah I did, really long and then you came back
[18:34] Speaker 1: and you talked about the cost In your book about
[18:37] Speaker 1: the Cost of Change, can you talk about that a
[18:40] Speaker 1: little bit?
[18:41] Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean something that I've learnt and I've
[18:46] Speaker 2: said quite a few times recently, is people genuinely generally
[18:51] Speaker 2: respect you if you are spiritually searching, but if you
[18:55] Speaker 2: find something, it's intolerable to them. So as long as
[18:58] Speaker 2: you remain open and say, wow, this is an amazing
[19:01] Speaker 2: world and it's filled with wonder you remain in a
[19:04] Speaker 2: place of marvels, but you don't necessarily heal. So interesting
[19:09] Speaker 2: the distinction between a marvel and a healing. And I
[19:13] Speaker 2: kind of curated marvels for thirty years with all these
[19:16] Speaker 2: wonderful stories, which I still love to a great degree.
[19:20] Speaker 2: But basically, when I hit fifty, which is about four
[19:25] Speaker 2: years ago, now, I realized I was in the midst
[19:30] Speaker 2: of a profound deepening into Christian experience, is the way
[19:35] Speaker 2: I would put it. In fact, it wasn't as even
[19:38] Speaker 2: it wasn't even becoming a Christian. It wasn't like it
[19:42] Speaker 2: wasn't like something landing on top of me. It was
[19:45] Speaker 2: like something coming out of me. And I just realized
[19:49] Speaker 2: that I'd grievously neglected it. But actually the values that
[19:53] Speaker 2: are most profound to me. The stories that are most
[19:56] Speaker 2: moving to me are Christian stories. So that was not
[20:01] Speaker 2: popular because I have an extremely intelligent readership who are
[20:08] Speaker 2: very discerning, and for all sorts of reasons that most
[20:12] Speaker 2: of us could understand, would be incredibly ambivalent about taking
[20:18] Speaker 2: on a religion that they would regard as you know,
[20:21] Speaker 2: the embodiment of colonial expression. So I would have lots
[20:25] Speaker 2: of Indigenous friends and they were like, oh, great, that's
[20:29] Speaker 2: just wonderful. Here he comes. You know, he's signed up
[20:32] Speaker 2: to Jesus. As if, as sometimes happens, I would have
[20:36] Speaker 2: a kind of an immediate personality change and regard all
[20:41] Speaker 2: mythologists and stories as lucipheric other than the Christian one.
[20:45] Speaker 2: And whilst whilst it is true that actually there are
[20:51] Speaker 2: a few stories that I don't tell anymore just because
[20:56] Speaker 2: they are evocative of certain forms of I would regard
[21:00] Speaker 2: to Scandinavian witchcraft. They just characters in that are But
[21:05] Speaker 2: Tolkien navigated this, Lewis navigated this, you know, George McDonald,
[21:11] Speaker 2: Charles Williams, we all navigated our love of these myths
[21:15] Speaker 2: and stories. But I am a bit more careful now
[21:19] Speaker 2: about there's a there's a it's not as if there
[21:25] Speaker 2: needs to be someone in the story that is Christ,
[21:28] Speaker 2: but you'd want Christ Christ to be the story on occasion.
[21:33] Speaker 2: In other words, there'd be an intimation of eternity in
[21:35] Speaker 2: that story. Otherwise I would be uncomfortable to tell it.
[21:40] Speaker 2: There has to be something redemptive in it, otherwise it
[21:44] Speaker 2: doesn't ring true to me actually anymore. Yeah, so there
[21:47] Speaker 2: have been changes, and it was not well received. It
[21:51] Speaker 2: wasn't that people were angry, they were just disappointed and confused.
[21:56] Speaker 2: And then over time, it's extraordinary that even four years
[22:00] Speaker 2: later now there's a kind of an interest. It's as
[22:04] Speaker 2: if everybody's sort of absorbed it somehow, And everywhere I turned,
[22:08] Speaker 2: people seem to be having Christian experiences.
[22:13] Speaker 1: People pay attention, right, and so whatever you were like,
[22:19] Speaker 1: I mean, you're still the same person, and I'm sure
[22:21] Speaker 1: that's what you tell people. It's not like you've changed.
[22:24] Speaker 2: That much now.
[22:26] Speaker 1: But if you haven't changed at all, then what's the point.
[22:30] Speaker 1: Right you talk about how stories form you, You've you know,
[22:34] Speaker 1: grabbed hold of another narrative that guides your life, right, Yeah,
[22:41] Speaker 1: so you would hope that you changed a little bit and.
[22:45] Speaker 2: That narrative grabbed me. Actually that's really what happened. The
[22:50] Speaker 2: narrative grabbed me. I couldn't. I think it's very dangerous
[22:55] Speaker 2: to start saying this is how I've changed. But I
[22:58] Speaker 2: am reliably in formed by truthful friends of mine that
[23:02] Speaker 2: there are elements to my personality that are minutely kinder,
[23:08] Speaker 2: minutely kinder or my or graces. I can actually entertain
[23:13] Speaker 2: conversations for longer than ten minutes that aren't entirely about
[23:17] Speaker 2: my own self absorption. So I have to trust that.
[23:21] Speaker 1: You know, yeah, I think you just circled around the
[23:25] Speaker 1: difficulty of humility. As soon as you think you've got it,
[23:29] Speaker 1: poof there.
[23:30] Speaker 2: You'll know. In Orthodoxy, we've got this terrifying phrase, vain glory.
[23:36] Speaker 2: I'm sure kings North had it nailed on his fridge
[23:39] Speaker 2: at some point. I remember being at Paul's house in Ireland,
[23:41] Speaker 2: and I'm sure he either had vain glory in pencil
[23:45] Speaker 2: on the fridge or I was kind of reaching. I
[23:48] Speaker 2: was reaching into the fridge and telling him how well
[23:50] Speaker 2: I was doing, and then he probably just muttered vain
[23:53] Speaker 2: glory at me or something like that. We just hurled
[23:55] Speaker 2: at each other all the time, because we we know
[23:58] Speaker 2: how over a lifetime, you've become you've become wired for,
[24:05] Speaker 2: you know, wanting a certain degree of success and then
[24:08] Speaker 2: humble bracking about it.
[24:10] Speaker 1: Yeah, or you don't want it, and then it starts
[24:13] Speaker 1: to come around and you think, well, maybe I do
[24:15] Speaker 1: want it. I mean that the temptation slips in. Yeah, yeah,
[24:20] Speaker 1: Well myth is very important to you. And I was
[24:23] Speaker 1: trying to explain it to my wife and she goes, well,
[24:26] Speaker 1: aren't myths things that aren't true? I think he might
[24:30] Speaker 1: have something to say about that. So what is myth
[24:34] Speaker 1: really and why is it not what we think we moderns?
[24:38] Speaker 2: Yeah, myth these days is so and so is a myth.
[24:41] Speaker 2: It means it's a fiction or it's a narrative that
[24:45] Speaker 2: is uh designed to hoodwink you in some way, That
[24:50] Speaker 2: is a myth, Whereas, of course, a myth, in a
[24:54] Speaker 2: more profound sense of understanding it, a myth is what
[24:56] Speaker 2: I would call a sacred story. So you have a
[24:59] Speaker 2: f fairy tale or you have a folk tale, but
[25:02] Speaker 2: a myth is it's not quite that they're deeper, they're
[25:07] Speaker 2: just older, and that a myth generally explains how we
[25:12] Speaker 2: came to be in the shape that we are in
[25:15] Speaker 2: other words, myths have creation stories attached to them. There
[25:19] Speaker 2: will be, if not the creation of the universe, there be,
[25:22] Speaker 2: there'll be a creation of a set of mountains or
[25:25] Speaker 2: a lake, and there'll be a satisfying sense of and
[25:29] Speaker 2: this is why we are here today in the shape
[25:32] Speaker 2: that we are. That's a myth. It is a sacred story.
[25:37] Speaker 2: Other ways of describing a myth are a beautiful truth
[25:41] Speaker 2: without the use of facts. I don't think I can
[25:45] Speaker 2: get near much in life until I can see it
[25:50] Speaker 2: within the context of a story, because otherwise, for me,
[25:54] Speaker 2: the facts of the matter, that's journalism. That's not story,
[25:58] Speaker 2: that's just journalism. And I can't make deep, seasoned decisions
[26:04] Speaker 2: from the facts. I need more than that. So myth
[26:10] Speaker 2: myth is a profound and deeply loved technology. That's what
[26:15] Speaker 2: it is. That's what you could tell your wife. It's
[26:17] Speaker 2: an ancient technology for getting grown. That's what it is.
[26:21] Speaker 2: It's an ancient technology for getting grown and sequested in
[26:25] Speaker 2: myths are all kinds of little secrets storehouse, story, storehouse.
[26:32] Speaker 2: They stored it, especially in cultures that weren't literate. You
[26:35] Speaker 2: stored information in a story, and when somebody else told
[26:39] Speaker 2: you it, the rabbi or the practitioner of one kind
[26:42] Speaker 2: or another. A certain kind of nutrition was passed on
[26:46] Speaker 2: in the story, and you remembered it, memorized it as
[26:49] Speaker 2: best you could, and went and told it to somebody else.
[26:52] Speaker 2: So myth also means no author. This is an old idea.
[26:58] Speaker 2: So Lord of the Rings is not a myth. Lord
[27:03] Speaker 2: of the Rings is a mythic story. And there's a
[27:05] Speaker 2: slight difference because it comes out of the you know,
[27:08] Speaker 2: the quill of one phenomenal mind who to be fair
[27:13] Speaker 2: was influenced profoundly by Anglo Saxon and Scandinavian and even
[27:17] Speaker 2: a frisson of Celtic mythology, although he was also a
[27:21] Speaker 2: bit rude about it. And so that's mythic. And there's
[27:25] Speaker 2: some wonderful mythic writers. Paul kings North you've mentioned is
[27:29] Speaker 2: an amazing mythic writer when he writes novels. His novels
[27:32] Speaker 2: are great. Should read a book called Beast if you
[27:34] Speaker 2: haven't already. However, none of these people would say I
[27:39] Speaker 2: am writing a myth, because a myth is partially defined
[27:43] Speaker 2: by the fact that it has passed through many males
[27:46] Speaker 2: and many imaginations before it arrives at yours, which is
[27:51] Speaker 2: why the relationship between myth and literature is a little
[27:57] Speaker 2: bit strange, because what happens then is you start to
[28:01] Speaker 2: get the definitive telling of a particular myth. I tell
[28:05] Speaker 2: Grail stories Arthurian stories. And there's a fella called cretend Destois.
[28:11] Speaker 2: There's a fella called wolf Ram von Eschenbach. There's a
[28:13] Speaker 2: fella called Thomas Mallory. They all wrote definitively and beautifully
[28:19] Speaker 2: and imaginate and imaginatively about the Arthurian tradition. But the
[28:24] Speaker 2: problem then is they've become Mount Rushmore figures. They've become
[28:29] Speaker 2: this is how it has done, and it's always been
[28:31] Speaker 2: done like this. But the reality is the Arthurian tradition
[28:35] Speaker 2: comes out of an oral tradition which was constantly developing
[28:39] Speaker 2: and falling apart and coming back. And you go to
[28:41] Speaker 2: the next valley, there's going to be a slightly different
[28:44] Speaker 2: version of you know, of that I was in. I
[28:48] Speaker 2: was in Alabama a few months ago, and that was
[28:52] Speaker 2: really interesting because I had no I could not driving
[28:56] Speaker 2: down a highway. So many different churches of like entirely
[29:01] Speaker 2: different names, very florid, going on and on. You know,
[29:04] Speaker 2: the primitive Baptist and a Baptist, you know, et cetera,
[29:08] Speaker 2: et cetera. And it made me, It made me thoughtful. One.
[29:11] Speaker 2: It made me think of the oral tradition, like all
[29:14] Speaker 2: these variants, and I thought, yeah, the event of Christianity,
[29:18] Speaker 2: the event of Christ is so strange. I'm not surprised.
[29:23] Speaker 2: And that was the case for a few hundred years after,
[29:26] Speaker 2: you know, his arrival. That kind of Christianity is plural
[29:30] Speaker 2: rather than you know, just the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox
[29:33] Speaker 2: Church is something that sort of forges itself with a
[29:36] Speaker 2: lot of discernment over time.
[29:40] Speaker 1: It's funny that you say the Christianity is plural because
[29:43] Speaker 1: our friend John, he's I keep pushing him to work
[29:47] Speaker 1: on that documentary Christianities with a question at the end,
[29:51] Speaker 1: how do we get here? You know, because I find
[29:54] Speaker 1: it quite odd living in I mean, it's the case
[29:56] Speaker 1: all over the world, but when you've got three churches
[30:00] Speaker 1: are Christian churches right next to each other, and my
[30:03] Speaker 1: inclination is to think that they rarely knock on each
[30:06] Speaker 1: other's doors and ask how they're doing. I mean, they
[30:08] Speaker 1: see each other as sort of rivals. Yeah, and that's
[30:12] Speaker 1: something that you know, while I understand doctrinal differences. It
[30:16] Speaker 1: still hurts at the end of the day.
[30:20] Speaker 2: Yeah, yes it does me. And I've had enough of
[30:25] Speaker 2: sectarian Christianity, and I've seen quite a bit of sectarian Christianity.
[30:29] Speaker 2: And although for me, I'm very happy within the Orthodox community,
[30:34] Speaker 2: and I'd have to say, for me, there are things
[30:37] Speaker 2: that I think they I feel are a straighter arrow
[30:40] Speaker 2: that they have that a lot got compromised in the West.
[30:43] Speaker 2: But that doesn't mean I can't sit in a Baptist church,
[30:47] Speaker 2: or I can't sit in an Anglican church and feel
[30:50] Speaker 2: the convivial warmth of being with other good hearted people.
[30:54] Speaker 2: Of course I can, and I have no desire to
[30:56] Speaker 2: scold or chide or you know, quote unquote educate them,
[31:02] Speaker 2: as we say in divine litagy, as soon as I
[31:04] Speaker 2: am the first, so I go in with with that
[31:08] Speaker 2: sensation rather than anything else. Yeah.
[31:12] Speaker 1: Well, it's like I said about the the heads on sticks.
[31:16] Speaker 1: We've become excarnate, and you know, everything is up here,
[31:22] Speaker 1: and we've removed the whole meaning of the the formation.
[31:27] Speaker 1: Like you talk a lot about initiation, the importance of formation,
[31:30] Speaker 1: and how we've lost that. If if your doctrine is
[31:35] Speaker 1: not forming, you it's actually demonic.
[31:39] Speaker 2: Mm hm.
[31:40] Speaker 1: I read something by Saint Maximus the Confessor, my brother,
[31:45] Speaker 1: his patron saint is Saint Maximus the Confessor.
[31:48] Speaker 2: And it I'd ruin it.
[31:52] Speaker 1: But it's something along the lines of theology without practice,
[31:56] Speaker 1: is the theology of demons.
[31:58] Speaker 2: M m m. Yeah. That's powerful. That's powerful if it
[32:04] Speaker 2: doesn't become a praxis, if it isn't there in the world.
[32:08] Speaker 2: The way I would paraphrase that in a way is
[32:11] Speaker 2: it's the difference between the Holy Grail and a poisoned chalice,
[32:17] Speaker 2: because in the Grail you will receive a tremendous, redemptive
[32:21] Speaker 2: Christian thing, which is the Grail. But if you hoard it,
[32:26] Speaker 2: you're Moors used to say all spiritual information has to
[32:29] Speaker 2: be paid for. That's a fascinating thought that everything has
[32:33] Speaker 2: to be paid for. But if you hoard or you
[32:36] Speaker 2: secrete something that essentially is meant to be given away,
[32:40] Speaker 2: it becomes toxic, It becomes ultimately lucipheric. Ultimately it becomes
[32:45] Speaker 2: a form of black magic because it is not edifying
[32:49] Speaker 2: or raising up anything around you.
[32:51] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's terrifying.
[32:54] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Well.
[32:59] Speaker 1: You talk about your night vigils in your book you
[33:02] Speaker 1: say that we do not serve our culture, well when
[33:05] Speaker 1: we remove the option of the night vigil in Orthodoxy.
[33:10] Speaker 1: I've had the experience of going to services in the
[33:14] Speaker 1: middle of the night, and there is something different when
[33:18] Speaker 1: that happens. I don't know if that's exactly what you're
[33:20] Speaker 1: talking about. So I'd like you to kind of talk
[33:23] Speaker 1: about your campfire vigils and what the night vigil is
[33:26] Speaker 1: and more importantly, how we can reclaim it.
[33:30] Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I'll have a look after this conversation. I'll
[33:35] Speaker 2: have a look at wherever that was in the book
[33:37] Speaker 2: and kind of recontextualize it for myself. But I have
[33:41] Speaker 2: an idea of what I was saying. When I was
[33:46] Speaker 2: about twenty three, I went out and sat on a
[33:48] Speaker 2: mountain in Wales for four days and nights without food,
[33:53] Speaker 2: without a tent, you know, without a fire, but I
[33:55] Speaker 2: had water and I had a little top to shelter under,
[33:59] Speaker 2: and that was in a kind of of held situation
[34:01] Speaker 2: with a trained vigual guide. But this is a ceremony
[34:06] Speaker 2: that exists all over the world, usually to mark moving
[34:10] Speaker 2: from adolescence to young adulthood. But the reality is so
[34:14] Speaker 2: few of us have ever been through anything like that.
[34:18] Speaker 2: The people that would come to do that fasting work
[34:21] Speaker 2: could have been any age actually, between about eighteen and
[34:24] Speaker 2: seventy eight usually, but it was a very powerful thing
[34:30] Speaker 2: to be temporarily denuded of your normal identity, the stuff
[34:36] Speaker 2: that we cling on to to give us a sense
[34:38] Speaker 2: to remember of persona, not presents. And what happens during
[34:43] Speaker 2: that encounter in the wild is on the last night,
[34:46] Speaker 2: and this is where we're getting up to what I
[34:48] Speaker 2: was saying, you do this night vigil. So already you
[34:53] Speaker 2: are four days without food, four days without company, four
[34:58] Speaker 2: days without human fai, four days without a text message,
[35:01] Speaker 2: four days without anything other than the wind or constantly
[35:05] Speaker 2: moving through the trees and whatever has decided to announce
[35:09] Speaker 2: itself to you during that period. And then, just when
[35:12] Speaker 2: you want to kick back, I think, well this is
[35:13] Speaker 2: almost over, you sit up awake, because the idea is
[35:19] Speaker 2: in only a few hours time you'll return to your
[35:21] Speaker 2: village or your town, or your people, or your family
[35:24] Speaker 2: if you're lucky enough to have one, and you need
[35:26] Speaker 2: never do this again. So it's worth pushing yourself for
[35:31] Speaker 2: a little bit while you're out there. I trained in
[35:36] Speaker 2: that work for eight years. As you have known because
[35:40] Speaker 2: you've read the book, it's woven throughout. It just kind
[35:43] Speaker 2: of comes up every now and again and goes down again.
[35:47] Speaker 2: I have to be careful talking about it because the
[35:50] Speaker 2: interesting people signing up for it now is so extreme
[35:55] Speaker 2: that I could lead those I could lead those vigils
[35:59] Speaker 2: all day, every week of the year and never get
[36:02] Speaker 2: to the end of the list, Whereas when I was younger,
[36:05] Speaker 2: we couldn't find anybody we were popping the champagne if
[36:09] Speaker 2: we got more than three people, Whereas now actually the
[36:12] Speaker 2: it's and I think it's what you were saying earlier on.
[36:15] Speaker 2: People are prepared for some rigor. I think even people
[36:20] Speaker 2: this is the beginning of disillusionment, even in what I
[36:23] Speaker 2: call visionary vegetables, even with ayahuasca and what they call
[36:27] Speaker 2: the plants. It's not that I'm not disrespectful of those things.
[36:32] Speaker 2: I just know the cultures they come from, and when
[36:34] Speaker 2: you take the ceremony out of the culture and you
[36:37] Speaker 2: pop it into a society as adolescent as ours, you're
[36:42] Speaker 2: going to have some fairly extreme responses because nobody is
[36:45] Speaker 2: holding it. It's not difficult to have a fiery psychotropic experience.
[36:53] Speaker 2: The difficult thing is the question what can now grow
[36:56] Speaker 2: from this? And that's the question that's at the end
[37:00] Speaker 2: of every great myth. If you are questing entirely for
[37:03] Speaker 2: your own sense of individuation again, you're back to black magic.
[37:08] Speaker 2: You're just becoming a magician of the sort. But when
[37:13] Speaker 2: you are working like that for your people or for
[37:17] Speaker 2: a principle, that is a different thing. And that is
[37:21] Speaker 2: when what you're doing becomes Yeah, you know, sacred not grotesque.
[37:28] Speaker 1: You wrote in the book, and even when I read it,
[37:31] Speaker 1: I felt it. And you said in the book that
[37:34] Speaker 1: people don't often like when you say it. It's something
[37:38] Speaker 1: about peering through the smoke and looking at everybody laughing
[37:41] Speaker 1: and giggling or talking about whatever, and what part of
[37:44] Speaker 1: you has come to die? What do you mean when
[37:48] Speaker 1: you're asking people that?
[37:50] Speaker 2: What I mean is this is the description of usually
[37:55] Speaker 2: the first night on the hill. So everyone's turned up
[37:57] Speaker 2: from different often different parts of the world. They've been
[38:00] Speaker 2: waiting months for this to happen, and we gather around
[38:04] Speaker 2: the fire and I say to them, Okay, you know,
[38:08] Speaker 2: hello Jeremy, Hello Sarah, Hello, Malcolm, you know, etc. Now
[38:12] Speaker 2: I'm going to go around and just ask you why
[38:14] Speaker 2: you're here. Just really simply, and what you tend to
[38:18] Speaker 2: get is intelligent, reflective, slightly unemotional responses because people still
[38:26] Speaker 2: have the persona up. And what I know about this experience,
[38:31] Speaker 2: which I've probably been around more than most you would meet,
[38:35] Speaker 2: is it in the end. At some point in that
[38:40] Speaker 2: period out there, usually something grandiose dies in you and
[38:45] Speaker 2: something great is born. Grandiosity and greatness not the same thing.
[38:49] Speaker 2: So in a way, if there isn't an openness for
[38:54] Speaker 2: something to leave, you for something to die. And I
[38:57] Speaker 2: use the word die dramatically because one of the things
[39:01] Speaker 2: I have to do as a guide is to see
[39:03] Speaker 2: a bit of alarm in the participants, because if I
[39:07] Speaker 2: don't see alarm ahead of time, we don't have any
[39:11] Speaker 2: time to process it before they actually go out into
[39:13] Speaker 2: the bush. And if you let someone go out into
[39:17] Speaker 2: the bush who is no fear of the dark, no
[39:21] Speaker 2: fear of encountering a spirit, no fear of going without food,
[39:25] Speaker 2: they are suddenly going to become overwhelmed and will have
[39:28] Speaker 2: no resources. So one of my jobs is to be
[39:32] Speaker 2: a bit provocative. So the question what has come here
[39:35] Speaker 2: to die? Is designed to it. It's a ritual question,
[39:40] Speaker 2: it's a ceremonial question, and in that charged environment it
[39:46] Speaker 2: has extra voltage, but you get you get unusual answers.
[39:51] Speaker 2: And so you'll say to someone, Okay, Nathan, what's come
[39:54] Speaker 2: to die, And before they've had a chance to resp
[40:00] Speaker 2: rehearse their answer, something rather old could come out.
[40:03] Speaker 1: That was a preview of my conversation with Martin Shaw
[40:08] Speaker 1: on commitment to reality. If you want the rest, and
[40:12] Speaker 1: trust me, you do search for commitment to reality. Wherever
[40:17] Speaker 1: you get your podcasts, we'd love to have you with us.

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