I do not cry much—hardly ever. It’s not in my temperament, perhaps. But yesterday afternoon, after posting the first version of this review, I came close to tears twice. The first moment was watching Olympic figure skaters Anastasiia Metelkina and Luka Berulava, having just finished a miraculously beautiful pair routine, sink to the ice in an exhausted but triumphant embrace. Then they rose to their feet, each quietly making the sign of the cross.
The second moment came just a few hours later, as I absorbed word of the sudden, senseless, and violent death of a 15-year-old boy on the periphery of my acquaintance. Rising from my prayers that evening, I thought back, strangely, to this book, and realized that my perspective on it, and what it seeks to accomplish, had already deepened.
“Being made,” “getting grown,” finding the “Ancient Good,” is a matter of life and death. So terrible are the wounds of the world, so divine is the calling of human body and soul—the mysterious dynamic of the heart between these two realities will either destroy you or turn you into what Martin Shaw likes to call a “praise maker.” And we cannot find that path alone.
Original review follows.
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There was once a boy who dwelt with his mother and father in a wide cultivated valley. Sometimes, his mother would take him beyond the green hills to his grandfather’s wilder kingdom by the sea, where he would wander in the mornings through misty forests, picking berries, and in the evenings play chess with his grandfather by the crackling hearth. Yet there was a nameless sadness in this boy, an unspoken fear, one his good parents, who gave him so much and shielded him from all outer darkness, could not understand, any more than the boy could himself. Then hard years came. The boy’s grandfather died, and exile followed: the boy’s father, seeing his livelihood among the fields of black and gold diminish and poverty threaten, sought a more secure fortune in a distant city, and the boy left his childhood home forever. Deep loneliness fell upon him in this new place, where the people were numerous, but all seemed busy in search of money and seats of power, things the boy little understood. Soon he found a book of stories, and his dreams grew bright with unseen lands as fair as those he had left, and almost more real to him than his waking life. But he also found a darkness in these worlds of imagination, a darkness that reflected his childish fear and grew in him silently. Some years later he left all to seek his own fortune, carrying away a small red stone that his mother had pressed into his hand. He studied under men and women wise in the world, and found success and praise in his every endeavor, but his dreams and darkness followed him. Yet in his studies, he also discovered the nature of the red stone from his mother: that it was, in fact, a seed of paradise. And a fresh hope blew into his life, that he might by this seed restore what he had long lost. So he planted it in the land of his exile. Not very well, for the soil was hard, and the boy knew almost nothing about gardening. For a long time, there was no sprout, and the boy spent his days hunched over that little bit of soil, his head often clouded with darkness. What did finally appear seemed a sorry plant indeed, and in it, the boy could see nothing of paradise. But he knew that this was his only hope, so he remained by it. As it grew slowly larger, as its branches began to reach outward, birds began to gather there. Around its stem he built a chapel, and he sang to the birds songs the wind had taught him, which he believed to come from his lost home. And he hoped that one day the tree would grow so tall that he could ascend by it, and leave the vaporous darkness behind, and find among the stars his own true country again.
What is the end of this story? I don’t know yet.
Martin Shaw advises us to tell such stories about ourselves, to take our dreams seriously, to let ourselves be “made” by the right myths. There are some readers who will dive into Liturgies of the Wild expecting an argument or manual of some kind, takeaways conducive to bullet-point format, and will end up frustrated. Shaw is not above a little preaching, but his approach to truth is typically allusive, wandering through personal anecdotes and ancient narratives that bleed freely into one another. His decades of meditation on life and story may have been brought into new focus by his self-startling conversion to Orthodox Christianity, but the “mossy face of Christ” he adores is a presence, not a thesis. And he wants us all to share in that presence. Boil away the rich Martin Shaw-ness of it all, and perhaps the residue is just religious truisms; but that approach would be to miss the point. This book is for people who want to take a journey with Martin, whose particular genius is to remind us, with the most charming whimsy, of what may we already know to be true but perhaps have not given due attention.
As I sit in my little study beneath a cheap reproduction of the Panagia Portaitissa, and under the bowed gaze of Charbel Makhlouf, I again ponder the image on the dust jacket of Liturgies of the Wild. I have often prayed in this study for a guiding star, for the peculiar path that will lead me most surely to the Ancient Good. Where are the wise elders in this day, the men and woman whole-formed and clear-sighted? Shaw would not claim any title like staretz or spiritual father for himself, and we too would be unwise to attribute it to him. Give him a decade or two in trail of the Cross. But what he suggests here is the possibility that we can deepen our lives and bring them into contact with Divine Ground by simply accepting our own littleness, by sinking our minds into the great silence of the heart and waiting for illumination. Some things “can’t be said with effect until they’re known, and God has his timing for that. How do we find something we were once gifted by grace? We can’t. We simply can’t. But we can take heart from the fairy tales….” The old stories teach us patterns of spiritual maturation; they give us metaphors to interpret our course into the trackless waters of the future. And there must be few more genial and gifted guides to those stories than Martin Shaw.
If I have a critique, it is that Shaw does not sufficiently consider what his own Orthodox tradition calls prelest, delusion. Much he says, especially in his chapter on evil, resonates with Evagrian psychology and the later tradition, but he dismisses the hesychastic suspicion of dreams and imagination with barely more than a hand-wave. He is clearly aware that “enchantment” can go bad, and as this issue goes to the core of his Romantic project, I wish he had devoted more space to marking spiritual pitfalls. How often are the stories we make of our lives fundamentally false and self-serving? But as the flame lit at his baptism licks over ever more of his life, perhaps he will have more to say on discrimination in future.
For now, there is much to be found in the affirmative path. It is a rich feast indeed to which Shaw beckons us.