https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9XfYNtTMao4
you’ve been on a path, like a massive transformation, you know, in your own personal life. Then obviously also even, I imagine even your readers, there’s been change in that world. Like who is coming to the workshops, all of that. And so I’m, I’m curious to see the change of your perspective and how it has changed your vision of storytelling. Do you feel like the way that you see stories or that you engage with stories that change in the past few years? Yeah, and I think I can sum it up pretty quickly, actually. I would say, and I’m moving between a sort of a mythic and a religious perspective, and there’s almost no difference in the, in the world that I live in. Myth showed me everything I needed to know about the conditions of living. Different gods and goddesses show you the betrayals, the healings, the strange nuances to it all. It shows you the playing field. It’s phenomenal. How to live it was the missing element for me. And that I have to say is the Christian narrative, is the Christian story, because it’s so, it actually turns a lot of the myths before it kind of on its head because of this last shall be first anti-Claos kind of thing going on. This huge, enormous consciousness where we’re not just venerating trees and bends in the river and all the thousands and millions of little Elohims and messengers that are moving around us. We’re making a claim that we’re in contact with the being that is infused in that, but also completely outside of it as well. I, that was just kind of too big for me. But in the absence of that, my life, I suppose, up until, you know, up until a few years ago, had the familiar kind of chaotic fault lines of not having that essential kind of binding agent that is Yeshua. So a lot, a lot has changed. It’s not as if my life hasn’t been nourished and informed and blessed beyond measure by these stories. But the reality is, and this is hard, this lot of Christians don’t like me saying what I’m about to say. The reality is, you know, I’m with Augustine, all truth is God’s truth. And I think that a lot of these stories, there could be some story way up from the Inuit. And they, and I respect this, they may not want to see it in this way. But from my point of view, many myths and stories are filled with pinpricks and hints of this great story. And so I feel that I was on a kind of drip feed for a really long time. And the thing that my heart was swooning for over and over in these stories was something that I could never defend in public, but was actually this sort of terrifying revelation that actually it was the it was the, you know, the aslant of my youth wishing to announce itself. And I ended up I went on a vigil for one hundred and one days. I went out into a dark more forest. And at the end of it, I had a profoundly eviscerating, beautiful, unimaginable almost encounter with Christ. But in the one place I never expected to meet him. I went out there thinking, well, by the time I finished this, I’ll probably be married to the wild in some way. And I came back married to Christ and I realized that both of these these weddings are facing each other. It’s a strange thing to say as someone I’m not a classicist. We’re talking about the Odyssey. I’m not a classicist in England. If you’re a classicist, that’s kind of connected to a class system, really connected to a certain level of school that you would have gone to. I didn’t go to schools like that. But I have a real experience, understanding and many decades long involvement with indigenous and shamanic stories. Oddly, they’re much, much closer to Christ figures than ones that you get in the West. They understand very well the idea of the suffering healer. They understand very well the one that you’re not looking at is the one that is actually kind of binding and through an act of love and sacrifice, bringing you life to the tribe. So I was I was aware of these things. But now, of course, I see the, for example, I see, you know, the crucifixion as the supreme poetic event of human experience. But I it was as if I was just not allowed to see it until I was almost 50. It was like this. And then God said, and now. Now, and for the last two years, my Jobian wonder eye has been opened. But for some reason, he wanted me to get all this other stuff in me, too. And so I’m in this. Rilling an unexpected you know what midlife is like, you can feel like you’ve seen all the movies worth possibly seeing. So to be in this new world where I’m meeting, I like what Paul Van der Kley is doing. You know, he’s a very interesting man with all his sort of cross associations. You see, I come from my dad is a preacher. My brother is a pastor. I’m very familiar with all of this. But at the same time, because of orthodoxy, I’ve been opened up to. I grew up in church. All the action was in the pulpit. Now the actions in the liturgy. You know, the pulpit is the only moment is that the sermon is the only moment where you can sit down. He’s like, Yeah, yeah, OK, sit down. This is just me for five minutes. And everybody, you know, stand around wisdom and we’re off, you know. So I kind of know where I am, but I also don’t know where I am, which is a wonderful place to be. And I think that what you said, you know, the idea that in some ways you had to pack all this other all this other stuff in you, I think in some ways, you know, this might will seem a little maybe I’m pushing it and whatever, whatever people think. But that it seems like to me, that’s the role that I perceive that you can have right now in this moment, which is, you know, you use the word the word rewilding Christianity. There are different ways to say it, but there is something in the other myth, which in the shamanic stories, in these ancient myths, which can can help us see the story of the Bible afresh again, because in some ways it’s giving you tax and it’s giving you ways into it that a lot of people have glossed over through their kind of systematic theology, you know, like this is this leads to this leads to this and Jesus died for your sins. And if you believe in him, you go to heaven, you know, that kind of stuff where it’s like you’ve actually stopped looking at the at the crazy things that Jesus does and the crazy things that are in those stories. You you will be aware and I think we have to kind of certainly in this country, in England, we have to doff our caps to Tom Holland, the writer in his book Dominion. Tom was the first guy that was saying, actually, despite the propaganda, England and the West in general is profoundly Christianized. Now, I go along with that for a while, but the problem is we are Christianized civically and culturally. We’re not spiritually anymore. We’re not. This is not a Christian culture. And so the cross isn’t quite we’ve got that bit, but we haven’t got that bit. So I love the fact that he yourself, Paul King’s North, lots of others are talking about the fact that we have we can’t be taking our cues from a culture that doesn’t give a shit about us anymore because we just get more and more thinned out, diluted, apologetic. We’re sort of, you know, don’t look at me. You know, whereas actually people I meet people all over the world looking at me, you know, looking for a deeper life. And the more we take our cues nervously from a culture that at best has amnesia, if not active hostility to these stories, the better. But we need to retell them, not not anathetize them or put in little cues to make them politically correct. Forget that. We just need them in their pure genius, raw form to be to do their work, to let God do his work. You know, I think something’s happening. I have to say, I think something’s happening. I’ve never. Born in the early 70s, I’ve never seen a moment quite as pregnant as this one. I’ve never known so many people talking about things like this. I think you’re right. You know, I think that the way that I see it is something like an arc. You know, it’s like we’re actually there’s a contraction of Christianity. But in that contraction, the people that care about it have to do it so deliberately that it cannot be accidental anymore. It can’t just be something we’re surfing. It just can’t be. So we have to look into it deeply. We have to we don’t have a choice. So because of it, it creates this weird little this this this smaller but brighter group of people that can see each other and are, you know, I’m amazed, like you said, like, you know, if you had asked me to predict Paul King’s North and Martin Shaw, you know, five, six years ago, I could not have predicted it. But then when I see when I see that coming over the horizon, I’m like, yes, that that’s it. Like and I can see that, like you said, I can see things coming together. And so it’s exciting. I mean, what what other life would you want to lead? It’s exciting to be to be in a world that is semi hostile to you, but then being surrounded by a roundtable of amazing nights is like what else would I want? Yeah, yeah, I think I think we’re all in agreement that church needs to become a lot again. You know, I think really. And if people don’t think we’re in a moment of tremendous peril, they are simply not paying attention. They’re not paying attention. All the ingredients you want for a phenomenal myth are occurring in real time right now. You don’t need to be nostalgic. You didn’t miss out. There was no other golden age of myth that was more and more engaging than this. This is the moment. And so find your place at the table. And I say that to everybody. There’ll be some kid right now watching us on a phone doing some shift, you know, his third shift at McDonald’s. We’re talking to you. You know, we’re talking to you. Look, locate, locate that noblesse oblige in you and see what kind of trouble you can get into, you know.