1
00:00:00,120 --> 00:00:02,720
Speaker 1: Do you know my whole life, no one has ever

2
00:00:02,799 --> 00:00:05,480
said to me. If there's one thing I just can't stand,

3
00:00:05,559 --> 00:00:08,480
it's a great story, it's never happened.

4
00:00:09,279 --> 00:00:10,240
Speaker 2: And so I.

5
00:00:10,560 --> 00:00:17,359
Speaker 1: Encourage everybody to be storytellers. Don't explore a story without

6
00:00:17,480 --> 00:00:20,440
actually telling it, living in the room, living in your jaw,

7
00:00:20,879 --> 00:00:24,519
because something essential gets passed on there. The soul is

8
00:00:24,559 --> 00:00:28,719
not fed entirely by logic. We are fed by images.

9
00:00:29,440 --> 00:00:33,399
We're not fed really by ideas. Ideas are interesting and

10
00:00:33,439 --> 00:00:36,039
we can puzzle on them. But when we want to

11
00:00:36,200 --> 00:00:41,359
be absolutely pollaxed by wonder, it is a story, one

12
00:00:41,359 --> 00:00:43,159
way or another that is going to do it.

13
00:00:55,119 --> 00:01:08,719
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Psol Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone.

14
00:01:08,799 --> 00:01:11,359
Speaker 3: It is my joy to be here with Martin Shaw.

15
00:01:12,319 --> 00:01:15,200
Everybody who watches this notes who Martin Shaw's he is.

16
00:01:15,760 --> 00:01:16,280
Speaker 2: He is a.

17
00:01:16,239 --> 00:01:21,319
Speaker 3: Wonderful storyteller, a professor and author, and he was there

18
00:01:21,359 --> 00:01:23,920
with us at the Symbolic Girl Summit this year. And

19
00:01:24,480 --> 00:01:28,159
Martin is also doing his very first online class with

20
00:01:28,239 --> 00:01:32,920
us on Christian wonder tales. He's been spending several years,

21
00:01:32,959 --> 00:01:35,799
I guess by now going back into those ancient stories,

22
00:01:35,879 --> 00:01:39,359
all those weird stories that nobody dares look at anymore

23
00:01:39,719 --> 00:01:42,680
and is going to make them resurface for us. And

24
00:01:42,719 --> 00:01:47,120
so Martin, thanks for thanks for coming, Thank.

25
00:01:46,959 --> 00:01:49,519
Speaker 1: You, Johnathon. Pleasure to be here today. And I am

26
00:01:49,560 --> 00:01:51,120
really excited about this course.

27
00:01:51,560 --> 00:01:55,280
Speaker 3: So why were you attracted to these stories, these Christian

28
00:01:55,319 --> 00:01:55,920
wondertail Like?

29
00:01:55,920 --> 00:01:59,200
Speaker 2: What is it about them?

30
00:01:59,439 --> 00:02:06,680
Speaker 1: I like, because you're not clinging onto them in the

31
00:02:06,920 --> 00:02:10,520
way you may one of the Gospels, for example. There's

32
00:02:10,520 --> 00:02:12,840
a kind of looseness to them. There's a sense that

33
00:02:12,879 --> 00:02:17,479
it's a kind of an abandoned Christian mythology. Really. And

34
00:02:17,520 --> 00:02:20,280
at the beginning of this year, I was on the

35
00:02:20,319 --> 00:02:23,199
smallest of the Arron islands off Island, so it's a

36
00:02:23,240 --> 00:02:28,800
remote island, and I spent some time really on vigil

37
00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:32,840
in the remains of a chapel of a woman called

38
00:02:32,879 --> 00:02:35,680
Saint Gobnet, who is a bee maiden. There's lots of

39
00:02:35,719 --> 00:02:41,400
stories around her, and these stories just me maiden. Yeah,

40
00:02:41,439 --> 00:02:43,879
she's just good with bees. Bees are attracted to her,

41
00:02:44,319 --> 00:02:48,560
honey is Irish Christianity? Yeah, it is a thing, you know,

42
00:02:48,680 --> 00:02:51,360
bees are attracted. There's a story you will have heard

43
00:02:51,400 --> 00:02:54,759
me tell before of a young a young Christian making

44
00:02:54,800 --> 00:02:58,120
his way across island carrying the body of Christ, and

45
00:02:58,159 --> 00:03:03,360
he sees this sort of ecstatic smoke or cloud coming

46
00:03:03,400 --> 00:03:06,560
towards him, and he falls into an ecstasy, and when

47
00:03:06,599 --> 00:03:09,680
he wakes up, the body of Christ has left him,

48
00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:12,639
which is something that can happen to young Christians. One moment,

49
00:03:13,360 --> 00:03:16,199
it's all very up close and personal. Next moment, God

50
00:03:16,199 --> 00:03:19,080
has gone. And in the end it turns out, after

51
00:03:19,159 --> 00:03:22,840
conversing with an angel that the bees have actually taken

52
00:03:22,879 --> 00:03:26,159
the body of Yesua to create a little kind of

53
00:03:26,319 --> 00:03:29,960
be a bee chapel where there's a bee Eucharist and

54
00:03:29,960 --> 00:03:33,520
they serve mead I suppose, rather than wine. But this

55
00:03:33,719 --> 00:03:39,439
monk's life becomes bringing people to the bee chapel and

56
00:03:39,479 --> 00:03:43,479
the presence of Christ. Now for a year. He tells

57
00:03:43,599 --> 00:03:47,479
no one of this delirium that he's lost. You know,

58
00:03:47,520 --> 00:03:50,120
he had one job and he's messed it up. But

59
00:03:50,240 --> 00:03:53,919
the angel says to him, you know, the grief and

60
00:03:53,960 --> 00:03:56,560
the shame you were carrying was far heavier than the

61
00:03:56,599 --> 00:03:58,759
body of Jesus. You should have just fessed up to

62
00:03:58,800 --> 00:04:02,479
this straight away, should have got you in confession. And

63
00:04:03,479 --> 00:04:06,800
the question I always ask my students at that point

64
00:04:07,360 --> 00:04:10,039
is when did you go through something that you considered

65
00:04:10,560 --> 00:04:14,479
a failure that was actually making honey. So we look

66
00:04:14,560 --> 00:04:16,560
back at our own lives and we see all sorts

67
00:04:16,600 --> 00:04:21,079
of things that seem like detours and mistakes and betrayals,

68
00:04:21,560 --> 00:04:24,439
and actually there is a shape and there is a

69
00:04:24,480 --> 00:04:26,639
pattern for it's a lot of the work that you're doing.

70
00:04:26,680 --> 00:04:30,600
Actually it's symbolic world, I think, is sifting that to consciousness.

71
00:04:31,079 --> 00:04:35,519
And these old Saint stories do that, They do that,

72
00:04:35,800 --> 00:04:41,519
and they are they are. I've been working recently, and

73
00:04:41,800 --> 00:04:44,600
I haven't announced this yet, but I've been working. Have

74
00:04:44,639 --> 00:04:48,959
you ever come across a Saxon gospel called the Healand

75
00:04:49,639 --> 00:04:57,040
or the heliand it's it's what you call it, Yeah, Yeah,

76
00:04:57,319 --> 00:05:02,600
it's the four gospels that are ninth cent monastic over

77
00:05:02,680 --> 00:05:06,759
in Germany put together, and it is clearly the story

78
00:05:06,879 --> 00:05:12,959
of the New Testament. But you know, you'd get conscious

79
00:05:12,959 --> 00:05:16,160
Pilot being called a thane, and you would get Rome

80
00:05:16,240 --> 00:05:19,680
being called a hill fort, and you would get Jesus

81
00:05:19,680 --> 00:05:23,160
being called the generous chieftain, and when they sail out

82
00:05:23,160 --> 00:05:27,199
on the lake, they're on a long ship. But this

83
00:05:27,399 --> 00:05:31,000
story essentially is the same. And there is a sense

84
00:05:31,079 --> 00:05:34,000
with these early Saints stories of something like that going on.

85
00:05:34,079 --> 00:05:38,120
You go, oh, okay, these these rifts and motifs that

86
00:05:38,279 --> 00:05:42,759
keep showing up are biblically embedded, but they're in a

87
00:05:42,879 --> 00:05:45,079
landscape that the Celts can comprehend.

88
00:05:46,720 --> 00:05:48,720
Speaker 2: And so are these now that you're looking at.

89
00:05:48,759 --> 00:05:52,399
Speaker 3: Are they mostly coming from from the Celtic traditions?

90
00:05:53,560 --> 00:05:56,079
Speaker 1: Yeah they are initially. They are initially, but we're not

91
00:05:56,160 --> 00:05:58,920
going to stay there. Where we're going to begin is

92
00:05:59,000 --> 00:06:03,079
actually just before the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. We're

93
00:06:03,079 --> 00:06:06,399
going to begin with something called the invasion tales of

94
00:06:06,439 --> 00:06:10,240
the Tour de Donnan, which is really the notion the

95
00:06:10,279 --> 00:06:13,360
island was never created. It just sort of always was

96
00:06:13,839 --> 00:06:17,120
in the Irish pagan mind. It just was always here.

97
00:06:17,160 --> 00:06:22,399
It's incomprehensible to think of a time when Ireland wasn't there. So,

98
00:06:22,720 --> 00:06:26,480
as you probably know from the story, there are various

99
00:06:26,600 --> 00:06:29,959
competing forces for Ireland, one of whom the tour had

100
00:06:30,000 --> 00:06:32,519
de Donnan are really what you would regard as the

101
00:06:32,519 --> 00:06:35,639
fairy people, the people of the she the people of

102
00:06:35,680 --> 00:06:38,959
the hill, the gentry. Down here in Devon where I live,

103
00:06:39,040 --> 00:06:43,120
we call them the Benji. You know, they're all around,

104
00:06:43,319 --> 00:06:46,759
or certainly in folklore and so we're going to begin there.

105
00:06:46,839 --> 00:06:49,920
We're going to look at the temperament and the consciousness

106
00:06:49,920 --> 00:06:54,920
of the stories before Christianity arrives, and little bits of

107
00:06:55,079 --> 00:06:59,360
foreshadowing that you get in those stories. Then in the

108
00:06:59,439 --> 00:07:03,160
first couple of gatherings, I will start to tell very

109
00:07:03,240 --> 00:07:05,959
much in the manner ver Shanarcky of a storyteller. I'll

110
00:07:06,000 --> 00:07:09,480
just tell the stories and see where we locate ourselves

111
00:07:09,480 --> 00:07:13,759
within them. However, and this is important, We're not staying

112
00:07:13,879 --> 00:07:18,199
there for the whole duration. What I'm really interested in

113
00:07:18,720 --> 00:07:23,800
is actually how Saint stories and stories like the heliand

114
00:07:24,399 --> 00:07:29,360
begin to evolve into what in the twelfth and thirteenth

115
00:07:29,399 --> 00:07:33,000
century we come to know as the chivalric tradition and

116
00:07:33,040 --> 00:07:39,519
the Arthurian tradition, which is very embedded really within Christianity.

117
00:07:39,560 --> 00:07:42,839
It's really the notion of no less Obliege that Christ

118
00:07:42,920 --> 00:07:45,319
has rescued you from the dung heap and placed you

119
00:07:45,480 --> 00:07:48,279
to sit with princes, and quite what are you going

120
00:07:48,319 --> 00:07:51,519
to do about that? So there's an evolution going on.

121
00:07:51,639 --> 00:07:55,319
We have the early Irish stories, but then we begin

122
00:07:55,439 --> 00:07:59,319
to bring it into a wider Arthurian context. And if

123
00:07:59,319 --> 00:08:02,839
you're thinking of an Arthurian context that is as European

124
00:08:03,160 --> 00:08:04,800
as it is British after a.

125
00:08:04,759 --> 00:08:08,439
Speaker 3: While, right, right, And so you see this fusion of

126
00:08:08,959 --> 00:08:12,480
the Celtic myth with Christianity. But also, I mean, obviously

127
00:08:12,480 --> 00:08:14,759
in the Arthurian tradition you see this kind of French

128
00:08:14,839 --> 00:08:19,319
romance integrate into these into these these tropes. But you

129
00:08:19,399 --> 00:08:22,360
can still tease out, you feel like you can still

130
00:08:22,399 --> 00:08:25,600
see the glimmers of those old Celtic stories in the

131
00:08:25,720 --> 00:08:27,319
Arthurian romances.

132
00:08:27,439 --> 00:08:30,240
Speaker 1: I certainly can. I certainly can. And I mean, if

133
00:08:30,279 --> 00:08:35,320
you're going to if you're going to look at the tradition,

134
00:08:36,279 --> 00:08:40,320
a lot happens really around, as you're saying, with the

135
00:08:40,360 --> 00:08:44,879
influence actually, even of the Moorish poets in mediev and

136
00:08:45,080 --> 00:08:48,960
Spain coming over, bumping into the courtly schools of love,

137
00:08:49,039 --> 00:08:53,919
bumping into eleanor of Aquitaine. And so whilst the appreciative

138
00:08:54,039 --> 00:08:57,039
consciousness you could say, of the Muslim poets is coming

139
00:08:57,080 --> 00:09:01,600
out over the Pyrenees, it's colliding with stories coming down

140
00:09:01,720 --> 00:09:05,279
from the Norman courts of Wales and Britain. Because the

141
00:09:05,320 --> 00:09:09,320
storytellers there primarily were not Saxon, they were Celts, and

142
00:09:09,360 --> 00:09:12,120
so they start to hear about King Arthur, they start

143
00:09:12,159 --> 00:09:20,279
to recognize ways in which the Arthurian tradition, as you're saying,

144
00:09:20,399 --> 00:09:25,559
is a confluence of influences. But you don't have to

145
00:09:25,600 --> 00:09:30,120
look very far before you can see these earlier sixth

146
00:09:30,159 --> 00:09:33,480
century strands that are the ones we're going to be

147
00:09:33,559 --> 00:09:37,159
exploring most profoundly for us will be Gawayne in the

148
00:09:37,159 --> 00:09:39,159
Green Knight. That'll be the final session.

149
00:09:39,480 --> 00:09:42,559
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's Oh, that's wonderful. That'll be amazing.

150
00:09:42,639 --> 00:09:47,720
Speaker 3: So moving from early pre Christian you know, Keltic traditions

151
00:09:47,759 --> 00:09:48,840
are the way to Gwain.

152
00:09:50,240 --> 00:09:53,879
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it. That's it. And the final the final

153
00:09:54,799 --> 00:09:57,960
session will be around the notion of a rule for life,

154
00:09:58,039 --> 00:10:02,200
which is something in Orthod we're fairly familiar with and

155
00:10:02,320 --> 00:10:05,639
anybody that's interested in Christianity as a sense of how

156
00:10:05,679 --> 00:10:09,279
do you get your life into an organized shape? What

157
00:10:09,360 --> 00:10:12,200
are you going to focus your attention on? And that

158
00:10:12,399 --> 00:10:17,000
is part of the chivalric Arthurian and I think Christian ideal.

159
00:10:17,799 --> 00:10:22,919
You don't have that so clearly in the early Fianna

160
00:10:23,159 --> 00:10:27,559
mythological stories of Ireland. Then when the Saint stories come

161
00:10:27,879 --> 00:10:31,799
with that incredible influence of the desert fathers and mothers.

162
00:10:31,960 --> 00:10:33,840
So you as you know you have talked to Paul

163
00:10:33,919 --> 00:10:37,559
kings North about this. I'm sure what you get in

164
00:10:37,679 --> 00:10:42,000
Ireland in the early days is this terrific Coptic Egyptian

165
00:10:42,600 --> 00:10:47,039
influence that's actually going on, as well as the more

166
00:10:47,120 --> 00:10:51,639
Latinized version of Christianity that begins to creep in via England.

167
00:10:52,440 --> 00:10:55,600
But not it. I hate to break the news, but

168
00:10:55,679 --> 00:10:58,120
not everybody is designed to be a saint in the desert.

169
00:10:58,320 --> 00:11:02,399
Not everybody is. So what we you've got.

170
00:11:02,240 --> 00:11:06,559
Speaker 3: To bounce it up well on paper, Its yeah, just

171
00:11:06,600 --> 00:11:07,519
live in the desert.

172
00:11:08,039 --> 00:11:09,360
Speaker 2: Is that wonderful.

173
00:11:10,559 --> 00:11:15,080
Speaker 1: Thirty years now of leading wilderness vigils in a forest

174
00:11:15,600 --> 00:11:19,960
or in wild places? I know, I know the reality

175
00:11:20,279 --> 00:11:24,600
of that kind of encounter, and it's useful, but it's not.

176
00:11:24,759 --> 00:11:28,000
It's not for everyone. It's not for everyone. And so

177
00:11:28,200 --> 00:11:32,759
what you get within the chivalric tradition is a way

178
00:11:32,799 --> 00:11:37,279
in which people can incorporate a spirituality as much of

179
00:11:37,320 --> 00:11:42,120
the village as of the forest or the desert. I'm

180
00:11:42,240 --> 00:11:44,840
very interested in the word marry. Do you remember, like

181
00:11:44,960 --> 00:11:49,200
merry England Robin Hood, you know, merry England will marry

182
00:11:49,320 --> 00:11:52,600
is a word to describe a lot of what was

183
00:11:52,639 --> 00:11:57,720
going on in Britain in pre Reformation Christianity before the

184
00:11:57,759 --> 00:12:01,600
stripping of the altars, before everything gets very very honed

185
00:12:01,679 --> 00:12:06,240
down within with reason to some degree. I understand kind

186
00:12:06,279 --> 00:12:08,559
of why it happened. It just went far too far,

187
00:12:08,679 --> 00:12:12,879
I feel, so all of that is what's going to

188
00:12:12,919 --> 00:12:15,960
be in this notion of a Christian wonder tale. So

189
00:12:16,000 --> 00:12:19,480
you know, I couldn't believe it, Jonathan. I actually googled

190
00:12:19,600 --> 00:12:22,080
Christian wonder tail a few years. It just didn't exist

191
00:12:22,120 --> 00:12:26,440
as a word. It wasn't there. So we've put it,

192
00:12:26,519 --> 00:12:28,799
we've brought it, we've shifted it to consciousness.

193
00:12:29,559 --> 00:12:33,480
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's it's interesting because there are those wonder tales?

194
00:12:33,519 --> 00:12:38,559
Are there also in other places? Right in the Greek traditions?

195
00:12:38,639 --> 00:12:42,200
Do you have these stories, but they've also been forgotten

196
00:12:42,519 --> 00:12:45,000
or they've also been tamed. And if you think of

197
00:12:45,639 --> 00:12:48,840
the stories of Saint Anthony, right, so the very first

198
00:12:48,879 --> 00:12:52,080
hagiography written in the story of Saint Anthony, he goes

199
00:12:52,080 --> 00:12:55,440
into the desert and meets Centaur in a sadder and

200
00:12:55,559 --> 00:12:58,000
talks with the satter in the desert. And it's like

201
00:12:58,919 --> 00:13:01,159
everybody who has an eye of Andy did they even

202
00:13:01,240 --> 00:13:06,399
know about these these wild aspects of the early Saint stories.

203
00:13:06,960 --> 00:13:10,879
I think everything has been tamed, even in Orthodoxy doesn't extent,

204
00:13:10,919 --> 00:13:12,759
a lot of things have been tamed to kind of

205
00:13:12,759 --> 00:13:14,720
fit our Martyn frame of thinking.

206
00:13:16,399 --> 00:13:20,159
Speaker 1: There's a wonderful story about a young lad called Saint Kieran,

207
00:13:20,759 --> 00:13:23,039
and Saint Patrick gives him he's a young monk. He

208
00:13:23,039 --> 00:13:26,879
gives him a bell and he says, this bell will

209
00:13:27,000 --> 00:13:31,600
ring wherever it is that God wants you to create

210
00:13:31,679 --> 00:13:35,399
your little church, your chapel. And so Kieran wanders off

211
00:13:35,440 --> 00:13:38,480
into Ireland and he has high hopes that it'll be

212
00:13:38,559 --> 00:13:42,120
somewhere very beautiful. So he would hang out, I would

213
00:13:42,120 --> 00:13:45,000
imagine in what we would now call Dublin, or he'd

214
00:13:45,039 --> 00:13:47,799
hang out in what we now call Galway, or somewhere

215
00:13:47,840 --> 00:13:52,000
beautiful like Connemara. But he ends up in a deep,

216
00:13:52,440 --> 00:13:57,200
gloomy forest, and sure enough, to his horror, the bell

217
00:13:57,320 --> 00:14:00,320
starts to ring and he muffles it. You know, like

218
00:14:00,360 --> 00:14:02,200
when your phone goes off and you don't want anybody.

219
00:14:02,200 --> 00:14:04,360
You're in church and you're trying to put off. And

220
00:14:04,399 --> 00:14:06,519
I wonder what is it like for us when a

221
00:14:06,600 --> 00:14:09,639
spiritual bell starts to ring, and we muffle the sound.

222
00:14:09,919 --> 00:14:13,240
You know, we do this. We don't want to We

223
00:14:13,279 --> 00:14:15,799
want to be like Jonah, you know, we head off

224
00:14:15,840 --> 00:14:18,720
in the opposite direction of where God is usually telling

225
00:14:18,799 --> 00:14:24,000
us to go. So Kieran in the end honors the

226
00:14:24,000 --> 00:14:28,039
bell and he starts to build his small chapel, and

227
00:14:28,120 --> 00:14:32,559
bit by bit his first students, his first monastics, turn up,

228
00:14:32,919 --> 00:14:37,320
and of course they turn up as a bore tusked bar,

229
00:14:37,440 --> 00:14:39,559
and they turn up as a wolf, they turn up

230
00:14:39,600 --> 00:14:43,759
as a fox, And suddenly Kieran is realizing that the

231
00:14:43,799 --> 00:14:47,080
story of Jesus seems to speak across species. Even the

232
00:14:47,120 --> 00:14:50,399
animals are interested. And so he sits down around the

233
00:14:50,399 --> 00:14:53,759
fire in the forest at night, and for a considerable

234
00:14:53,879 --> 00:15:00,360
chunk of time, the first, the first willing student students

235
00:15:00,399 --> 00:15:04,679
of the Christian religion are the animal presences. And then finally,

236
00:15:04,759 --> 00:15:08,240
bit by bit people start to turn up. And you

237
00:15:08,279 --> 00:15:13,000
get that in Celtic Christianity, in the early Church, many

238
00:15:13,039 --> 00:15:18,879
of the places where even Abby's were created, initially there

239
00:15:18,919 --> 00:15:21,960
is an encounter with an animal. There, there's some profound

240
00:15:22,039 --> 00:15:27,159
encounter an animal, and that would be the place this

241
00:15:27,200 --> 00:15:29,720
woman I mentioned on the scott on the Irish Island

242
00:15:29,759 --> 00:15:33,519
Saint Gobnet. She finds the place that God intends to

243
00:15:33,559 --> 00:15:37,639
her for her by following nine white deer. So you

244
00:15:37,639 --> 00:15:41,399
can imagine the metaphors are so rich, the images are

245
00:15:41,399 --> 00:15:45,360
so wonderful for people, because, as far as I'm concerned,

246
00:15:45,399 --> 00:15:49,759
everybody I meet is a saint in training, you know,

247
00:15:50,240 --> 00:15:53,039
why not? Why not? You know that that's as certainly

248
00:15:53,080 --> 00:15:55,759
as Christians what we're trying to be. So these are

249
00:15:55,840 --> 00:16:00,200
stories that give us, with a little bit of mischief

250
00:16:00,279 --> 00:16:02,759
and a little bit of beauty, you know, a road

251
00:16:02,799 --> 00:16:03,240
to follow.

252
00:16:03,960 --> 00:16:09,639
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and how you know?

253
00:16:09,720 --> 00:16:13,240
Speaker 3: I mean I've been obviously been talking about this. I'd

254
00:16:13,240 --> 00:16:15,519
like to hear how do you Because for a lot

255
00:16:15,519 --> 00:16:20,399
of people, these stories they're actually embarrassing, right, They're embarrassing

256
00:16:20,399 --> 00:16:22,960
to them because okay, so he get to bell and

257
00:16:23,080 --> 00:16:27,000
or you know, like animals come to the campfire. You know,

258
00:16:27,080 --> 00:16:29,600
the modern mind becomes cynical very quickly.

259
00:16:30,120 --> 00:16:32,279
Speaker 2: And so what do you, how do you?

260
00:16:32,279 --> 00:16:34,960
Speaker 3: What do you think their way back into these stories

261
00:16:34,960 --> 00:16:38,240
are how can we as you know, modern people that

262
00:16:38,399 --> 00:16:41,320
drive cars and have cell phones, how can we dive

263
00:16:41,399 --> 00:16:42,399
back into these stories?

264
00:16:44,200 --> 00:16:46,919
Speaker 1: Well, they're not for everybody. I think that's the first thing.

265
00:16:47,120 --> 00:16:51,679
If you really have no instinctial interest in them, then

266
00:16:51,720 --> 00:16:54,320
you'll find some other way to live, some other temple

267
00:16:54,360 --> 00:16:58,720
to serve in. I feel very strongly about Christianity in general.

268
00:16:58,759 --> 00:17:01,519
Actually we should just let the stories be the stories

269
00:17:01,559 --> 00:17:04,759
for a bit. We should stop whashing them over the

270
00:17:04,839 --> 00:17:08,400
head with allegory or theory or even too much theology.

271
00:17:09,319 --> 00:17:13,400
I'm of the old tradition that Holy Spirit goes where

272
00:17:13,440 --> 00:17:18,000
he will. And actually these stories are luminous, their stained

273
00:17:18,000 --> 00:17:23,279
glass apparitions, loaded like the layers of an onion with

274
00:17:23,599 --> 00:17:30,359
information and disclosure. So I never try too hard to

275
00:17:30,400 --> 00:17:34,640
persuade anybody of anything. I let the stories do the work.

276
00:17:35,319 --> 00:17:38,640
And I think as soon as you've got animals in story,

277
00:17:38,759 --> 00:17:42,160
animals that talk, and you've got bells that ring, we

278
00:17:42,240 --> 00:17:46,519
know we have ented the marvelous, and we know that

279
00:17:46,599 --> 00:17:50,480
we have entered a terrain that for me is telling

280
00:17:50,519 --> 00:17:55,240
me a deeper truth about my life than statistics ever.

281
00:17:55,319 --> 00:17:58,119
Can you know? I was listening to the I've just

282
00:17:58,160 --> 00:18:01,440
been praying in a church this morning, and beforehand, I

283
00:18:01,480 --> 00:18:03,880
was listening to the radio. And as you know, well,

284
00:18:04,759 --> 00:18:07,480
the world is filled with invasion and war at the moment,

285
00:18:07,519 --> 00:18:12,160
it's all we hear about and I needed. I know

286
00:18:12,319 --> 00:18:17,079
from mythology that if you gaze too long at a monster,

287
00:18:17,680 --> 00:18:21,759
it will reduce you to ashes. And the correct mythological

288
00:18:21,799 --> 00:18:25,799
approach is to have a shield, and you gaze at

289
00:18:25,839 --> 00:18:29,480
the trouble through its reflection on the shield. And these

290
00:18:29,519 --> 00:18:34,359
stories do that in a fashion. I have lots of

291
00:18:34,359 --> 00:18:38,039
friends of mine that have been involved in activism work

292
00:18:38,039 --> 00:18:40,920
of one kind or another and are simply burnt out

293
00:18:40,960 --> 00:18:44,799
by it because there's no artistry to their approach to it.

294
00:18:44,839 --> 00:18:48,400
They just fall into despair. So I find these stories

295
00:18:49,079 --> 00:18:54,200
really nourishing, really protecting in a strange way. They protect me.

296
00:18:54,880 --> 00:18:59,240
But it's what the Mexicans call the river beneath the river.

297
00:18:59,799 --> 00:19:05,079
And if somebody is constantly using a certain analytical part

298
00:19:05,119 --> 00:19:07,519
of their mind, that is all well and good, but

299
00:19:07,599 --> 00:19:10,559
it's not something that Ian McGilchrist would be interested in.

300
00:19:10,960 --> 00:19:14,480
It's not that great or what James Hillman called the

301
00:19:14,519 --> 00:19:19,279
poetic basis of mind. Most of us want to hear stories.

302
00:19:19,400 --> 00:19:22,000
Do you know my whole life, no one has ever

303
00:19:22,079 --> 00:19:24,759
said to me. If there's one thing I just can't stand,

304
00:19:24,839 --> 00:19:30,519
it's a great story. It's never happened. And so I

305
00:19:30,640 --> 00:19:37,799
encourage everybody to be storytellers. Don't. Don't. Don't explore a

306
00:19:37,880 --> 00:19:41,559
story without actually telling it, living in the room, living

307
00:19:41,599 --> 00:19:46,160
in your jaw, because something essential gets passed on there. So,

308
00:19:46,599 --> 00:19:50,400
to go back to your original question, I think initially

309
00:19:51,039 --> 00:19:54,519
most people are very happy to settle by a fire

310
00:19:54,720 --> 00:19:57,920
or even buy a computer screen and get told a story.

311
00:19:58,519 --> 00:20:04,400
But there can be a slow, protracted, nervous breakdown of

312
00:20:04,440 --> 00:20:11,279
your usual way of thinking. Quite honestly, I'm famous for this. Yeah,

313
00:20:11,319 --> 00:20:15,440
you know, so I can't apologize. I can't apologize for that.

314
00:20:16,000 --> 00:20:20,279
Speaker 3: I like what you're saying in some ways, to some extent,

315
00:20:20,680 --> 00:20:24,359
explaining it is not the right way, because there is

316
00:20:24,400 --> 00:20:27,960
a mystery which is real, which is that these stories,

317
00:20:28,000 --> 00:20:30,279
like I say, from the fairy tales, these legends, all

318
00:20:30,279 --> 00:20:33,680
these types of stories, they they contain elements which to

319
00:20:33,880 --> 00:20:39,039
the everyday life and to the mundane life seem completely absurd.

320
00:20:39,519 --> 00:20:44,000
But nonetheless, that type of storytelling is universal. It's universal

321
00:20:44,000 --> 00:20:46,680
in every culture of all time. There are stories that

322
00:20:47,200 --> 00:20:50,200
have these elements in them. And not only that, but

323
00:20:51,400 --> 00:20:53,640
you know, you tell a fair tale to a child

324
00:20:53,880 --> 00:20:58,039
and the child immediately loves it and is more attentive

325
00:20:58,079 --> 00:21:01,359
to it than he would be to a munday and story.

326
00:21:01,400 --> 00:21:04,519
Even though if you break down the elements in the story,

327
00:21:04,640 --> 00:21:09,440
they like in terms of everyday causality, it's ridiculous, like it's.

328
00:21:08,839 --> 00:21:11,319
Speaker 2: Why is there talking wolf? Why?

329
00:21:11,480 --> 00:21:11,839
Speaker 1: What?

330
00:21:11,839 --> 00:21:12,039
Speaker 2: What?

331
00:21:12,200 --> 00:21:12,279
Speaker 3: Like?

332
00:21:12,319 --> 00:21:12,400
Speaker 1: What?

333
00:21:12,480 --> 00:21:13,759
Speaker 2: You've never encountered these things?

334
00:21:14,160 --> 00:21:14,279
Speaker 1: Uh?

335
00:21:15,000 --> 00:21:17,559
Speaker 3: So there is you know, even just how can I

336
00:21:17,599 --> 00:21:21,279
say this, Like even just if we look at our

337
00:21:21,319 --> 00:21:24,799
experience of the stories from being a child to being today,

338
00:21:25,240 --> 00:21:29,079
there is something necessarily precious about them by the very

339
00:21:29,119 --> 00:21:32,359
fact that these stories exist, that they've been told over

340
00:21:32,400 --> 00:21:37,079
and over and that, like I said, even though you know,

341
00:21:37,119 --> 00:21:39,680
when you join Peterson has this famous thing, it's like

342
00:21:39,720 --> 00:21:43,000
you watch Pinocchio and you see Pinocchio being swallowed by

343
00:21:43,000 --> 00:21:45,759
a whale, turning into a donkey speaking to a cat,

344
00:21:45,799 --> 00:21:48,599
and you never ask you never, you're never bothered by it.

345
00:21:49,000 --> 00:21:52,680
You never think, well, that's that's that doesn't make sense?

346
00:21:53,119 --> 00:21:56,480
But why because obviously you'd have never like Haank. So

347
00:21:56,720 --> 00:21:59,559
there's a deep there are deep analogies in us that

348
00:21:59,720 --> 00:22:02,920
res in these stories, even though we don't even though

349
00:22:02,920 --> 00:22:03,799
we don't understand that.

350
00:22:05,519 --> 00:22:09,400
Speaker 1: Yes, and I think it comes to that very strange

351
00:22:09,519 --> 00:22:11,960
notion that we find all over the world that humans

352
00:22:12,000 --> 00:22:17,480
have a soul, and a soul. A soul is not fed,

353
00:22:17,680 --> 00:22:22,839
it seems, it seems that the soul is not fed

354
00:22:23,000 --> 00:22:28,279
entirely by logic. And usually in our life the times

355
00:22:28,319 --> 00:22:33,160
we feel most profoundly alive are in times of great

356
00:22:33,200 --> 00:22:37,559
distress or great wonder. But in some way the soul

357
00:22:37,720 --> 00:22:42,599
seems to wake up. And traditionally, in many cultures that

358
00:22:42,720 --> 00:22:47,480
are ritually savvy, that don't have an understanding of, you know,

359
00:22:47,599 --> 00:22:51,839
initiation mythologies, the slow process of growing into a human being,

360
00:22:52,599 --> 00:22:56,920
we are fed by images. We're not fed really by ideas.

361
00:22:56,960 --> 00:23:00,559
Ideas are interesting and we can puzzle on them, but

362
00:23:00,640 --> 00:23:05,400
when we want to be absolutely pollaxed by wonder, it

363
00:23:05,480 --> 00:23:08,079
is a story, one way or another that is going

364
00:23:08,119 --> 00:23:10,279
to do it. You and I would have been in

365
00:23:10,400 --> 00:23:14,160
church on Sunday in the midst of the story of

366
00:23:14,200 --> 00:23:17,880
the divine Liturgy, that very slow, ancient dance that we're

367
00:23:17,960 --> 00:23:21,960
all part of. And the truth is, don't tell anybody.

368
00:23:22,000 --> 00:23:24,640
Sometimes I don't want to go to church. Sometimes I

369
00:23:24,720 --> 00:23:27,799
wake up and I think, oh no, here we go again.

370
00:23:27,880 --> 00:23:32,160
My feet are already aching. But something will happen in

371
00:23:32,200 --> 00:23:35,039
the second usually in the second hour of the liturgy,

372
00:23:36,400 --> 00:23:40,400
where I will fall backwards into the arms of the

373
00:23:40,440 --> 00:23:42,839
story of the liturgy. Somehow. I never know when it's

374
00:23:42,839 --> 00:23:46,759
going to happen, never know, can't guarantee it. But something

375
00:23:46,880 --> 00:23:53,160
happens and I get lifted out of my mundane, worried,

376
00:23:53,400 --> 00:23:57,000
neurotic mind, and for a period of time I experienced

377
00:23:57,039 --> 00:24:02,319
something like grace. And then I can't sustain it, and

378
00:24:02,400 --> 00:24:05,160
so I come back and under the same irritable rat

379
00:24:05,200 --> 00:24:07,880
bag that I was before I went into church. But

380
00:24:07,960 --> 00:24:12,359
I find that stories give me. I'm forgiven me. If

381
00:24:12,400 --> 00:24:14,559
I've said this before, you know you end up. I'm

382
00:24:14,559 --> 00:24:16,960
sure you experienced this saying things and you're mad. Have

383
00:24:17,039 --> 00:24:20,400
I said this already in the last five minutes. You

384
00:24:20,559 --> 00:24:25,799
experience in stories pin pricks of eternity. And actually, as

385
00:24:25,839 --> 00:24:29,680
a mythologist and a storyteller, I lived on pin pricks

386
00:24:29,720 --> 00:24:32,880
of the eternal for twenty five years in the stories

387
00:24:32,920 --> 00:24:35,519
I was telling. And then you know, and I do

388
00:24:35,640 --> 00:24:40,440
have to say this, entering Christianity, it's not pin pricks anymore.

389
00:24:40,480 --> 00:24:44,319
It's a great river that you've vented. You've entered what

390
00:24:44,599 --> 00:24:48,079
was hinted at and alluded to in many other stories.

391
00:24:48,559 --> 00:24:52,079
Suddenly you've gone from you know, milk to meat, as

392
00:24:52,079 --> 00:24:52,960
Paul would say.

393
00:24:52,799 --> 00:24:57,000
Speaker 3: Yeah, but why do you think why do you think then,

394
00:24:57,200 --> 00:24:57,920
I mean, this is a.

395
00:24:57,839 --> 00:25:01,000
Speaker 2: Big question, but you know we can polk at it.

396
00:25:01,039 --> 00:25:04,119
Speaker 3: Why do you think then that so many of the

397
00:25:04,160 --> 00:25:08,359
wonder of Christianity has been reduced?

398
00:25:08,440 --> 00:25:11,519
Speaker 2: Right? Why is it that Christianity has.

399
00:25:11,400 --> 00:25:13,920
Speaker 3: Been made so mundane when if you look at the

400
00:25:14,039 --> 00:25:15,799
very elements of it, if you look at the story

401
00:25:15,839 --> 00:25:20,799
of Jesus, crucifixion, the resurrection, the communion, the Eucharistic meal,

402
00:25:21,119 --> 00:25:23,880
all of it is completely out of whack, like.

403
00:25:23,839 --> 00:25:26,000
Speaker 2: There's nothing, there's nothing.

404
00:25:26,400 --> 00:25:30,400
Speaker 3: How could something like that become kind of moralistic mundane?

405
00:25:31,960 --> 00:25:34,559
Speaker 1: Yeah? Is there is there nothing we can't pull the

406
00:25:34,599 --> 00:25:40,240
stinger out of? Eventually? I think I said it a

407
00:25:40,279 --> 00:25:44,039
few minutes ago that I think to come close, to

408
00:25:44,119 --> 00:25:47,640
come close to story in the way for a modern

409
00:25:47,680 --> 00:25:51,480
person to come close to story involves almost a kind

410
00:25:51,480 --> 00:25:56,039
of nervous breakdown of that conventional ways of thinking. And

411
00:25:56,599 --> 00:26:01,039
I think to really approach what a Christian is is similar.

412
00:26:01,079 --> 00:26:05,759
It certainly has been for me. It's been an extraordinary process.

413
00:26:06,240 --> 00:26:09,920
But when I look, if I was to critique, and

414
00:26:09,960 --> 00:26:11,960
I'm not really qualified to do it, but I will.

415
00:26:12,000 --> 00:26:17,559
If I was to critique modern Western Christianity, a lot

416
00:26:17,559 --> 00:26:23,160
of the time it seems to activate the will you know,

417
00:26:23,240 --> 00:26:27,519
that evangelistic, great commission esque feeling that we have in

418
00:26:27,559 --> 00:26:31,960
the West. Western Christianity feels very extroverted to me. It

419
00:26:32,000 --> 00:26:38,880
feels a very extrovert version of the Christian experience. Orthodoxy

420
00:26:38,920 --> 00:26:42,559
doesn't really And when it is as much an effort

421
00:26:42,599 --> 00:26:47,759
of will as it is an experience of love, then

422
00:26:47,880 --> 00:26:51,359
I think you lose contact with the wildness of the

423
00:26:51,400 --> 00:26:55,599
thing because you are trying to make it. You're trying

424
00:26:55,759 --> 00:27:00,920
so hard to make it accessible. In a strange way,

425
00:27:00,960 --> 00:27:05,240
you are no longer asking anything of anybody. Now what

426
00:27:06,039 --> 00:27:09,400
I mean, I would have heard you. Actually, you and

427
00:27:09,440 --> 00:27:12,519
I were talking recently. You and I were talking recently

428
00:27:12,559 --> 00:27:16,400
about this situation that the church often seems to be in,

429
00:27:16,759 --> 00:27:20,279
where we are mimicking a culture that no longer cares

430
00:27:20,319 --> 00:27:22,720
for us. And you said to me, you said, look,

431
00:27:22,759 --> 00:27:25,240
if I want to go to a rock concert, there's

432
00:27:25,240 --> 00:27:28,480
a much better rock concert I can go to than

433
00:27:28,480 --> 00:27:31,039
the one that I'm going to get in my local parish.

434
00:27:31,440 --> 00:27:34,160
I'll just go and see Pearl jam or I'll see

435
00:27:34,240 --> 00:27:37,039
you know, I'll just do that, and so I think

436
00:27:38,720 --> 00:27:43,200
we have become photocopied and photocopied and thinned out. We

437
00:27:43,319 --> 00:27:46,720
have lost, as many other people have said, predominantly over here,

438
00:27:46,759 --> 00:27:54,000
Tom Holland, we've lost our weird and a positive example though,

439
00:27:54,079 --> 00:27:57,799
of a change, would have been last Saturday. I would

440
00:27:57,799 --> 00:28:01,559
have been with my spiritual father, father Bereforous, with a

441
00:28:01,559 --> 00:28:06,119
whole group of young katakumin, so young guys, predominantly men

442
00:28:06,480 --> 00:28:10,319
that are going to enter the process of moving into Orthodoxy.

443
00:28:11,240 --> 00:28:13,720
And one of the reasons I asked him, I said,

444
00:28:13,720 --> 00:28:18,440
you know why you hear is predominantly because the situation

445
00:28:18,799 --> 00:28:24,440
calls something. It's calling something out of them, it's calling

446
00:28:24,519 --> 00:28:29,440
more out of them, which is a chivalric gallant position.

447
00:28:30,240 --> 00:28:33,400
Christianity is very strange because on the one hand it

448
00:28:33,440 --> 00:28:36,799
has this great emphasis on humility, but on the other

449
00:28:37,000 --> 00:28:40,079
it has this emphasis that your steps in this world

450
00:28:40,160 --> 00:28:43,839
matter and have consequence, and you have to proceed like that,

451
00:28:44,279 --> 00:28:49,960
but not being annihilated by your own ego. So I'm

452
00:28:50,000 --> 00:28:52,960
going in all sorts of directions from your original question.

453
00:28:53,640 --> 00:28:57,640
But you and I follow a God who was born

454
00:28:57,680 --> 00:29:01,839
a fugitive. He dies in an outlaw, and then he has

455
00:29:01,880 --> 00:29:07,319
the audacity to return. That's wild information. That's very very strange.

456
00:29:07,480 --> 00:29:14,319
It's very strange, but it has become thinned out, domesticated,

457
00:29:15,119 --> 00:29:19,680
and so coned over. We can't seem to hear hear

458
00:29:19,720 --> 00:29:21,680
the message of it anymore. It doesn't seem to get

459
00:29:21,720 --> 00:29:22,720
anybody excited.

460
00:29:23,920 --> 00:29:24,519
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you.

461
00:29:24,720 --> 00:29:27,599
Speaker 3: I think your point also, you know this idea that

462
00:29:27,799 --> 00:29:30,440
it engages the will, because one of one of the

463
00:29:30,480 --> 00:29:33,759
things that happens in that case is that we feel like, Okay,

464
00:29:33,799 --> 00:29:36,880
now we master this, you know, and now we're going to,

465
00:29:37,200 --> 00:29:39,720
like you said, make it available to others because we

466
00:29:40,119 --> 00:29:43,640
you know, we've got this, you know. Whereas in fact,

467
00:29:43,759 --> 00:29:46,400
the story of Christ, you know, and the life, the

468
00:29:46,480 --> 00:29:52,119
liturgical life is is something which is constantly transforming you, right,

469
00:29:52,200 --> 00:29:58,880
It's constantly changed. It's constantly bringing you into insights and

470
00:29:59,119 --> 00:30:01,599
you know, personally inside in your life, but also cosmic

471
00:30:01,640 --> 00:30:04,359
insights and insights about others, and insights about you know,

472
00:30:04,440 --> 00:30:08,559
and participation into things that keep growing and keep getting bigger.

473
00:30:10,039 --> 00:30:12,720
And so yeah, I think that's interesting if you if

474
00:30:12,759 --> 00:30:16,079
you see yourself rather in the story right in the

475
00:30:16,119 --> 00:30:19,640
flow of like we're part of this astounding story. We

476
00:30:19,720 --> 00:30:23,200
have the chance to have a little parcel, you know,

477
00:30:23,519 --> 00:30:25,759
of Christ and to live that out.

478
00:30:25,680 --> 00:30:27,480
Speaker 2: In our in our in our life.

479
00:30:29,599 --> 00:30:33,559
Speaker 3: That is definitely it seems like a way into you know,

480
00:30:33,599 --> 00:30:35,119
a way into the mystery.

481
00:30:36,359 --> 00:30:38,880
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, I also see, how can

482
00:30:38,960 --> 00:30:42,160
I say this, like, I also see.

483
00:30:41,400 --> 00:30:45,720
Speaker 3: The opposite, right, I see people who make it all

484
00:30:45,759 --> 00:30:48,720
about themselves as well, right, make it all about their.

485
00:30:48,559 --> 00:30:51,519
Speaker 2: Story, like their own story.

486
00:30:51,640 --> 00:30:53,480
Speaker 3: And so it seems it seems like what we need

487
00:30:53,519 --> 00:30:56,759
is something like a like, yeah, this balance between this

488
00:30:56,759 --> 00:31:00,759
this life that I'm leaving but as it is angered

489
00:31:00,960 --> 00:31:02,640
or in the in the river.

490
00:31:02,559 --> 00:31:04,759
Speaker 2: Of a of a greater cosmic story.

491
00:31:04,799 --> 00:31:09,680
Speaker 1: At the same time, I've been thinking recently about the

492
00:31:10,640 --> 00:31:14,039
because I'm working on this Saxon Gospel, not because I

493
00:31:14,119 --> 00:31:17,160
need not because we need it particularly, but just because

494
00:31:17,160 --> 00:31:20,799
it's a wonderful bit of storytelling. It's incredible. But I've

495
00:31:20,839 --> 00:31:24,720
been thinking about the Saxon relationship. They're very heavy on

496
00:31:24,839 --> 00:31:28,200
the notion of fate and destiny. Fate and destiny, it's

497
00:31:28,200 --> 00:31:31,799
a Scandinavian thing, it's a Saxon thing. And someone was

498
00:31:31,839 --> 00:31:34,319
saying to me recently, they said, well, as a Christian,

499
00:31:34,680 --> 00:31:37,359
what do you make of all of that? And I said, well,

500
00:31:37,480 --> 00:31:40,000
I want to be as surrendered to the mind of

501
00:31:40,079 --> 00:31:43,400
Christ as I possibly can. So as a Christian, I'm

502
00:31:43,440 --> 00:31:46,519
trying to enter the river fully that and go in

503
00:31:46,559 --> 00:31:50,680
the direction he wants. But I will wiggle my kayak

504
00:31:50,960 --> 00:31:55,799
as I go. So in other words, it's this, it's

505
00:31:55,880 --> 00:32:00,039
surrender to the life that God wants for you. But

506
00:32:00,079 --> 00:32:04,640
at the same time, I would presume He has infiltrated

507
00:32:04,680 --> 00:32:09,160
you with intuitions, gumption, a little bit of personal stamina

508
00:32:09,640 --> 00:32:12,279
to move your you know, move your craft. I'm not

509
00:32:12,319 --> 00:32:14,559
in a sort of blissed out state all the time.

510
00:32:15,160 --> 00:32:18,799
I often think that a Christian is required to be

511
00:32:18,920 --> 00:32:23,319
both steadfast and restless in a way. When you read

512
00:32:23,359 --> 00:32:26,759
the Gospel of John, it's hard to pick it out,

513
00:32:26,759 --> 00:32:29,319
but right at the beginning the Gospel of John, he's

514
00:32:29,559 --> 00:32:33,319
he's writing not just for Christians, but he's writing that

515
00:32:33,400 --> 00:32:37,440
you stay a Christian, that you stay a Christian. So

516
00:32:37,480 --> 00:32:41,720
the notion is that Christianity has an active principle to it.

517
00:32:42,079 --> 00:32:47,039
There's a movement in the story. It's very hard. As

518
00:32:47,079 --> 00:32:51,680
you get older, your mind gets calcified with certain ideas,

519
00:32:52,319 --> 00:32:55,559
and one of the most dramatic things for me about

520
00:32:55,559 --> 00:33:00,559
my conversion to Christianity was in the middle of my life,

521
00:33:02,319 --> 00:33:04,599
having to sort of dissolve a lot of what I

522
00:33:04,720 --> 00:33:09,119
previously thought was absolutely established in my thinking and in

523
00:33:09,160 --> 00:33:09,839
my character.

524
00:33:10,720 --> 00:33:11,119
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.

525
00:33:11,599 --> 00:33:17,039
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's the stories that we remember, the stories

526
00:33:17,079 --> 00:33:21,079
that we come back to are filled with those crossroads moments.

527
00:33:21,640 --> 00:33:24,559
Myths are very rarely about the day that was, just

528
00:33:24,720 --> 00:33:28,519
like the day before. They're not those stories are not

529
00:33:28,640 --> 00:33:32,359
worth remembering, certainly not in an oral culture. We remember

530
00:33:32,440 --> 00:33:35,839
the story where something unexpected happens on the way to

531
00:33:35,839 --> 00:33:37,920
the fair, you know exactly.

532
00:33:38,839 --> 00:33:42,160
Speaker 3: And so when you look at these these Christian wondertail

533
00:33:42,240 --> 00:33:44,720
that you're exploring, or you know, the Saxon Gospel and

534
00:33:44,759 --> 00:33:48,400
these these this kind of fusion that's in between that,

535
00:33:49,000 --> 00:33:53,039
are there something that you've seen that you're almost thinking, Okay,

536
00:33:53,200 --> 00:33:56,559
I can't I even I can't touch that, Like that's

537
00:33:56,680 --> 00:33:59,960
where it's too weird, that's I don't understand it, like

538
00:34:00,400 --> 00:34:01,359
the connecta.

539
00:34:01,839 --> 00:34:09,199
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I would. I would say. An interesting question

540
00:34:09,320 --> 00:34:13,000
for me over the last few years has been as

541
00:34:13,000 --> 00:34:16,639
a as a Christian and as a storyteller and a mythologist,

542
00:34:17,159 --> 00:34:21,119
are there certain stories that are just not feeling right

543
00:34:21,239 --> 00:34:26,000
to tell? Anymore. Yeah, And actually I would have to say,

544
00:34:26,159 --> 00:34:30,679
there's a couple in the Scandinavian pantheon that are just

545
00:34:30,880 --> 00:34:38,440
so dark and are so woven in with witchcraft, it

546
00:34:38,559 --> 00:34:41,400
is not appropriate for me to get my energy behind

547
00:34:41,400 --> 00:34:44,079
them and bring them into the world. It doesn't mean

548
00:34:44,119 --> 00:34:47,760
that I don't appreciate them in a in a rather

549
00:34:47,880 --> 00:34:51,599
macabre fashion, but I'm not putting my I'm not putting

550
00:34:51,639 --> 00:34:56,679
my my energy behind it. It's it's too inculcated in

551
00:34:56,960 --> 00:35:03,199
a wildly different Does that make sense, No, you have to.

552
00:35:03,480 --> 00:35:08,119
You're going to feel at some point not all roads

553
00:35:08,199 --> 00:35:10,559
leave up lead up the mountain to Muhammad. Not in

554
00:35:10,639 --> 00:35:14,559
my book, you know. So there are certain stories that

555
00:35:14,679 --> 00:35:18,599
I may even consider translating or having written down. But

556
00:35:18,719 --> 00:35:22,119
when you tell a story that engages another kind of

557
00:35:22,239 --> 00:35:27,119
energy altogether, and so with the Saxon Gospel, they're cleaving

558
00:35:27,320 --> 00:35:30,880
so clearly to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that's fine.

559
00:35:31,559 --> 00:35:35,760
To the early Celtic wonder tales, the Christian wonder tails,

560
00:35:39,280 --> 00:35:42,719
they again have all sorts of similarities to things that

561
00:35:42,760 --> 00:35:46,119
you're reading in the Gospels, and there's no taste in

562
00:35:46,159 --> 00:35:51,400
your mouth that feels that the message has got so mixed,

563
00:35:51,679 --> 00:35:54,920
it's lost its divine ground. Now I haven't encountered that.

564
00:35:55,280 --> 00:35:58,360
Speaker 2: Okay, well I mean that. Yeah, that's that's fascinating.

565
00:35:59,239 --> 00:36:04,840
Speaker 3: And these stories were they how are they preserved? Like

566
00:36:04,880 --> 00:36:07,639
are they were they preserved actively? Or are they like

567
00:36:07,719 --> 00:36:10,880
there's just one book somewhere in the library that they found,

568
00:36:10,920 --> 00:36:13,480
you know, in the nineteenth century, Like were they preserved actively?

569
00:36:14,960 --> 00:36:17,960
Speaker 1: They're all over the place. There's lots and lots and

570
00:36:18,079 --> 00:36:22,480
lots of books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth

571
00:36:22,480 --> 00:36:26,559
century Saint tales, accounts of the early saints. Now, the

572
00:36:26,599 --> 00:36:31,360
thing is they're written without a tremendous amount of imagination,

573
00:36:32,039 --> 00:36:34,960
so it's very easy for your eyes to go dead.

574
00:36:35,440 --> 00:36:37,760
You have to be a storyteller. You have to be

575
00:36:37,800 --> 00:36:41,480
a professional in a way to glean what is actually

576
00:36:41,519 --> 00:36:44,960
going on and go, okay, does put this work in

577
00:36:45,000 --> 00:36:51,039
a room? Is this story inviting me to be related

578
00:36:51,079 --> 00:36:53,920
to it? One of the things in stories that is

579
00:36:53,960 --> 00:36:58,079
interesting is when you come to a part that makes

580
00:36:58,079 --> 00:37:02,760
you uncomfortable or you don't like. When I'm training storytellers,

581
00:37:03,239 --> 00:37:05,760
the first thing I say to them if they're hearing

582
00:37:05,800 --> 00:37:08,559
a story from me for the first time, which bit

583
00:37:08,679 --> 00:37:13,440
can't you remember, and at some point someone will say, yeah,

584
00:37:13,519 --> 00:37:16,880
there was a red rider, then there was a right rider.

585
00:37:17,480 --> 00:37:19,159
Was there another rider? I said, yeah, there was a

586
00:37:19,199 --> 00:37:24,119
black rider. And whatever you forget in this story initially

587
00:37:24,239 --> 00:37:27,840
is your point of investigation, because it's the part of

588
00:37:27,880 --> 00:37:30,480
you that shuts down and says, I'm not ready for

589
00:37:30,519 --> 00:37:33,440
that information. I'm not ready to hear that at the moment.

590
00:37:34,039 --> 00:37:37,679
And so in a way, it's not what you remember,

591
00:37:37,880 --> 00:37:41,639
it's initially what you forget as a storyteller that pulls

592
00:37:41,639 --> 00:37:45,760
you further in. That's the invitation. So as I always say,

593
00:37:45,960 --> 00:37:51,719
spiritual information often arrives with dismay, and it's stories that

594
00:37:51,880 --> 00:37:55,960
confound me on occasion or upset me that become a

595
00:37:56,000 --> 00:37:59,280
pebble in my shoe that over time I have to,

596
00:38:00,400 --> 00:38:03,320
through the slow labors of storytelling, bring it into my

597
00:38:03,400 --> 00:38:06,159
body in psyche, so better I understand it.

598
00:38:07,400 --> 00:38:07,760
Speaker 2: Hmmm.

599
00:38:08,400 --> 00:38:10,280
Speaker 3: And so can you give us an example of a

600
00:38:10,320 --> 00:38:17,400
story that was your blind like blind with your blind

601
00:38:17,480 --> 00:38:19,519
by like a story that you it took you a

602
00:38:19,559 --> 00:38:21,440
long time to be able to see properly.

603
00:38:24,119 --> 00:38:24,719
Speaker 2: That's a tough Q.

604
00:38:25,199 --> 00:38:27,719
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's I'll go for a I'll go for a

605
00:38:27,760 --> 00:38:30,960
massive story. I'll go for a story that we're both

606
00:38:31,000 --> 00:38:35,599
familiar with, passival. So passival is is is a grail

607
00:38:35,639 --> 00:38:41,639
epic passival. Depending on how the word is spelt, you

608
00:38:41,800 --> 00:38:44,039
get different versions of it, some that are French, some

609
00:38:44,239 --> 00:38:47,360
that are German. The one that I really like was

610
00:38:47,360 --> 00:38:51,400
written composed at least by a man called Wolfram von Eschenbach,

611
00:38:51,840 --> 00:38:54,840
who was a German. He was something called a minisinger,

612
00:38:55,079 --> 00:38:58,559
a singer of love who the Germans, you know what

613
00:38:58,599 --> 00:39:01,960
the Germans are like. They see what's being done somewhere else,

614
00:39:02,000 --> 00:39:05,519
and that vivl improved this, and so they saw what

615
00:39:05,679 --> 00:39:10,159
was happening with the with the troubadours, and then they

616
00:39:10,199 --> 00:39:12,719
get the menacing is. So there's a lot of intro,

617
00:39:12,960 --> 00:39:16,159
a lot of influence of schretend Detroit and others. But

618
00:39:16,280 --> 00:39:20,599
the story of passival, Passival as a character actually, for me,

619
00:39:20,800 --> 00:39:23,480
for the first half of the story is deeply unattractive.

620
00:39:24,039 --> 00:39:31,800
And he's he's almost repellent. He's naive, he's boastful. He

621
00:39:31,960 --> 00:39:39,039
commits one, one audacious mistake after another. In fact, they

622
00:39:39,119 --> 00:39:41,719
say in it Wolfram says he made an art of

623
00:39:41,800 --> 00:39:45,559
his failure. He made an art of his failure. And

624
00:39:45,599 --> 00:39:48,960
it's only in the second half of his life, when

625
00:39:49,159 --> 00:39:53,440
actually he has an experience where he could have he

626
00:39:53,480 --> 00:39:56,599
could have healed the ailing grail King, but is not

627
00:39:56,760 --> 00:40:00,239
experienced enough to do so. It's in the second half

628
00:40:00,280 --> 00:40:03,800
of his life that he tries to find as an

629
00:40:03,840 --> 00:40:07,400
act of will something he was initially given as an

630
00:40:07,440 --> 00:40:11,400
act of grace, which is kind of impossible. But often

631
00:40:11,559 --> 00:40:14,360
earlier on in our life we are afforded all sorts

632
00:40:14,360 --> 00:40:18,239
of opportunities that out in the wastelands of our forties,

633
00:40:18,280 --> 00:40:21,079
fifties and sixties, that all seems to have gone away.

634
00:40:21,159 --> 00:40:24,360
We're in a much harder place. So passer all was

635
00:40:24,400 --> 00:40:28,039
a story. For many years. He was not attractive to

636
00:40:28,079 --> 00:40:31,280
me in the way Robin Hood would be attractive. He

637
00:40:31,400 --> 00:40:34,360
was not attractive to me in the way that bear

638
00:40:34,440 --> 00:40:38,559
Wolf would be attractive. But in the end I realized

639
00:40:39,000 --> 00:40:43,599
me with my own catalog of disasters and mistakes, he

640
00:40:43,800 --> 00:40:46,159
was telling me far more about the walk of my

641
00:40:46,239 --> 00:40:50,079
own life than any of those wonderful high faluting heroes

642
00:40:50,400 --> 00:40:54,480
ever could. And so then then what I had to do,

643
00:40:54,599 --> 00:41:00,559
Jonathan imagine this Wolfram's Wolfram's Story is one hundred and

644
00:41:00,559 --> 00:41:07,000
eleven pages of gossipy high German Medieval High German. You know,

645
00:41:07,159 --> 00:41:10,199
most of it's just descriptions of suits of armor and horses,

646
00:41:11,039 --> 00:41:13,880
and I had to take them. I had to take

647
00:41:13,920 --> 00:41:17,559
those four hundred and eleven pages and over a period

648
00:41:17,559 --> 00:41:21,599
of about a year, inculcate them into a language that

649
00:41:21,719 --> 00:41:23,639
round a fire for two and a half days I

650
00:41:23,639 --> 00:41:27,960
could tell without people going into a trance of boredom.

651
00:41:28,519 --> 00:41:32,800
But by the end of it, I had wrestled like

652
00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:37,880
Jacob with the story, and I had recognized my own

653
00:41:38,000 --> 00:41:42,719
failings and smallness of spirit that Parsival has. But also

654
00:41:43,840 --> 00:41:46,079
I had forgiven myself in a way, because in the

655
00:41:46,079 --> 00:41:49,199
way in the story you have to forgive Passaval. But

656
00:41:49,280 --> 00:41:52,480
it's only when Parsival actually is in the process of

657
00:41:52,719 --> 00:41:56,239
he meets a holy man who gradually reveals to him

658
00:41:56,280 --> 00:41:59,639
what a disaster he's made of his own life. It's

659
00:41:59,719 --> 00:42:03,679
then and the possial himself says, I need to ask

660
00:42:03,760 --> 00:42:06,639
for forgiveness. And I always say in that part of

661
00:42:06,639 --> 00:42:11,400
the story, this is the moment when something grandiose Impossival

662
00:42:11,559 --> 00:42:16,360
died and something great was born. And I think all

663
00:42:16,360 --> 00:42:18,559
of us are human beings, at some point are going

664
00:42:18,599 --> 00:42:21,519
to encounter that reality. So the big one for me

665
00:42:21,800 --> 00:42:25,920
was possible. What about you, Have you ever had a

666
00:42:25,960 --> 00:42:27,239
story that you struggled with?

667
00:42:28,079 --> 00:42:32,039
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that it's funny that you say that.

668
00:42:32,159 --> 00:42:35,199
You know, it's funny that you mentioned that, because I've

669
00:42:35,239 --> 00:42:38,519
also noticed that when I I mean, obviously I love

670
00:42:38,559 --> 00:42:41,519
the Bible stories, but I've also noticed that there are

671
00:42:41,599 --> 00:42:46,119
some Bible stories that I don't remember, and especially there

672
00:42:46,119 --> 00:42:49,039
are some parts of Jesus's story, for example, that I

673
00:42:49,199 --> 00:42:51,679
tend to forget some of the things that he said,

674
00:42:51,719 --> 00:42:55,239
which some of the parables that don't make sense or

675
00:42:55,239 --> 00:42:59,599
that seem to say the opposite of what Jesus is saying. Yeah,

676
00:42:59,679 --> 00:43:02,440
And you know, for example, like for the longest time

677
00:43:03,000 --> 00:43:05,880
when I was when I was young, there was a

678
00:43:05,920 --> 00:43:09,320
part of Jesus, the part where he says where he

679
00:43:09,360 --> 00:43:11,800
praises the Pharisees, well, he doesn't praise them, but he says,

680
00:43:12,360 --> 00:43:16,599
you know, he says, don't do what the Pharisees do,

681
00:43:16,679 --> 00:43:19,159
but listen to them before their sitting in Moses' sit

682
00:43:19,760 --> 00:43:22,119
you know. And as a kind of young rebel, you know,

683
00:43:22,719 --> 00:43:25,519
punk punk rock kind of teenager that's say, in my

684
00:43:26,400 --> 00:43:28,760
up to my twenties, like I could I couldn't see

685
00:43:28,760 --> 00:43:29,119
that part.

686
00:43:29,199 --> 00:43:30,119
Speaker 2: I just couldn't see it.

687
00:43:30,519 --> 00:43:35,119
Speaker 3: And then at some point in my mid twenties that

688
00:43:35,280 --> 00:43:37,079
text hit me. It was like and I read it

689
00:43:37,119 --> 00:43:40,119
and I thought, what what I Jesus says that? And

690
00:43:40,159 --> 00:43:42,280
I thought, I've been reading this story for years and

691
00:43:42,360 --> 00:43:45,360
I've never seen it like I because I've never seen

692
00:43:45,360 --> 00:43:48,239
that Jesus says that, or I've relegated to some dark

693
00:43:48,280 --> 00:43:53,159
corner where it doesn't it doesn't matter. And so that's

694
00:43:53,239 --> 00:43:55,119
Those are the types of things that I've that I

695
00:43:55,159 --> 00:43:58,800
pay attent that I pay attention to, for example, even

696
00:43:58,880 --> 00:44:02,960
in terms of just insight into into how profound those

697
00:44:03,000 --> 00:44:05,840
stories are. Like there's a part in the Gospel where

698
00:44:05,920 --> 00:44:10,000
Jesus sells Peter to bring a sword to you know,

699
00:44:10,079 --> 00:44:12,800
at the at the Last Supper, you know, and I

700
00:44:12,800 --> 00:44:15,559
always just would completely ignore that because the part where

701
00:44:15,599 --> 00:44:19,000
Jesus tells Peter not to strike the Roman soldier that

702
00:44:19,079 --> 00:44:21,840
makes sense story wise, like it makes total sense, But

703
00:44:21,920 --> 00:44:24,280
you don't remember that Jesus told Peter to bring the

704
00:44:24,280 --> 00:44:28,119
sword in the first place, because that part bothers you.

705
00:44:28,199 --> 00:44:30,920
It doesn't it's not doesn't give you that knife clean,

706
00:44:31,400 --> 00:44:36,239
you know, Like Francis of ASSISTI Jesus that you expect, uh.

707
00:44:36,280 --> 00:44:38,119
And so even especially in the story of Christ, are

708
00:44:38,159 --> 00:44:42,119
the places where elements of Christ's story of things that

709
00:44:42,159 --> 00:44:44,119
he said or things that he's that he's done that

710
00:44:44,199 --> 00:44:47,559
wouldn't stick, just wouldn't hold in my memory are the

711
00:44:47,760 --> 00:44:50,840
are the ones that have brought me further because they've

712
00:44:50,840 --> 00:44:53,039
compensated for my own tendencies.

713
00:44:53,079 --> 00:44:58,800
Speaker 4: You could say, I think you've raised something very important, really,

714
00:44:58,880 --> 00:45:02,880
which is what is what are those stories trying to

715
00:45:02,920 --> 00:45:06,119
do to the reader, Because you imagine that any keen

716
00:45:06,320 --> 00:45:10,079
editor would have spotted things like this immediately and bit

717
00:45:10,119 --> 00:45:13,039
by bit by bit removed the pebbles from the shoe.

718
00:45:13,519 --> 00:45:16,239
Speaker 1: But they're not in there, And so you come out

719
00:45:16,760 --> 00:45:20,400
if you really are concentrating as you're reading, you're going

720
00:45:20,440 --> 00:45:25,760
to come out of it, not usually with the fulsome

721
00:45:25,920 --> 00:45:30,280
glow that I would receive from an epic myth. I

722
00:45:30,400 --> 00:45:36,360
come out of the biblical stories aware that something powerful

723
00:45:36,480 --> 00:45:40,480
and rather disturbing has happened that I've only half glimpsed.

724
00:45:42,119 --> 00:45:44,199
I've been asked a couple of times. They've said, you know,

725
00:45:44,559 --> 00:45:47,239
when you pray, does Jesus sort of stand in front

726
00:45:47,280 --> 00:45:50,119
of you in that iconic way where you know, he's

727
00:45:50,239 --> 00:45:53,280
literally facing you like an icon, And I say, not

728
00:45:53,360 --> 00:45:56,920
at all. He's a figure moving through the tree line,

729
00:45:57,360 --> 00:46:02,199
you know, I just catch glimpses. He's thrilling. For me.

730
00:46:03,159 --> 00:46:08,519
I never ever feel christ like ever. So that's interesting

731
00:46:10,360 --> 00:46:14,199
because here's a thing. One of the questions I had

732
00:46:14,199 --> 00:46:17,199
before I was a Christian was, how on earth do

733
00:46:17,320 --> 00:46:22,360
you follow a figure who is entirely perfect? How do

734
00:46:22,400 --> 00:46:24,760
you figure? How do you follow a figure made of light?

735
00:46:25,559 --> 00:46:29,760
Because you would know, in conventional mythologies we have very

736
00:46:29,920 --> 00:46:33,840
nuanced gods and goddesses. No one is going to Zeus

737
00:46:34,440 --> 00:46:39,840
or Dionysus or Athena or Grendel for you know, an

738
00:46:39,880 --> 00:46:46,000
experience of complete emphatic, you know, luminous wholeness. So that's

739
00:46:46,039 --> 00:46:48,559
been one of the challenges for me. I was talking

740
00:46:48,559 --> 00:46:52,920
to someone recently and they said, well, reading the Bible

741
00:46:53,039 --> 00:46:55,679
is like having a bath, you know, and sometimes the

742
00:46:55,679 --> 00:46:58,400
bath feels rather hot as you get into it. And

743
00:46:58,440 --> 00:47:03,119
the language is clean. As we've discussed before, it very

744
00:47:03,239 --> 00:47:08,440
rarely describes, if ever, the inner condition of anybody. You've

745
00:47:08,440 --> 00:47:13,639
got the surface thing, you know. And then this happened,

746
00:47:13,639 --> 00:47:15,440
and then this happened, and then there was this and

747
00:47:15,480 --> 00:47:18,119
then they went onto the hill. And as a storyteller,

748
00:47:18,159 --> 00:47:20,800
I want to break down in tears because I'm thinking

749
00:47:21,000 --> 00:47:23,480
this is going to be very difficult for me to tell.

750
00:47:24,079 --> 00:47:25,000
Speaker 2: I have good news.

751
00:47:25,039 --> 00:47:29,320
Speaker 1: Though since I've seen you last, I have started to tell, say,

752
00:47:29,400 --> 00:47:33,039
for example, the stories of Genesis up to about the

753
00:47:33,079 --> 00:47:40,320
Tower of Babel, and they are fullsome wild, beautiful, disturbing things,

754
00:47:40,519 --> 00:47:43,960
even told orally, but they're not chapter and verse. But

755
00:47:44,079 --> 00:47:47,199
the I cleave to the you know, I cleave to

756
00:47:47,280 --> 00:47:50,760
the narrative. There's a limit to poetically how far I'm

757
00:47:50,760 --> 00:47:53,719
going to go with it. But yeah, I love it.

758
00:47:53,760 --> 00:48:00,079
But as you're saying, I forget, I forget because the

759
00:48:00,159 --> 00:48:06,400
Bible seems to be sometimes contradictory. I realized a few

760
00:48:06,480 --> 00:48:08,519
years ago I was never going to get a clear

761
00:48:08,599 --> 00:48:12,719
sense of half of what Jesus was saying until I

762
00:48:12,800 --> 00:48:16,400
did the slow labor of the Old Testament, because he

763
00:48:16,519 --> 00:48:20,880
is continually everything is talking to everything else. In Russian

764
00:48:20,960 --> 00:48:24,280
fairy tales, if you're trying to get close to the firebird,

765
00:48:26,039 --> 00:48:28,760
she's often in a cage in the wild. If you

766
00:48:28,880 --> 00:48:32,760
touch the cage, there's thousands of invisible strings that go

767
00:48:32,880 --> 00:48:36,800
off into the forest and everything suddenly becomes luminous and alerted.

768
00:48:37,199 --> 00:48:39,800
And I find the Bible a bit like that. It's

769
00:48:39,840 --> 00:48:42,960
got all of these tendrils attached to it, but it

770
00:48:43,119 --> 00:48:46,280
doesn't quite honestly, as someone that's grown up with Homer

771
00:48:46,360 --> 00:48:50,000
and Shakespeare, other than the song of the Songs or

772
00:48:50,119 --> 00:48:53,320
job it doesn't always give me what I'm hungry for

773
00:48:53,440 --> 00:48:56,719
as a word person, but it gives me something deeper.

774
00:48:57,920 --> 00:49:03,559
Speaker 3: Yeah, but the figure of crazy is it's definitely what

775
00:49:03,639 --> 00:49:06,519
you said is very insightful because in scripture, all the

776
00:49:06,599 --> 00:49:10,639
other characters have a light and a dark side, right

777
00:49:10,719 --> 00:49:14,239
they You can read almost all the Old Testament stories

778
00:49:14,360 --> 00:49:16,039
and you know, I actually encourage people to do that

779
00:49:16,039 --> 00:49:18,440
as an experiment, like read the story of King David

780
00:49:18,480 --> 00:49:20,159
from the point of view of King Saul. Like you

781
00:49:20,159 --> 00:49:22,920
can do it, and you can see that King Saul

782
00:49:23,079 --> 00:49:26,280
sometimes if you can make actually King Saul right to

783
00:49:26,360 --> 00:49:28,280
some extent in some places where it's like, you know,

784
00:49:28,360 --> 00:49:30,639
I don't know about David, he's he's a little shady.

785
00:49:30,639 --> 00:49:32,400
Speaker 2: You can do it. Even read Exodus from the point

786
00:49:32,400 --> 00:49:33,679
of view of the Pharaoh and.

787
00:49:33,599 --> 00:49:35,760
Speaker 3: Realize that, you know, he's got his reasons for what

788
00:49:35,800 --> 00:49:39,239
he's doing, and so each all the characters. Actually, although

789
00:49:39,280 --> 00:49:43,119
the descriptions are sparse, the characters are actually quite complex.

790
00:49:44,480 --> 00:49:46,559
Speaker 2: Yeah, and even in the New Testament.

791
00:49:46,199 --> 00:49:49,480
Speaker 3: You see you see Saint Peter, Saint Paul, you know,

792
00:49:49,599 --> 00:49:52,280
in the way they present themselves, you can see like

793
00:49:52,360 --> 00:49:55,519
their warts, you know, even though they're saints, you can

794
00:49:55,599 --> 00:49:56,800
kind of see their warts and.

795
00:49:56,719 --> 00:49:57,880
Speaker 2: How and their excesses.

796
00:49:58,360 --> 00:50:05,760
Speaker 3: But Christ is like, ah, it's it's annoying because on

797
00:50:05,800 --> 00:50:08,880
the one hand, like you said, he's he presents the

798
00:50:08,920 --> 00:50:13,800
perfect person. But then at the outset, that perfect person

799
00:50:13,920 --> 00:50:16,159
doesn't look like the way you think it should look,

800
00:50:17,199 --> 00:50:20,719
and so and so he also has like all these

801
00:50:20,800 --> 00:50:24,440
multiple aspects that we that's why we struggle to see

802
00:50:24,480 --> 00:50:27,119
it because we we think we have a particular point

803
00:50:27,119 --> 00:50:27,440
of view.

804
00:50:27,599 --> 00:50:28,840
Speaker 2: We think Jesus should.

805
00:50:28,639 --> 00:50:30,719
Speaker 3: Be like I said, he should be Saint Frans of

806
00:50:30,760 --> 00:50:34,360
ASSISI knights with everyone, hippie dippy Jesus right, or he

807
00:50:34,440 --> 00:50:37,920
should be you know, like telling people off, telling them

808
00:50:37,960 --> 00:50:40,639
their real truth, you know, getting them, you know, getting

809
00:50:40,639 --> 00:50:43,440
them the message, making sure that that uh uh.

810
00:50:43,480 --> 00:50:45,480
Speaker 2: And and it's like if I like one of those,

811
00:50:45,519 --> 00:50:45,920
then I.

812
00:50:45,880 --> 00:50:48,920
Speaker 3: Struggle to see the other because it's so complete and

813
00:50:48,960 --> 00:50:51,920
so there's always this prism that I can't completely see

814
00:50:51,960 --> 00:50:54,960
through because it has because it has all these facets

815
00:50:55,000 --> 00:50:59,480
that are that that don't seem to usually belong together.

816
00:51:00,000 --> 00:51:01,000
Speaker 2: Maybe that's the way I think.

817
00:51:00,920 --> 00:51:05,599
Speaker 1: That's exactly exactly right. You can't draw Jesus with one line,

818
00:51:06,079 --> 00:51:08,920
you know. I think as a child, I really wanted

819
00:51:08,960 --> 00:51:12,039
him to kind of morph into John the Baptist, you know,

820
00:51:12,079 --> 00:51:14,840
I just really want I really like John the Baptist,

821
00:51:15,239 --> 00:51:18,119
or I really like Elijah, you know, I really like

822
00:51:18,199 --> 00:51:21,199
those kind of guys. And then he's a bit too

823
00:51:21,480 --> 00:51:24,280
Sometimes he's a bit urban for me. But then he's

824
00:51:24,280 --> 00:51:27,079
back out praying early in the forest in the morning.

825
00:51:27,159 --> 00:51:29,599
You don't know what he's up to. You can't you

826
00:51:29,639 --> 00:51:33,280
can't pin him down. And on the one hand, Christ

827
00:51:33,360 --> 00:51:36,719
is willing to talk to everybody, but beware if you

828
00:51:36,800 --> 00:51:40,920
talk to him, beware because he's gonna he's he's going

829
00:51:41,000 --> 00:51:44,480
to confront you with something. He will expose you. I

830
00:51:44,840 --> 00:51:47,079
say this to people all the time. I live in

831
00:51:47,119 --> 00:51:51,400
a state as a Christian of intolerable exposure. It's it's

832
00:51:51,480 --> 00:51:55,440
dreadful for me. It's it's a constant, low level humiliation

833
00:51:56,760 --> 00:52:03,440
because I'm because because of all things that we're describing,

834
00:52:03,519 --> 00:52:08,000
you know, mythology wonderful though it is, offers you a

835
00:52:08,039 --> 00:52:13,800
lot of places to hide, and it allows you to worship,

836
00:52:13,880 --> 00:52:16,719
as Paul would say, the unknown God. You know, that's

837
00:52:16,760 --> 00:52:20,639
what I did for years. I just lived. Romanticism is

838
00:52:20,679 --> 00:52:24,400
a push towards Christian experience, but it's not quite it

839
00:52:24,920 --> 00:52:28,000
most of the time. I was. I was finishing a

840
00:52:28,000 --> 00:52:30,920
book the other day and I wrote something that I

841
00:52:30,960 --> 00:52:35,440
thought was meaningful to me. I said, every experience of beauty,

842
00:52:35,880 --> 00:52:39,760
in every experience of beauty, we are being prepared for eternity.

843
00:52:40,800 --> 00:52:44,159
In every experience of beauty, we are being prepared for eternity.

844
00:52:44,480 --> 00:52:48,039
I believe that as a Christian, certainly those glimpses of something,

845
00:52:48,079 --> 00:52:52,280
and it's whise the Romantics say. You know, truth is beauty.

846
00:52:52,360 --> 00:52:55,559
Beauty is truth. Beauty shows you what you want to

847
00:52:55,599 --> 00:52:57,880
defend in your life, what you're going to stand for,

848
00:52:57,960 --> 00:53:01,079
how you earn your name. Again, this is the chivalric tradition.

849
00:53:01,519 --> 00:53:04,239
This is a very Christly way of living, I think.

850
00:53:04,960 --> 00:53:10,920
But yeah, the Bible, my goodness me, the bits that

851
00:53:10,960 --> 00:53:13,440
we forget. I often pick it up and I feel

852
00:53:13,440 --> 00:53:16,280
like I've never read it before. On that note, fill

853
00:53:16,360 --> 00:53:19,760
me in. How was it for you? Because you and

854
00:53:19,840 --> 00:53:22,599
Jordan and was James all there the other week doing

855
00:53:22,719 --> 00:53:25,159
Genesis about it? What was it?

856
00:53:25,400 --> 00:53:28,360
Speaker 2: We did the gospel? Yeah, we did the gospel story.

857
00:53:28,440 --> 00:53:32,400
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean it was daunting, you know, because

858
00:53:32,400 --> 00:53:35,280
the gospels also because it's like the Gospels, like all

859
00:53:35,320 --> 00:53:38,840
the Gospels, it's so large. It was quite daunting, and

860
00:53:38,880 --> 00:53:42,440
I was I was worried about it. But in the end,

861
00:53:42,559 --> 00:53:44,719
I felt like we had just the right type of

862
00:53:44,719 --> 00:53:46,079
people there and.

863
00:53:47,599 --> 00:53:48,639
Speaker 2: We were able to.

864
00:53:50,360 --> 00:53:52,960
Speaker 3: You know, respect the text as much as possible and

865
00:53:52,960 --> 00:53:54,760
to kind of bring out and because we went through

866
00:53:54,760 --> 00:53:58,079
the entire Gospel, like we got, we tried to deal

867
00:53:58,079 --> 00:53:59,639
at least with the story in terms of the story

868
00:53:59,679 --> 00:53:59,960
of Christ.

869
00:54:00,039 --> 00:54:01,760
Speaker 2: Tried to deal with all the elements of the story.

870
00:54:02,599 --> 00:54:07,559
Speaker 3: I feel like the complexity of Christ came out, you know,

871
00:54:07,639 --> 00:54:09,800
and some of the difficult aspects of the Gospel too.

872
00:54:09,800 --> 00:54:13,559
We had Dennis Frager there, you know, Jewish guy who

873
00:54:13,840 --> 00:54:17,800
pointed out some of the things that are difficult for

874
00:54:17,880 --> 00:54:21,639
them to see in the gospel, did it very respectfully

875
00:54:21,639 --> 00:54:24,719
and everything, and so it was it was great. I

876
00:54:24,719 --> 00:54:28,840
can't wait for people to see it. I think that

877
00:54:28,960 --> 00:54:31,880
some I think that some Protestants will be annoyed with

878
00:54:31,920 --> 00:54:35,480
it because we don't preach the Gospel, like not once

879
00:54:35,719 --> 00:54:38,440
in the sense that they would hope, like, we don't

880
00:54:38,440 --> 00:54:41,800
present the way to be saved in the entire you

881
00:54:41,800 --> 00:54:46,239
know whatever. Ten hours of discussion, we basically just look

882
00:54:46,280 --> 00:54:49,880
at the character that's appearing on the text. And like

883
00:54:49,960 --> 00:54:52,519
for John Ravaki, who grew up even grew up in

884
00:54:52,519 --> 00:54:56,840
a Christian home and went away from Christianity, we went

885
00:54:56,880 --> 00:54:58,599
through the text and he felt like he had never

886
00:54:58,880 --> 00:55:01,719
encountered Jesus before. He said, he said, I'm encountering a

887
00:55:01,800 --> 00:55:05,679
Jesus that I'd never noticed. You know, I'm He thanked

888
00:55:05,719 --> 00:55:07,639
all of us, He said, thank you for bringing me

889
00:55:07,679 --> 00:55:09,800
along on this journey, because all of a sudden he's

890
00:55:09,840 --> 00:55:13,199
seeing Jesus in a in a fresh light. And I

891
00:55:13,239 --> 00:55:16,360
think that that's maybe if we did anything good, that's

892
00:55:16,400 --> 00:55:17,920
the best thing that we did.

893
00:55:18,599 --> 00:55:19,920
Speaker 2: H And I think it's the same with.

894
00:55:19,840 --> 00:55:21,679
Speaker 3: You with what you're doing in terms of you know,

895
00:55:21,760 --> 00:55:24,480
I I've been asking you ever since you became a Christian.

896
00:55:24,880 --> 00:55:27,559
I've been like I've been always asking the same question,

897
00:55:27,639 --> 00:55:28,679
like are you reading the Bible?

898
00:55:28,719 --> 00:55:29,719
Speaker 2: Are you reading the Bible.

899
00:55:29,519 --> 00:55:32,360
Speaker 3: Story because I have this I have a dream of

900
00:55:32,400 --> 00:55:35,000
one day sitting there, you know, and listening to you

901
00:55:35,119 --> 00:55:37,920
tell me a Bible story and I, you know, I

902
00:55:37,960 --> 00:55:39,960
know it'll make me see it in a way that

903
00:55:40,079 --> 00:55:42,679
I haven't seen it yet, and so I find that

904
00:55:43,320 --> 00:55:46,039
extremely exciting. And I think that's why I'm excited also

905
00:55:46,079 --> 00:55:49,039
about you know, this Christian Wondertails class that you're going

906
00:55:49,119 --> 00:55:51,880
to give for us, because I think you have a

907
00:55:52,000 --> 00:55:56,159
unique capacity to make things shine in the light that

908
00:55:56,239 --> 00:55:59,960
they're not used to seeing, things, like make normal things

909
00:56:00,199 --> 00:56:03,800
seem very very odd in a way that fords his

910
00:56:03,840 --> 00:56:05,119
people to pay attention again.

911
00:56:05,159 --> 00:56:09,039
Speaker 1: You know, yes, do you remember do you remember the

912
00:56:09,079 --> 00:56:13,679
image when there's the conversation amongst the disciples about should

913
00:56:13,679 --> 00:56:17,480
they pay tax or not and Jesus sends it. I

914
00:56:17,519 --> 00:56:20,920
think he sends Peter out to collect a fish and

915
00:56:20,960 --> 00:56:24,920
there's the coins in the mouth of the fish. And

916
00:56:24,480 --> 00:56:28,119
I always think about the fact that Peter, as a fisherman,

917
00:56:28,199 --> 00:56:31,440
has caught thousands of fish by that point, but he's

918
00:56:31,480 --> 00:56:34,760
never caught fish with coins in its mouth before. And

919
00:56:34,840 --> 00:56:37,239
That's what I'm trying to get to with these stories,

920
00:56:37,840 --> 00:56:39,679
is like, this is going to be the time you hear,

921
00:56:40,400 --> 00:56:43,840
you hear the story and there's the coins in the mouth. Beautiful,

922
00:56:43,960 --> 00:56:47,519
very much part of that fairy tale way of viewing

923
00:56:47,599 --> 00:56:49,880
the world. You know, a lot of what we hear

924
00:56:49,920 --> 00:56:52,800
about the moment with contemporaries of ours is the idea

925
00:56:52,880 --> 00:56:59,079
of re enchanting Christianity. Now, for me, enchantment is a

926
00:56:59,199 --> 00:57:02,360
nuanced word. You know, it's really nuanced, and I'm not

927
00:57:02,360 --> 00:57:05,440
always mad about it. I see Christ usually as a

928
00:57:05,440 --> 00:57:09,599
wakeer upper rather than an enchanter. But I do believe

929
00:57:10,400 --> 00:57:14,800
that it would be a wonderful thing to sit in

930
00:57:14,840 --> 00:57:18,679
the presence of these stories again and trust them as stories,

931
00:57:19,159 --> 00:57:21,280
let them do the work for you, let them do

932
00:57:21,360 --> 00:57:26,280
the work, and that maybe your imagination on occasion can

933
00:57:26,320 --> 00:57:29,119
gleam and there is a little bit of Holy Spirit

934
00:57:29,159 --> 00:57:33,159
in it and something unexpected can happen. I've just started

935
00:57:33,199 --> 00:57:35,840
a course actually that you were kind enough to be

936
00:57:35,920 --> 00:57:37,840
part of. The other night the skin Boat and the

937
00:57:37,880 --> 00:57:41,519
Star in England, We've got there's seventy of us. There's

938
00:57:41,519 --> 00:57:46,599
seventy of us slowly making our way from creation tales,

939
00:57:46,760 --> 00:57:51,519
Genesis and other stories into the big epics like Tristan

940
00:57:51,559 --> 00:57:55,880
and is Older and Passival all the way Finally, what

941
00:57:55,920 --> 00:57:58,800
we do on the very final weekend is we take

942
00:57:58,920 --> 00:58:03,599
stories from the student's own lives, especially not their own

943
00:58:03,679 --> 00:58:08,559
but maybe their aunt's, uncles or grandparents, and we say,

944
00:58:08,599 --> 00:58:13,280
give us a ten minute story from your family, relatively unadorned,

945
00:58:13,800 --> 00:58:17,480
that has these mythic threads that we've banged into over

946
00:58:17,519 --> 00:58:20,679
the year. So we start big. We start with the

947
00:58:20,760 --> 00:58:24,800
macro and we end with the micro. And I would

948
00:58:25,000 --> 00:58:31,239
like God willing the Christian Wonder Tales experience is interesting

949
00:58:31,280 --> 00:58:33,880
for all of us. If it is, there's all sorts

950
00:58:33,880 --> 00:58:35,880
of things that we could develop with symbolic world.

951
00:58:35,920 --> 00:58:39,719
Speaker 2: It'd be great. Yeah, it's great. I think that. I mean,

952
00:58:39,760 --> 00:58:40,679
we definitely.

953
00:58:41,280 --> 00:58:45,599
Speaker 3: I really enjoyed, you know, collaborating with you and I

954
00:58:45,639 --> 00:58:47,039
feel like we're on the same team.

955
00:58:47,119 --> 00:58:49,079
Speaker 2: You know. It's weird to be on a keen now

956
00:58:49,159 --> 00:58:49,800
are a sudden?

957
00:58:50,239 --> 00:58:54,000
Speaker 1: Isn't it odd? How we've you know, water finds its level.

958
00:58:54,639 --> 00:58:57,719
There's I always have the images you and I. It's

959
00:58:57,760 --> 00:59:00,079
a very fond memory for me as the two of

960
00:59:00,159 --> 00:59:04,480
us drinking guinness and smoking cigars in Dublin about eighteen

961
00:59:04,519 --> 00:59:07,679
months ago. We're just getting to know each other and

962
00:59:07,719 --> 00:59:11,679
you were talking to me about you know becoming an iconographer,

963
00:59:12,320 --> 00:59:15,320
and that you suddenly had the luxury of time on

964
00:59:15,360 --> 00:59:18,920
your hands and you could listen. You could listen to

965
00:59:18,960 --> 00:59:23,440
the great stories and the dress and gradually, bit by bit, providentially,

966
00:59:23,559 --> 00:59:27,679
those things gather around you. And which is what all

967
00:59:27,760 --> 00:59:31,079
the all the myths always point to one essential thing

968
00:59:31,519 --> 00:59:35,519
in our lives. We are going to experience trial and tribulation,

969
00:59:36,360 --> 00:59:39,400
but in other words, the underworld. But can we come

970
00:59:39,480 --> 00:59:43,159
from it with a gift for others? And at its best,

971
00:59:43,280 --> 00:59:46,320
what we're all trying to do is to turn the

972
00:59:46,360 --> 00:59:51,360
complexity of our own life into decent compost that something

973
00:59:51,400 --> 00:59:55,039
beautiful can grow from. I really believe that, and so

974
00:59:55,079 --> 00:59:57,960
it's exciting for me that you're right. We do have

975
00:59:58,039 --> 01:00:00,639
a team. They're all sorts of folks that we could

976
01:00:00,679 --> 01:00:05,039
mention that are emerging from the forest, from the tree line,

977
01:00:05,079 --> 01:00:09,079
and the strangest of ways, always something to contribute. Great.

978
01:00:09,440 --> 01:00:12,239
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so I mean I look forward to this

979
01:00:12,280 --> 01:00:14,760
class everybody you know, and we'll put a link obviously

980
01:00:14,760 --> 01:00:16,840
in the description if you want to join. It's going

981
01:00:16,880 --> 01:00:21,679
to be an amazing time. I can't wait to see

982
01:00:21,679 --> 01:00:24,119
how it comes together. I will definitely be taking the

983
01:00:24,199 --> 01:00:28,000
class myself and Martin. I always look forward to seeing

984
01:00:28,000 --> 01:00:31,840
you again and to learning from you. You know, I've

985
01:00:31,840 --> 01:00:33,920
been paying attention to Martin quite a bit. I mean

986
01:00:33,920 --> 01:00:38,000
he kind of knows that, like he just trying to

987
01:00:38,039 --> 01:00:42,239
see how he's you know, because I'm explained the stories, right,

988
01:00:42,280 --> 01:00:42,719
I try.

989
01:00:42,880 --> 01:00:44,800
Speaker 2: I I'm an okay storyteller.

990
01:00:44,800 --> 01:00:47,320
Speaker 3: But you know, when he came to the Symbolic World,

991
01:00:47,320 --> 01:00:49,079
those who've watched the videos that we're there the Symbolic

992
01:00:49,079 --> 01:00:53,039
Girl Summit, it's it's universally accepted that Martin stole the

993
01:00:53,119 --> 01:00:57,320
show from everybody, including Jordan Peterson, that it's like it

994
01:00:57,440 --> 01:00:59,480
was all about of all about Martin because he just

995
01:01:00,519 --> 01:01:03,280
the way you told the story was so captivating, and

996
01:01:03,320 --> 01:01:06,039
so so I encourage all of us to learn from

997
01:01:06,079 --> 01:01:07,719
him and the people watching.

998
01:01:07,800 --> 01:01:08,920
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can learn from Martin.

999
01:01:09,000 --> 01:01:12,280
Speaker 3: You know, we can all become storyteller to to some

1000
01:01:12,519 --> 01:01:14,880
level at least, you know, and then and then provide

1001
01:01:14,920 --> 01:01:17,519
that those little coins to the people around us.

1002
01:01:17,519 --> 01:01:18,639
Speaker 2: So thanks for what you're doing.

1003
01:01:19,960 --> 01:01:22,840
Speaker 1: Thank well, Thank you, Jonathan. It's very generous and I

1004
01:01:22,880 --> 01:01:25,840
will take that to the bank. I appreciate it. I've

1005
01:01:25,920 --> 01:01:29,079
just wanted to finish really with echoing what you've said

1006
01:01:29,400 --> 01:01:33,400
is that it's very rare in human history that storytellers

1007
01:01:33,400 --> 01:01:36,760
have earned any kind of money from it. So I

1008
01:01:36,880 --> 01:01:40,599
just recommend everybody listening to this not to get caught

1009
01:01:40,679 --> 01:01:42,679
up with Oh, so he's saying, I have to become

1010
01:01:42,679 --> 01:01:46,599
a professional storyteller. The traditional place for stories is around

1011
01:01:46,639 --> 01:01:50,039
the hearth. It's with your family, it's with your community,

1012
01:01:50,480 --> 01:01:53,119
it's with your church, it's with your friends in the tavern,

1013
01:01:53,199 --> 01:01:57,480
it's when you're working in the fields. Don't don't be

1014
01:01:57,559 --> 01:02:01,079
seduced by microphones. Don't be seduced by having to create

1015
01:02:01,079 --> 01:02:04,440
a website. Don't think like that, because in a strange way,

1016
01:02:04,480 --> 01:02:08,320
you offend the stories if you try and monetize them

1017
01:02:08,360 --> 01:02:11,760
too quickly. Let them, let them talk to you, let

1018
01:02:11,840 --> 01:02:14,400
them have their way with you. So yeah, thank you

1019
01:02:14,400 --> 01:02:16,480
for having me on. I love being part of this

1020
01:02:16,760 --> 01:02:17,760
and onwards.

1021
01:02:18,440 --> 01:02:19,880
Speaker 2: All right, we'll see you. So thanks.

1022
01:02:20,679 --> 01:02:24,280
Speaker 1: Hello there, this is Martin Shaw inviting you to come

1023
01:02:24,320 --> 01:02:28,880
and join me for Christian wonder Tales, my first online

1024
01:02:28,920 --> 01:02:33,800
course with Symbolic World. It is a secret history of

1025
01:02:33,840 --> 01:02:37,159
things that we're going to be exploring from the early

1026
01:02:37,360 --> 01:02:41,559
Celtic saints and heroes of antiquity all the way up

1027
01:02:41,599 --> 01:02:45,679
to the chivalric tradition of Arthur, round table, Merlin, the

1028
01:02:45,719 --> 01:02:49,119
whole thing. What do stories like that have to tell

1029
01:02:49,199 --> 01:02:54,000
us about the moshpit of our own modern lives? One

1030
01:02:54,039 --> 01:02:57,840
over four gatherings, We're going to find out. I promise

1031
01:02:57,880 --> 01:03:00,440
you this, it will not be boring.