Book Review: Liturgies Of The Wild

An author whom I read regularly is Rod Dreher.  I have spoken of him more than once and have four of his books (How Dante Can Save Your Life, Live Note By Lies, The Benedict Option, Living in Wonder).  I enjoy his writing style and makes me think.  He also publishes a Substack (you can find it if you look) - I will simply say that I do not always agree with everything he writes, but he always makes me think.

One of the things that comes from his Substack is the amount that he reads.  He is a prodigious  reader and puts my reading list to shame.  He also freely shares what he reads and makes recommendations, which I confess have added to my own bookshelf (as if I needed another excuse).

One of his recent recommendations was Liturgies Of The Wild:  Myths That Make Us by Martin Shaw.

Shaw is quite a man of contrasts.  Originally a troubled youth (he alludes to being in a rock band at one point and going nowhere), he found himself attracted to myths, eventually receiving a Ph.D. and teaching at a number of schools and universities.  He has spent (and apparently spends) a great deal of time out of doors, either leading people on a form of retreat or on retreat himself.  He defines himself as a "mythologist".  Originally fallen away from the Christian faith, he later found his way back and is now a practicing Orthodox.

I do not quite know to describe Shaw's intention except to allow him to describe it himself:

"What kind of book have you opened?  A book with two intentions. Firstly, to provide you with mythologies that are expert in ushering people through life's travails, that do in fact speak in an initiatory tone, that provide a seam of ideas and images to gird your ways in troubling times.  Something you can hang your heart on.  Secondly, to show you that by nesting in those great myths you in turn start to sift the subterranean narratives of your own life to consciousness.  If your story is a river, then myth is the ocean it should naturally lead to."

He notes:

"This is a book in which we begin to regather our lost stories.  We regather them this way: We become conscious of how the great themes of myth speak through our own years.  When this happens, our own stories gain a shape and purpose that we may never have dreamed of.  This is a book about how to get home.  Home in our bones, our wonder, our eccentricity, our steadfastness.  Home in our curves, wrinkles, opinions, and grief.  The sheer, humble nobility of being lucky enough to be born at all.  There are many of us with second houses and pensions who are nowhere near anything that feels like home."

We have lost our stories and myths, suggests Shaw, and are left wandering through a world where, like his impression of much of church, is almost entirely indoors and cut off from Nature and the stories that once upon a time, gave humanity grounding.

By myths, I should note, Shaw is not just talking about what we would now consider mythology, gods and goddesses and heroes.  He consider what we now call folk tales or fairy tales as myth as well - something, again, we seem to have abandoned in a modern world where we can look through the heavens into depths of space but never really "see" the wonder.

Shaw organizes the book into a series of subjects - things like initiation and death and passivity and passion and prayer and guilt and envy and limit and evil.  He generally shares a story of interest from himself or involving him, pivots to a myth he feels is related, and then draws the lesson between the myth and the subject matter.

I will hesitate from speaking of some specific passages - because those specific passages have actually become part of what seems to be this impending feeling that there are things that I need to confront and (likely) change in my life (and thus, we will review them in due course).  So speaking in general, what did I think of the book?

It was....thought provoking.  Some of the chapters made me really think.  Some of the chapters essentially fell flat, at least for me - especially some of the later ones on the book, which I cannot tell if is due to the motif of story, myth, application was just an idea that got old after time or that they simply did not work as well as with some of the other sections.

What might wonder how, as a re-Christianized Christian (Orthodox tradition) and a mythologist with a huge gap between his childhood in a mainline denomination and his rediscovery of God, his view works.  The answer is kind of.  Certainly as someone that has delved deeply into stories, he sees them in ways that perhaps those that are not so deeply read in such things will not - and, I will say, I learned more of some types of "myths" (as defined above) than I had ever known about.  And yet, parts of that story telling did not work in reference to the Christian story.  Using the name Yeshua - which, while technically correct, I have always found as a bit of an affectation - was a little off-putting, as was the idea of Him as the story archetype of a Druid (again, perhaps right in terms of a story based observation, but again, off-putting).

I think his underlying points are good:  that we have lost story in our own lives - after all, some of the most inspiring and thought provoking items I have ever read were stories and, yes, myths - and have replaced it with a literalism that both binds and enervates us; that to integrate story and looking at the world outside of us (back to that idea of our church, and our life, being indoors) has the potential to change how we relate to God and His Creation.  The delivery is a bit uneven, though.

It is worth a read - as long as you are willing to hold the tension of a man who sees Christ and follows Him, but perhaps in a very different way.