How to Be a Human Being

“I want to tell you a story.” 

My four-year-old son wakes me up every morning with these words. When we’re children this comes as naturally to us as breathing. We’ve all done this: make up stories, dwell with them, and perhaps, if we’re lucky, become formed and shaped by the old myths and fairy tales.

Most of us grow out of this, and when we do that we lose something deep and profound, something that makes us human, and not mere machines consisting of nothing more (at least, so we think) than a “brain” on stilts.

In our age though, we’ve become inundated with advertisements, with headlines, with “stories” so to speak. From celebrities to politicians, on down to our own need to navigate the minutiae of our lives on social media, it seems like we can never get enough stories to get us through our days. But are they the right ones?

We’re surrounded by easy narratives: slick advertising that promises, in the immortal words of Mad Men’s Don Draper, “more happiness.” The news gives us pre-packaged friends and enemies; prosperity gospels are peddled instead of repentance; Hollywood offers Marvel-tier heroes and villains. 

But there are other stories. The old ones we might have forgotten as we’ve “grown up.” For Dr. Martin Shaw, there’s a fundamental difference between these mere packages of information wrapped in desire and what he refers to as myths: i.e. sacred stories.

Martin Shaw is a walking contradiction to our times: a mythologist, storyteller, and professor who found Christ in a radical encounter after a 100-day vigil in a Dartmoor forest in England. In his walk with Christ, he finally converted to Orthodoxy, and has been discovered and become beloved by Anglophone Orthodox over the past few years.

In part, learning to hear and learning to tell the right stories is at the heart of Shaw’s new book Liturgies of the Wild.

Even its title is an invitation. Orthodox readers are deeply familiar with the word “liturgy,” which coming from the Greek means something like public work, or work of the people. When we get together every Sunday for liturgy, not only are we telling again the tales of the apostles, the prophets, the exiles, the broken and the saved, but we invite and meet that “greatest story ever told.” The Divine Liturgy is itself a story. But like all the great stories, the great myths, when we experience it over and over each Sunday, we keep being invited deeper into the story, and seeing or hearing something new. The liturgy exists as an incarnate reality, a radical encounter that not only ruptures each of our own stories, but is ultimately the only way in which to make sense of them.

Today the word “myth” is used to dismiss something as false. But myth, as Shaw tells it, is actually one of the only ways to access something true.

We often forget that part and parcel of being a human being are the acts of forgetting and remembering. The stories we tell ourselves drape themselves over us throughout our lives. Often we don’t even think of them consciously, or if we do we only remember what it is we, or the world for that matter, want us to remember about ourselves. This often means we aren’t being honest with ourselves.

Confession is hard.

Not only is it hard before our spiritual fathers and the presence of the Lord, but also in our own dark hours alone at night, whether in our soft beds or alone upon the heath. What Shaw asks of us in his book is to do the work of the people, and that doesn’t mean bearing our curated souls on social media in some performative pop-psychological way. It means to be honest about our own stories to ourselves and God. But it takes tremendous work to uncover those truths for ourselves. Shaw invites us to this work through a kaleidoscope of stories across myth, fairy tale, and the lives of men and women he has encountered along the way.

Shaw gives to readers a retelling of many classic myths and fairy tales. When we heard these stories at our parents' knees, perhaps they seemed safe. But what Shaw gives us is anything but the safe and familiar, as if embodying that phrase of the poet Ezra Pound: “Make it new!” Shaw invites to hear the old stories again, and wonder at their renewed relevance. Wonder, after all, is the true beginning of wisdom.

In “On Forgotten Stories,” Shaw makes this bold claim:

I’ve long held the strange idea that the arrival of Christ begins in the middle of Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus visits the Underworld and Achilles tells him the following, the game is up for the old order:

“Sooner be a slave to a poor man than King of the Underworld.”

With these words, from the greatest of Greek Heroes, the world turns. Kalos—imperishable glory—is the deepest ambition of a warrior. When Achilles says it is without meaning down in Hades, something utterly new is being announced. A shield is hurled on a stone floor. A fresh consciousness. Yeshua, the God-man is coming. The last shall be first.

I’ve read and puzzled over that scene in the Odyssey for much of my life, from high school on to graduate school, and somehow Shaw finally shocked its meaning right into my marrow. Christ was there, pointing the way. If we truly believe in the incarnation, we can see these pointers everywhere, not only in the great stories, but also the little stories that make up our own lives and that we offer up to Christ on our own paths to theosis. 

Liturgies of the Wild is nothing less than a guidebook on how to be a human being. This is the question that arises during his own Christ-haunted apprenticeship as a storyteller with Wallace Black Elk—how to become a human being. For those of us already in the Church, what Shaw presents might seem to be more of what we already know, but made new to us again. For so many of the seekers in the “wild” today, what Shaw presents is a radical offer to engage with truth.

Real truth. Hard truth. Not the soft, soothing truths offered by narrative-makers and spiritual salesmen of our time. The deepest, perhaps sometimes most frightening truths—about the world, but especially about ourselves.

Nowhere is Shaw more of an assured Christian than in this. After all, in Christ rests all truth and in Him and His Church is that fullness, but many are the roads modern pilgrims take to get there. Shaw’s book offers them bread along the way and a helpful wave ad orientem to that treasure house of mysteries we attend every Sunday.

Martin Shaw is often linked closely with the writing of fellow Orthodox convert Paul Kingsnorth. For good reason, both men aim to not only diagnose the ills of our digital postmodern world, but also seek to offer an alternative to it. If you haven’t, do read Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine and learn what it is we’re up against. Then, when you’re done, read Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild to learn how you can live with it.

In the early 20th-century the Catholic writers G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc were often grouped together under the name of “ChesterBelloc.” Together they inveighed against much of what the 20th century held then as “sacred cows” of modernity. Today however we are blessed to have what I refer to as the “ShawsNorth,” that not only excoriates our times but offers us real, rare, and hard-fought wisdom on how to not only to think about our times, but to live in them.

One last bit of advice I give to potential readers of Shaw’s work is to not sleep on the audiobook. In Plato’s Phaedrus there’s a skepticism of the written word, in part because we can never know who is reading, or the disposition of their own souls. For Plato’s Socrates, the preferred method of instruction is in person, by hearing. There’s something different in hearing this work spoken by Shaw on audiobook that’s hard to capture, and deeply memorable. He is, after all, a storyteller, and something is imparted in the way he narrates his own words.

The world might tell us that we become more human with age. It might be, perhaps, that most people were more human as children than they are as supposedly “mature” adults. Shaw points us toward a kind of progress and return—to truly mature, we must encounter the myths and fairy tales that help us truly become human beings. 

T.S. Eliot wrote that “In my end is my beginning,” and those words are deeply true for us as Christians. From our baptism to our death, we look forward to our resurrection, and what story it is that we’ll tell, in the end. 

As Shaw writes towards the end of his work: “We have Christ’s full attention—let’s not waste it.”

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