Martin Shaw on myth, maturity and the movement to service
From the moment we reach for our phones in the morning, stories compete for our attention: news blurbs, targeted advertisements, television series, political narratives and the curated lives of strangers. Our difficulty today is not that we lack stories. If anything, perhaps for the first time, we have too many. Yet for mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw, what is lacking amid this abundance is not information, but wisdom.
“I think we do have too many stories for the first time, and I think we have too many gadgets, too many screens to tell us those stories,” he says. “They don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart. They seduce us rather than court us.”
His new book, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us, turns towards stories which resist instant interpretation, make demands upon us and may take years to reveal what they contain. Beneath its myths, fairy tales and personal history lies a deeper question: how is a person formed?
For Mr Shaw, stories offer an imaginative language for life’s ordeals and transitions. “We live in initiatory times, but we lack an initiatory language,” he says. “It’s very hard for us to decipher what on earth is going on. In a sense, stories are initiatory braille. They’re a way that we can decipher when we’re blind, when we’re in the dark.”
Soulful education
Mr Shaw knew there were writers, and people who read fairy tales to children in libraries. What had never occurred to him was that stories could be told to adults in a living, oral form.
“I didn’t know there was a way in which you could tell fairy stories to adults in an unmemorised fashion,” he says. “You told it as an oral storyteller. It wasn’t a recital, it was a telling. You were imagining and shaping the words in front of people.”
In his twenties, during what he describes as a long hiatus from Christianity, myth supplied much of his “soulful and spiritual education”. He had tried painting and music, but storytelling was different.
“There’s always been a kind of wind behind my storytelling,” he says. “There’s been something that people were always keen to receive. Storytelling was like an instant fit.”
The tales he returned to as a young man seemed simple only from a distance. Mr Shaw compares them to icebergs: the initial encounter is merely the visible tip, while an immense body remains concealed beneath the surface. Their depth appears only when they are given space and time.
That time cannot be hurried. Mr Shaw once laboured with a fairy tale for 15 years before telling it publicly. Every time he read it, he fell asleep. He eventually concluded that there was something in the story his soul did not want him to confront. “Storytellers usually are looking for things in stories that they are troubled by or don’t even approve of,” he says, “and that actually is the clue that that’s the story they should be telling.”
Teachers and guides
Stories themselves, however, are not enough. Human beings are formed through encounters with others: people who show them where to look, when to linger and when to move. Mr Shaw remembers being fortunate in his twenties to encounter older men who had made lives around joy, vocation and the handing-on of knowledge. Without such figures, he believes, the young take their cues almost exclusively from their own generation. “When you don’t have that, what happens is you take all your visual cues from your sibling generation,” he says.
“The legacy is that you’re going to have an adolescent culture,” Mr Shaw says. “You’re going to have people that look like adults, but aren’t adults, because they have not moved yet from a position of tremendous self-absorption to a position of service. And the myths that last are always ones that talk about a condition of service that is bigger than your own ambition. And until you encounter that, you’re not fully grown as a human. And until you demonstrate that to others, you’re not a real grown-up.”
That movement from self-absorption to service is central to his understanding of maturity. The enduring myths are rarely stories of limitless self-invention. They involve sacrifice, obligation and a good beyond the hero’s private ambition.
The Christian centre
Liturgies of the Wild gathers themes and strands Mr Shaw has explored over three decades, but now gives them a distinct centre. Penguin approached him with an interest in the journey which took him “from being a mythologist to being a Christian”.
Mr Shaw describes the book as a “hinge”: inviting Christians to rediscover myth and readers drawn to myth to reconsider Christianity. It has become, he says, “like a market square full of people talking”.
That places them at odds with a culture promising freedom from every boundary and the possibility of becoming anything we desire”
His return to Christianity followed a 101-day vigil in a wood on Dartmoor, culminating in what he has described as an encounter with “the mossy face of Christ”. It did not cause him to discard the stories he had spent his life telling. It changed the light by which he saw them.
“I often locate in these stories not what you’d call a Christ figure, but a Christ consciousness in the whole story,” he says. The humility of a hero, the willingness to sacrifice and the capacity to carry a cross may permeate an entire tale. “Sometimes the whole story is Christ-like. It’s not a particular character in it, it is the energy of the whole tale.”
Here stories become more than cultural inheritance or psychological integration. They can train the imagination towards service and sacrifice, but for Mr Shaw the fullness of the person is found in Christ.”
The myths which endure, he says, repeatedly emphasise “making a covenant with limit”. That places them at odds with a culture promising freedom from every boundary and the possibility of becoming anything we desire.
“Myths always say, no, it’s not about being anything you want,” he says. “It’s about being something quite specific. It’s trying to figure out what is announcing itself in your heart, and then having the discipline to make a life out of that.”
Depth
Such discipline requires resisting shortcuts. Mr Shaw points to the temptation to search online for a ready-made explanation of a tale without first living with it, feeling its strangeness or allowing it to trouble us.
“My challenge to all of us is: can you replace some growth for depth?” he says. “We are three miles wide and two inches deep.”
The myths, he adds, will not reveal their secrets without concentration and fidelity. A summary can provide information, but not the encounter by which a person is changed.
Consume less bad news, use the phone less, return to physical books and go for a walk each day”
For young people navigating the noise of digital culture, his first instruction is simple: “Take courage.”
Then comes the practical work of guarding the imagination: consume less bad news, use the phone less, return to physical books and go for a walk each day. At the beginning of the walk, he advises, ask a question and remain alert for an answer.
“This is a far more magical universe than we may expect,” Mr Shaw says, “so start to treat it accordingly, and it will rush toward you.”