Liturgies of the Wild : Myths that Make Us

There's an old Celtic belief that if you aren’t wrapped in the cloak of story, you are liable to experience huge rushes of angst as you age. You are, in some grievous way, unprepared for what the world will hurl at you. You remain adolescent, stuck, unable to act or to rest. In Liturgies of the Wild, acclaimed mythographer, storyteller and Christian thinker Martin Shaw proposes that we look to the ‘ancient technologies’ – the myths and initiatory rites – for help achieving maturity and wholeness. Drawing on his experience as a guide for wilderness rites of passage, Shaw teaches you to read a myth the way it wants to be read; provides vivid retellings of tales powerful enough to carry you through life’s travails; and shows you how to gather and reshape your own thrown-away stories. Most vividly, he shares how these ancient technologies led him – unexpectedly – to Christ, ‘the True Myth,’ by way of a thirty-year journey and a 101-night vigil in a Dartmoor forest. Combining scholarly erudition with earthy storytelling in the tradition of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Liturgies of the Wild is an invitation to let the great myths make us more fully human.