Strangeness is the new real. Martin Shaw & Mark Vernon in conversation

A couple of years back, Martin Shaw had a visionary experience that led him to Christianity. We talked about it as the Mossy face of Christ - • The Mossy Face of Chri...
So it was great to talk again about what's been happening. Which is much. The conversation ranges over what might be happening now with Christianity, Martin's recent participation in the Symbolic World Summit, the strangeness, weirdness and terror of Christ, being in the world but not of it, and the importance of myths, stories and fairytales.
We mentioned Martin's new course The Skin-Boat and the Star as a practical manifestation of what has been happening for him. For more on that see here - schoolofmyth.com/five-weekend...
For more on Mark's work see - www.markvernon.com
0:00 The reviving of interest in Christianity
2:53 Report from the Symbolic World Summit
6:53 Christ, fairytales and reconnecting with the source
14:21 How to keep Christianity strange
21:33 From ideas to encounter
24:11 Being in the world but not of the world
29:08 Passions of the soul and Rowan Williams
37:38 Knowing stories and inhabiting stories
43:48 From persona to presence
47:56 Good fruits not good works
49:26 Martin's new course and the imaginative edge
52:44 What puts people off Christianity?
54:01 Proxies for the Spirit
58:17 Limits and more, growth and depth
01:04:21 Romanticism coming of age
01:12:13 Jonathan Pageau, Malcolm Guite, Iain McGilchrist and others on the new course

[@TheHajah1]

Just lovely listening to the two of you talk.. unexpectedly your conversation reawakened the Yearning in me that I hadn’t realised has been missing a while. It brings a close image & invitation to ride the white horse into the deep wildwood of soul again.. thank you.

[@grailcountry]

43:45 This is interesting, especially in light of the conversation I had with Martin about Maclolm Guite's suggestion that North American Christianity had been impoverished by failing to integrate the stories of the land. The question then becomes how can this be accomplished without risk of cultural appropriation. This actually is in tension with Martin's own writing in several other place in which he suggests that one need not be native to a place, to become connected to it through it's stories. This is quite a practical question as I am in the midst of organizing a conference here in the Pacific Northwest and I have been looking for a Native American story teller for the conference.

[@julianchase95]

I put this forward very gently and respectfully, not being from the US and therefore not fully knowing your situation - but I wonder how much store need to set by the notion of “cultural appropriation”. It’s always seemed (to me as a European, whose culture is entirely shared across all boundaries) such a mean-spirited, narrow, fussy, paranoid concept, and it limits and frustrates any true cultural creation. All culture is shared - from Homer to Bob Dylan. All *life* is shared. There cannot by any definition be any kind of cultural production without the artist taking elements that are not his. Language, musical instruments, art materials - all are borrowed from somewhere. Idiom, images, metaphor - all borrowed. No culture has not borrowed from others, no person has not learned from others, and both not been enriched. It strikes me that the appropriation concept has both the legalism of the capitalist patent and intellectual property mindset, and also risks a kind of cultural purism that could almost be seen as fascist. It’s not going to work in the long run because it’s anti-human, anti-life. But hopefully any learning from other cultures can be done sensitively. Apologies if I’m not seeing something here.

[@grailcountry]

@@julianchase95 I don't disagree

[@grailcountry]

What a nice treat!

[@PlatosPodcasts]

Thanks. That's what I feel about your work.

[@tara_artist]

Mark... My experience with your book and lectures on the Divine Comedy were very much helping my thruogh my very own divine comedy! ❤🙏

[@PlatosPodcasts]

Good to hear. That's what Dante does...

[@dawnmuir5052]

LOVE the idea of the Star for your course, Martin! Brilliant integration of the natural, invisible and symbolic world!

[@SM-oz4jy]

Great conversation many thanks.

[@ddod7236]

2 treasures. I wish I lived in the UK, or had the "do-re-mi" to travel--I surely would attend. God speed. Thank you.

[@DaaS4235]

This conversation blew my mind. Wow. Deep breath.

[@samrowbotham8914]

I am a Gnostic yet still enjoyed the chats.

[@kensears5099]

I'd expand on the observation Mr. Shaw made in response to the hypothetical declaration, "I'm too complicated for Christianity." Yes indeed, "if that's what you think, you're dealing with a facsimile...." Actually, two facsimiles. A facsimile of Christ, and a facsimile of yourself. So, naturally, there can be no authentic encounter between two such facsimiles.

[@cynthiaford6976]

The most intractable idea for those of us raised as secular humanists is considering (etym.with the stars) metaphysical evil. So I can both think it is increasing exponentially, with "the furnaces of affliction", and not be able to believe in it. I signed up for House of Beasts and Vines, finally, and went to the archive to begin at the beginning. Something inarticulable in the story of the Horned Women, inchoate for the left brain, resonated in an inexplicable way with my sense that without Christ something in us can whorl with the presence of metaphysical evil and join it. I loved this conversation, and feel it to be a tracker's mark on a tree towards Dylan's "highway of diamonds with nobody on it" and not of his"ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken" And on Good Friday eve. I'm for Hopkins's dappled things, not the nightmare of the perfect, but this dialogue is both moth eaten and perfect.

[@gorjanaelenairi]

Excellent points💜

[@radscorpion8]

I was going to boo christianity like I normally do but in this case yayy for alternative interpretations!!

[@CALCANEUS3535]

I can so relate. Thanks to thinkers and explores like these two, I’ve learned that Christianity (and other religions too) are meant to “have” proportionally but meant to be in participation with. Talks like these send my imaginal capacity soaring! Dangerous for sure. But in the danger, a bigger, more meaningful and real life is to be discovered.

[@aleksandereeri]

Andrew Huberman looks great with a hat.

[@99rjs]

Enjoyed the conflab. The Dartmoor weekends sound fantastic but I'm at the other end of the country, sadly.

[@kensears5099]

"It's not just what's going on in our heads." Exactly, This simple truth is pure gold. The quintessence of the spiritual life, the Christian life, is NOT an obsessive introspection. The meaning, flow, rhythm and trajectory of the true "world" (reality) we are ultimately part of inifinitely transcends the "world" we are not to be "of" (run ragged by, as your guest put it so well), and that equally means it transcends our conscious conjurings, rabbit warrens, conceptualizing and imaging. Which doesn't disallow or damn the conscious conjurings but safely puts them in their place, reminding us not to be essentially "of" them, either.

[@kensears5099]

The earthly life we wisely maintain a light, tenuous hold on...includes our brains.

[@kbeetles]

This course sounds so good with many delicious guests - alas, I am too old now for such journeys but I hope I might get little crumbs from the table.... ?

[@MrJohnQCitizen]

Will this conversation be available as a podcast at all? Look forward as always to giving me undivided attention

[@PlatosPodcasts]

It's on my podcast, Talks and Thoughts, available via podcast feeds.

[@shari6063]

Presence would feel like Christ.

[@simeonbanner6204]

Not exactly applicable to my own spiritual sense but I think Mark and Rupert Sheldrake made the point of somehow the old places of worship, places on the earth, Gods themselves being under utilised or forgotten. From Sheldrake's perspective if the society becomes less Christian are we breaking that resonance with the past? However the question then emerges what past do you go back to? Is it pre-Christian, say to the sacred wells, mountains etc say of the celts? Would we be return to some pastiche anyway.? A cursory look at a youtube on the people building super computers, quantum computers makes me feel these people are a new priestly class.

[@geoffreynhill2833]

Try praying to someone whom you loved and who loved you but has now gone. ❤

[@spearofsolomon]

Saying "In the beginning was the Logos" uses mythos as the vehicle

[@SacraTessan]

♥✨…look for the glimmering moments in tour childhood

[@dianagoddard6456]

Mark I spoke to you the other day at the Jung club . no one could be more eclectic in terms of spiritual practices eastern religions mysticism etc and the legacy religions but I do wonder where do all the ordinary mothers and children I see go who seem either happy with our Catholic Church or the evangelical charismatic but then we are spoilt for choice in Oxford ….!!!but then Not everyone is free to do all this island stuff …. No man is an island

[@bradrandel1408]

🦋🕊🌹

[@t3br00k35]

Check out James Tabor

[@ArchangelIcon]

There is a simple answer to this point at 48:00 All people are made in the image of God, and all are naturally good. Evil and bad works is through the Fall and our fallen condition.

[@dianagoddard6456]

Surely Jung says a lot of this , Marie Louise Von Franz etc

[@AquariusGate]

I just thought to comment on the title, hello 👋 Strangeness is not a natural property. Strange is a perception that we can grow familiar at defining. I imagine strangeness comes from a ( conscious or unconscious) association with quarks? I'm surprised, given your religious insights, that you would not define the new reality as mysterious? Mystery is at the expressive edge of any faith, and any genuine enquiry into the nature of nature.

[@PlatosPodcasts]

You're probably right but I'm working on William Blake right now and for him "mystery" is an ambivalent word, carrying the ring of mystified, whereas "vision" and "visionary" are the words alive to the tremendous and ineffable. So I'm holding off "mystery" for a while to see what difference it makes!

[@AquariusGate]

@PlatosPodcasts That's one thing that makes you a great creator Mark, you do interact with your audience. Thanks for the reply and insight to the unspoken influences. William Blake is probably the mosy mercurial artist i have learnt about, i can't wait! Thank you in advance 👌

[@AquariusGate]

@PlatosPodcasts That's one thing that makes you a great creator Mark, you do interact with your audience. Thanks for the reply and insight to the unspoken influences. William Blake is probably the mosy mercurial artist i have learnt about, i can't wait! Thank you in advance 👌