In Frederick Buechner’s novel, Godric (1980), he tells the story of a man’s mystical experience of God. Not a man flushed with heroism, quite the opposite. He comes to the greenwood with a heavy sense of sin on him, the legacy of his actions being real enough. In a fallen moment he is gifted an encounter with something that calls him — oddly silently — by his name. Though I hadn’t read Godric when I myself took to the woods, Buechner’s dream vision gives me significant pause as to quite what happened out there.
I spent years living in the tent locating what I couldn’t find in Christianity. I’ve fasted on hills and in forests, spent a thousand or so nights under the stars. As well as my storytelling, I’ve worked with hundreds of people in the wild with rites-of-passage, many thousands through my books and teaching on myth. A wilderness vigil is a four-day-and-night fast in a remote place, taking stock of life and listening deeply to everything around you. Many cultures from all over the world gave some variant of this ceremony. It unshackles something essential.
For an awfully long time this search paid enormous rewards. It still does. But it remained outside the ken of the religion of my childhood. Approaching my fiftieth birthday that was all about to change, though I had no inkling. I decided that I was going to extend my experience of wilderness vigils, break out into new ground again, intensify the human instinct to lean into wisdom.
This is what I made my mind up to do.
For 101 days I would walk into a Dartmoor forest and tell it a story. I called these offerings Calling Songs. What I was calling to I didn’t quite know. After the telling I would sit, often at dusk, and just listen to the wood. I can slip into that kind of frequency easily because of my many years of doing such a practice. The 101 days was taxing, repetitive, sometimes marvellous. I learnt an awful lot about fidelity, of simply showing up, again and again.
Come one very chill January evening I had finally come to the end of this ritual. The last night was a journey to the very centre of the forest, to an Iron Age hill fort, where I would sit up all night in prayer. Picture the scene: with a full belly and mug of tea drunk, I set out from my cottage up the path into the trees. The ground was frosty and everything seemed to glitter. I was aware of the occasional distant stag bellow as I thumped up the frozen rutted track with just a wee bit of moonlight coming down through the oaks. I could hear the urgent rush of the Dart River down the hill to my left and I felt some jubilance that this would all soon be over. It had been a heady and disorientating few months. But now I felt grounded and solid within myself. The night vigil was more a formality really, a sign off, a doing-things-proper at the end of a long act of service. I wasn’t expecting anything from it.
The first few hours passed uneventfully, the high blue cry of the occasional owl somewhere to the right above my head. I remember being aware there would be the bones of the long dead down somewhere in the frozen mud of the hill fort. Somewhere in the third watch of the night I remembered what I’d brought with me. Two rocks I’d fished out of the Dart earlier on that day. When I’d brought them home, I’d realised they were actually one rock that had split. Who knows how many years they had resided under the brown-green waters of that freezing river? So near each other but apart.
I decided to stand, and to knock the stones together.
Clack clack clack
I made a very simple prayer of thanks, for the many blessings and disciplines learnt from the 101 days, and openness on this last night for any last insights.
Creator, what would you have me do?
For a minute or two nothing happened. I looked around — as I’m liable to do — the dim shapes of trees and holly bushes. Nothing. Nothing. Business as usual. I felt relief almost.
Then I did something I never do. I looked up. Past the trees into the sky. And it was then that I saw it.
It was a light rapidly falling to earth, the colours being very similar to the Aurora Borealis — the Northern Lights. And when I say falling to earth I mean aimed directly at me. This all took place over a few seconds. My jaw dropped and is still dropped. I saw it change shape, so it became like an arrowhead moving at breath-taking, impossible speed. What I was seeing seemed an entry into the marvellous. As a wilderness rites-of-passage guide of twenty-five years I’ve seen some things, but nothing like that. It was painfully beautiful, seemingly impossible. An arrow falling from the sky. I just couldn’t move. If this was the end, then it was a pretty bloody amazing way to go.
At the last moment — and this is an event that is both only a few seconds long but continually unfolding to me to this day — the arrow plunged directly into the trees just a few feet to my right. Utterly silent, these luminescent greens and pale whites seemed to be just sucked into the pitch dark of the pungent forest floor and disappear.
I sat up for the rest of the night; agape, ecstatic. I wasn’t frightened. I even danced.
Around dawn I staggered back down the frost-glittered track set out before me. I was bushed, amazed, sore, emotional. I sat at my kitchen table and gripped the sturdy weight of the timber. I looked in the mirror and patted my own head incredulously. As if checking I was still alive.
But it wasn’t over. Not quite.
As I finally clambered into bed, I closed my eyes and saw nine words: Inhabit the Time and Genesis of your Original Home.
I really didn’t understand what that could mean, not in my thoughts at least. My body may have. It’s an odd phrase, with little skips that makes it hard to pin down, it flips like a salmon in the hand and is gone. Such words require a kind of devotional chewing to gradually glean the protein. I knew from my family line that the understanding was that our original home was — dare I even think it, let alone say it — Eden. I had not thought about that word for a long, long time.
So I go out into the bush for 101 days, peer into the mysteries as deeply as I possibly can, and I find the mossy face of Christ staring back at me? This just can’t be happening.
The two sides of that rock so long separated had found themselves again.
And later a dream came.
One night I dreamt of a figure of light who simply brought me into itself for possibly twenty seconds. The love that emanated from this embrace was barely quantifiable in human terms. It was devastating, it doesn’t exist as far as I can tell in the usual human range of sense experience. It was every hug, every much-needed weep, every longed-for reunion happening all at once. It was high tide in the heart. Everything I’d ever loved was in this holding, and a whole lot more this bear of little brain had never experienced. I panicked, and immediately the intensity dropped to a slightly more manageable level. It somehow communicated to me without using words. It said that every act of loving care between people on the planet (and to animals, funnily enough) had, secreted within it, an echo of this original, enormous love it had for all of us. Our little moments of intimacy and affection were all spider-webbed up to this being.
It also told me that I should watch the sun rise as often as I could. That there was something in the act of dawn that would be good for me to keep witnessing. Since then I sleep in a room facing east, and I keep the curtains open. I will never, ever forget this dream.
Some say that dreams are a personal mythology, and mythology is a community dream. These weren’t that. They were sensorially outside my life’s experience of dreaming. They came from someplace else. But that brings me round to myth. There’s very little in the world that tells me more about the experience of life than mythology. I have absolutely devoted myself to it for twenty-five years. It is a gift that keeps on giving. Much of it is luminous with wisdom. For anyone wishing to understand their own impulses on a grand scale I recommend the old stories. To understand how we have spoken across-species using story I recommend the old stories. Go to the Greek, the Aboriginal, the Irish, the Siberian. They tell us so very much about life. They are tattooed into me. They show us the great fundament of the lived experience.
Myths told me all about life, but this myth, this Yeshua, crashing like that January arrow into human time, told me how to live that life. For me, that directive resides most radically in that most Punk Rock of teachings, the Beatitudes. I found my final and greatest teacher. I became a Christian. Or, more likely, I realised I was a Christian. Just not a very good one. A little out of focus.
As Yeats puts it, Christ’s ‘uncontrollable mystery’ had arrived.
I was baptised in late winter, in the depths of a Dartmoor river, by a man as much goat as priest. My father beside me, us all slip and slidey and jubilant into the dark currents.
Afterwards I sat on the bank and wept like a child.
…a man’s green, leafy face. He gazed at me from high above…his was the holiest face I ever saw. My very name turned holy on his tongue. If he had bade me rise and follow to the end of time, I would have gone.[1]
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Works cited:
[1] Frederick Buechner, Godric (New York: Atheneum, 1980), p.144.
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