And above all, watch with glitering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” (The Minpins, Roald Dahl)

They often say, don’t meet your heros. It’s no secret that meeting our childhood stories can have the same sort of impact due to the ways it can desenchant our romanticizing of these figures. My experience with her book Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, was mixed, a book that accompanied me on my pilgrimage to England to do precisely that- meet my childhood stories, but one of the things author Lucy Mangan does extremly well is cut through the noise of our complicated relationship with the past in order to reclaim these stories and figures as essential part of who we are. As such interrogations tend to go, how, we ask, do we approach these figures born from a world we deem not just foreign to our own, but somehow morally inferior. How do we, in other words, embody what it means to “grow into our childhood” in a way that doesn’t demean it or rewrite it.

In the case of Roald Dahl, a figure I am preparing to encounter on day 2 of my pilgrimage, we meet a (fill in the blank with children’s writer, wartime fighter ace, spy, celebrity, husband to a film star), whom would go on to be plagued by accusations of misogyny and anti-semitism.

The grounds by which Mangan prepares our adult minds to meet our childhood is the intentional undercutting of our modern pretenses. To bury the past by way of convincing ourselves that we somehow stand above it is to distance ourselves from the reality of our lives in the present. This practice, of “othering the past” has more to do with protecting our adult selves from the pains of internal critique than it does holding our childhoods to account. Where the needed process of growing up into our childhood is exchanged for growing out of it.

As Roald Dahl once said, “Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.” This holds true for Dahl. Traversing the grounds of his own inspiration must mean the same for me if I am to approach my childhood stories in a way that allows them to actually speak. After all, the minute we assume that we stand above the past is the minute we acknowledge that one day the past will stand above us. Which is another way of saying, this way of thinking leaves our judgments flowing back in our direction. One of the ways in which this journey was able to speak to me was by inviting me to seek a better narrative, a better way of understanding our relationship to our childhood stories, existing as they do in relationship to our childhood selves.

I wake up in that small, cramped room soaked in sweat and still aching from overextending myself the previous day. The cracked window hadn’t seemed to help, although I’m slightly grateful that there doesn’t seem to be any stray birds or other creatures taking advantage of that open invitation to share my accomodations. I might have slept. I’m not sure. What I do know is that my alarm is telling me to get up. The day’s agenda is calling, and the early sunrise spilling through that still open window seems  to be in agreement.

My next walking map directs me four blocks down to a breakfast place called Oatis, where I find an order of freshly prepared coffee and blueberry pancakes affording me a proper greeting to a new day.

Yes, that four block walk still resulted in me walking the wrong direction not once, but twice. My mental map can only get me so far when any and all sense of north, south, east and west has been completely overturned.

Before I leave, I grab an extra order of an oat-bowl to go (or to put it in proper English terms, to “take-away”), ensuring that I don’t need to worry about lunch. Cheap and convenient. The bus schedule says I’ve got seven minutes to catch a bus that is a 3 minute walk away.

At which point I once again walk out the door and head in the wrong direction. My eventual redirection leaves me watching the bus pass straight by my stop while I’m still waiting on the opposite side of the street for the light to turn green.

Actually, true story. That bus ended up stopping at the same light that eventually turned and allowed me to walk across. There I was, now staring straight at the driver waving my hands in order to get him to open the doors and let me in. To which he promptly ignored me. My first thought- what is this, Winnipeg?

Thus, there I am on the proper side of the street watching the driver take off without me. A slight panic sets in- I have 40 minutes to get to my train heading to Great Missenden, Roald Dahl’s hometown and the inspiration for his stories, and a decision to make. Thankfully I had printed off a walking map for preicsely this scenario. With one caveat: it’s a 35 minute walk to my destintion: Marylebone Train Station. Yes, I walked it. And yes, I ultimatey made it, grateful for the  one hour reprieve the train ride would offer me.

Unlike the train from the previous day, which brought me from Heathrow to Paddington, this trip introduces me to the simple joys of train travel in England. The route begins by meandering through the Southhampstead neighborhood before gradually leaving the city limits behind in favour of the lush landscape of the Croxley Hill Lakes region. From here it’s a serene mix of villages and greenery that confirms why the English countryside is considered an enchanting place. In an area essentially devoid of mountains, it is dominated by rolling hills, clear lakes, and medieval villages. The sort of landscape where you are afraid to blink for risk of missing another standing castle or stone abbey.

By the time the train arrives in Great Missenden, all of the noise of the city is gone. This is a different world defined by a different pace. Exiting the train bring me down a hill and straight into this village that one could swear was pulled straight out of any number of Dahl’s stories. A fairytale-esque landscape marked by a small high (main) street and a singular road leading up to the church on the hill where Dahl is buried.

I duck into the first building that greets me to grab a coffee. Here my attempts to order a simple drip coffee open up a conversation not just about coffee culture in England (if you want something other than the traditional espresso drinks you have to order an americano- because only north americans order their coffee like that), but about my travels. Apparently they found my accent “lovely,” and I got a whole backstory on the other north american whom had decided to move to their town and whom was the star of the show around these parts. Everyone loved it when Charlie (irony noted) would come in to chat, which he did on a regular basis. I never got to meet Charlie, but I did apparently make their day.

Coffee in one hand, my walking map in another, my pilgrimage takes me halfway up the high street to a hidden alley tucked between two buidings, which I don’t think I’ll ever get used to. Everytime I duck through one of these tiny passageways I start to feel like I’m heading down an endless rabbit hole that I might never come out of. I did learn something important though about these paths from my coffeeshop converstaion. One of the very real quirks about the English landscape is this concept of the right to roam. This is going to become the norm from here on in, but these pathways, or towpaths, essentially lead you through what here in North America would be deemed private land. Hence why these routes have all kinds of fun instructions, such as hopping over wooden turnstiles and fences, and cutting through large fields, and navigating through hedges sepearting one property from another. It might seem unusual to me, but this is in fact how these layers of history remain present and active in the life of the people. This is how one gets to these spaces that defined Roald Dahl’s own childhood experiences, and how locals continue to tread these same paths.

Eventually this towpath arrives at Angling Spring Wood, which was both Dahl’s personal playground and the backdrop for Fantastic Mr. Fox and Danny the Champion of the World. This path takes you in a large cricle through a meadow and up to a farmhouse lookout over the countryside, eventually landing back at the High Street where you find such landmarks as the Petrol station from Danny the Champion of the World and Maltida’s library. Right in the center of High Street is the museum, marked by a replica of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory gate, and housing a recreation of Dahl’s writing room with real world items (the chair being the most iconic).

The height of this journey leads you up the hill to the old church, still looming large over the town as it keeps watch. Underneath what (I think is) a giant oak tree surrounded by benches is Dahl’s grave, with footprints from the BFG walking from the benches to the gravestone. The BFG was, and still is, my favorite story (and adaptation) of Dahl’s. It taps into these themes of learning what it is to belong in this chaotic world, and about the nature of growing up and forgetting our childhood. It is the story that most captures the spirit of my present pilgrimage, and the one that draws me most intimately into the life of this compplicated writer. Here I find this image and invitation to learn what it means to grow into our childhood, not past it or above it, and this is really what drove Dahl towards wrestling with the tension of his raw and direct observations about life and it’s brute nature on one side (you can see that in the often sharp and direct handling of his characters in terms of the child-adult relationship), and finding hope in the power of story. In the power of the book. To borrow from the BFG, “Don’t gobblefunk around with words.” Rather, learn what it is dream like a child, and to let that childhood temper your cycnism about the adult world. You can definitely feel how these woods, the quiet setting of this town, became and remain a sacred space for doing just this. 

Mangan suggests that at it’s core, Dahl believed the writing process begins and ends with telling a good story. Not a lesson, not a morality tale, but a good story. All else follows from this. Apart from this the world cannot make sense. Apart from this the author can only expect to stand above the inherent power of this simple truth about the human experience rather than being informed by it. One of the beautiful things for Mangan about stepping into these stories as an adult is finding these glimpses of an author who was above all else human. A complicated creature who was aware of his quirks and shortcomings You can see this in his writings, which, as Mangan points out, far from being misogynistic are littered with a wanted humility we might miss, for example, in the strong female characters whom grace his pages. In many ways this was a man whom was a product of his own time and place and all of the complex parts that shaped it (beginning with the backdrop of war), but whom found himself restless, seeking those hidden truths reminding us that this world is, in fact, shaped by magic. I loved this thought as I contemplated my own complicated legacy and story on the train ride back into the city, eating my oat-bowl and dreaming about my next adventure. If the morning was spent connecting with the magic of a good story, the afternoon would be bringing me to the doorstep of A.A, Milnes fascination with philosophy. For now, I have an hour to read.

The last time I was on a plane was 12 years ago. It was the summer of 2014, and we were on our way (from Winnipeg) to Kyiv, embarking on the next phase of our adoption journey

12 years doesn’t feel like a long time in one respect, but planning my recent trip to England made me feel like I’ve just time travelled to an entirely different era. While I pale in comparison to many, once upon a time I would have seen myself as a fairly seasoned traveler. Planning yearly, if not twice yearly trips had conditioned me to the different tricks and money saving methods that made it possible as a genuine budget traveller. It’s not that the years since our trip to Ukraine have been absent of travel, rather a change of life and routine had left it streamlined and fairly contained to simple trips within Canada and over the border. Certainly I felt things shifting over those years still, where small things that once made sense no longer did, but planning a bigger trip like this felt like I was being thrust headfirst into a wholly unfamiliar world, where I no longer knew the rules of the game, and where the more I tried to make sense of things the more lost I started to feel. Given that the biggest changes felt to be the tangible absence of personal contacts in a system now fully immersed in the impersonalized nature of data and tech based tools, these sorts of walls between what used to be a more hands on and grassroots process ensured that it remained very difficult to to find help in navigating this process, let alone to find ways to budget well.

Perhaps a bit of poetic overlay there with the fact that this was commenorating the official road to 50. Everything seems to be a reminder that I am at the age where the world increasinbly seems to leave you behind, where so much of yourself becomes obsolete.

More poetry given I am travelling to a place with more layers of history to be accessed in mere days than I could possibly encounter in multiple years of exploring my own backyard (which I love, it’s a different kind of history).

I found myself thinking back on this process as I stepped off the plane and into the maze that is Heathrow. The shock of being very much out of practice with this whole jetsetting thing. If you’ve never been, whatever image you have in your head about the sheer size of this airport, trust that there is no way to overestimate the reality of how big it actually is. In a kind of quintessential British fashion, my first real shock about occupying a world not my own would be immediately throwing things into chaos by walking on the right side of those long corridors rather than the left. Only to be met by a never ending barrage of “sorrys.” The second would come from my first experience of that singular phrase which is now permanently burned into my brain: mind the gap. 

At some point I find myself boarding the train, jet lag and luggage in tow, officially emerging from the mostly windowless miles of artificial light into the light of day as the train hits the now open track.

Hey, they told me it rains a lot over here, so things are already looking up.

Here I move through a long series of industrial neighborhoods, making my way to Paddington Station, holding my piece of paper in front of me as I count down the different stops, afraid of losing my sense of orientation. So much of this particular stretch of trainline hides your surroundings from your view, but I will say, it’s makes the entrance into Paddington that much grander.

And yes, the rumours are true. The much loved bear becomes your vital travel companion at this stage in the game, with his own fish out of water experience modeling what it is to emerge from that train into a befuddled mix of daze and wonderment.

Bumping into the throng of bodies all making their way to different platforms (and seemingly making you feel as though you are the only one who has no idea where they are going or what they are doing) as your mind is running a mile of minute. Your eyes glimpse what will become the first of many paddington statues, which somehow helps calm your nerves just a little. You pass by what will also become the first of many encounters with Costa Coffee and the local Sainsbury’s grocer.

And finally I have exited the station, stepping into the larger than life square where I am greeted by the sights and sounds of what could be any major city. The steady movement of bodies down the sidewalks, the familiar sounds of crawling traffic and honking horns. There are small signs that distinguish it. A red double decker bus passes by as I am fumbling for my next piece of paper, in desperate need of a map. Buildings that, although occupied by modern businesses, feel like they were built in the 1600’s. Over to my left I see the large Paddington store engulfing everything else in it’s block, to my right signs for the Little Venice canal.

Orientation at this point begins with one simple task: make my way to where I will be storing my luggage for the day, a task which immerses me in a fact of London that will plague me for the remainder of my day: there are no street signs, only signs (if one is lucky) printed on the sides of buildings at major intersections. Miss those (and some of them are conveneiently obscured or entirely absent) and you’ll be walking blocks trying to figure out where exactly you are. Which is to say, a luggage storage station that was supposed to be a 5 minute walk away turned out to be three wrong turns distanced from where I eventually found myself 15 minutes later. But eventually I made it. 3 pounds and a luggage tag now meant I was free to start my wandering.

When it comes to travel my mantra is simple. I am always looking for the trifecta of coffee, the waterside (rivers, lakes, oceans), and the bookstore/movie theater. Whatever else I build around those three things (which of course will include food and ice cream) is my window into a given place, and typically my favorite mode of experiencing these things is through the simple joy of walking. In the planning stages of this trip I had come to terms with the fact that some of the familiar big hitters, beginning with the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace, would need to be skipped in order to accomadate my priorities. Here my agenda was, once again, seeking out the stories of my childhood by way of England’s rich literary heritage. And what better introduction to London than Charles Dickens.

Search online and you’ll find a plethora of organized paid and self guided tours of Dickens’ London, available through a single google search. Most of these are the same, some branch out into a few off the beaten path surprises, all share this essential caveat in common: experiencing Dickens’ London requires employing your imagination. Beginning with his living quarters from 1850 to 1860 at Tavistock Square (which is no longer standing, instead featuring buildings that are part of a larger medical district), and stretching all the way to his frequenting of the still functioning Covent Gardens and his fascination with St. Paul’s Cathedral (famously called the writers church). These are all sites that once reflected, as Alastair Schanche notes in a 2026 article for London X London, a time of population boom, industrial development, “foggy skies and cramped slums,” and, my favorite line, a distinct “mix of misery and excitment.”

Befitting my own aims, Dicken’s once said,

If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.”

Thus, walking in his footsteps, while channeling the spirit of a man who was particularly fond of the late evening and night hours, becomes an exercise in imagining the Victorian era of his time lying underneath the now revamped neighborhoods, and often in plain site amidst the rows of still standing townhouses and old pubs/restaurants.

His museum, a small, intimate, and revealing look into the author’s life, is the cornerstone of all of the walking tours of course, built as it was in the house that served as a location for the earliest years of his writing career (The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickelby, and Oliver Twist). Before getting there however, my own trek would take a detour around to 221B Baker street, which was of course made famous by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his now infamous creation of the renown detective, Sherlock Holmes (and funnily enough, is not an actual address, floating inchorently between two disconnected house numbers).

Here stands the preserved victorian era setting that brings the world of Holmes and Watson alive (for true enthusiasts there is also plenty of self guided walking tours available, but a little ways away on Northumberland Street is the Sherlock Holme’s Pub, which features a recreation of his living quarters).

I arrived in the early morning hours coming off a long haul flight, so before stopping at the museum I headed to the highly recommended Bill’s Baker Street Restaurant (one of a number of locations), where I indulged in my first full English breakfast (fyi, the rumours are true. For the celiacs of the world, London, and England for that matter, treats you like royalty. If you find a menus worth of options in one place, you are guaranteed to find another one the next building over. Same for vegeterian/vegan options).

When in London.

I loved the Sherlock Holmes Musuem. I loved it even more on a full stomach. Maybe a bit less in the heat wave (it persisted through the entirety of my travels, including these early moments of exploring mult-floor victorian era rooms without air conditioning). Similar to Dickens, apparently he never used to wear that iconic hat (in Dickens’ case he hated the hat), and so much of what has come to popularize his presence for us today are later additions (such as the phrase “elementary, my dear Watson.”) Perhaps what I found most fun was seeing the relationship between Doyle and the authors that shared his city with him (from Sayers to Wilde). Everyone was invested. And hey, I would think most of us can understand why.

My self guided “walking tour” now took the long way around back to the Charles Dickens Museum. My next stop would be the Marleybone location of Daunt Books, with it’s infamous “travel section” located in a gorgeous interior lined by shelves and a large, stained glass window.

This would be the first of a handful of London’s literary institutions that I will visit, and without a doubt was probably my favorite. It’s not massive by any means, but it’s the sort of place that nevertheless invites you to get lost in it’s many intentionally placed corners.

Mental note: I’ve got one bag, and I have to lug it around England. Make good, rational decisions. Or don’t and thank yourself later.

From Daunt Books, I made my way up Regent Street, a long, winding street taking you past the massive Waterstones Bookstore (think an oversized version of Chapters or Barnes and Noble), Hamley’s Toy Store, and London’s Oxford and Piccadilly Circus’ (grand intersections in the vein of Times Square).

Here if you veer left up Coventry Street you end up in Leicester Square (or it’s a very short walk across St. James Park and you are at the Mall, the grid like area containing Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, an area I was saving for the next day). At Leicester, a quaint, picturesque square, you are now connected to Charing Cross (fun fact: this road gets its name from the little known Eleanor, a past Queen who’s immortalization involved the longest cermonial walk in history, ultimately ending up here where you will find the last in a number of crosses that still dot the routes (see the wonderful book, Eleanor: A 200 Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen by Alice Loxton).

I’m breaking in here to say, at his point in my pilgrimage I suddenly realize I forgot to take my portable charger out of my luggage when I stored it. Whatever ambitions I had of keeping my phone in my pocket were now fully going to be realized, as those power bars were running dangerously low in the dead of this heat. I am genuinely at the mercy of my walking maps now.

On the other side of Leicester Square is a single section of street that reaches straight across to St. Martin’s Lane (London’s theater district) called Cecil Court. Welcome to London’s “bookstore street.” And chocolate. But more imporantly, more books, and more books, and more books. In this case, old, rare books. Imagining trying to preserve these titles through a trip and another flight home, I again called on my rational senses. to pervail.

If that’s not enough to capture my attention, a short walk up St. Martins has you at Covent Gardens. Fun fact: Covent Gardens is the oldest residential square in London. When you walk through this area, imagine it at the moment of it’s transition from the old city to the modern city we know today, transforming over the 1600’s through the gradual reimagining of a city reaching beyond it’s old city walls. Here Covent Gardens, one of it’s most recognizable market squares, transitions from a once kitchen garden for Westminster monks into a meeting place and trading center bustling with crowds.

What I wanted to note here for the purposes of my interests is that this area became one of Dickens’ old haunts, which stretches from these very markets, past the Old Curiousity Shop (which of course informed an entire book), and up Fleet Street to Ye Old Cheshire Cheese Shop and Blackfriars.

Given the still preserved old city landscape of this area, this is where your imagination is free to come most fully alive. I wonder at the London of his own percieved fascination, the river lying on one side, the industrialized epicenter on the other. It’s one thing to take in the sites and the smells, it’s another to imagine these streets in a time when poverty and upper class systems existed side by side on the edge of the whole modernist vision striving to come to fruition, in an age where lanterns pierced through the common rolling fog and diseases ran rampant.

Heading north again, I had scheduled afternoon tea with The Mad Hatters Tea Party at Sandersons hotel. If you remember, my phone was now essentially dead. My first instance of my printed walking maps failing me. All thanks to a confusing discrepency between New Oxford street and Oxford Street. I will admit, at this point, given a day on foot in the heat, that feeling of being lost definitely starts to carry a bit of extra weight. Thankfully though, after putting a series of puzzle pieces together, I finally got my orientation through what has now grown into a series of rather large high rises.

What greets you upon arrival is the fountain laden sitting area designed to transport you into another world. Keeping with my literary theme, a voice that I would be crossing paths with later on in my trip when I got to Oxford (Lewis Carroll), this was a nice touch, and certainly a welcome reprieve. Whether or not I would do it again, it’s a quintessential tradition made of tea, scones, sandwiches and desserts that is guaranteed to be more than even the most ambition patron can tackle.

After doing my best to make a dent, I payed my bill and continued on my way, beginning at the British Museum and Russell Square just down the road, and movimg into the gradually quieting streets with low lying buildings and old, victorian architecture that eventually brings me to The Charles Dicken’s Museum. I was one of a handful of people there, making my way through the multi-floor house which includes a wonderful exhibit on the “women who made Charles Dickens.” In a very real way these are the personas that continue his story following his death, and the museum does an excellent job of letting you feel the flow of that narrative from start to finish. I think what most spoke to me here, aside from getting to see his writing process layed out in such a visual fashion (the meticulous efforts he gave to the old world craft was truly inspiring), was imagining a young, uncertain voice finding his way and the legacy that emerges from that. For me, Dickens was always a writer who helped to connect, for my young mind, disparate worlds together, be it the rich legacy of storytelling that somehow pushed its into my own modern setting with it’s particular set of universal concerns and questions in tow, or the life of this figure whom seemed to hold such an enduring and eternal fascination with a world filled with tension, both wonder and suffering. Or even being one of the earliest voices to collapse these arbitrary lines between modern genres, especially when it came to normalizing what was a very real penchant for horror. 

I will cite one of my biggest regrets here. Dickens’ grave is located in the famous Poets Corner in Westmintster Abbey, something you can only see with an official ticket. This is where a number of the great literary voices of London and England’s history are buried. Circumstances did not allow me to get there, which was part of my plans. I did however still get plenty of pictures of the Abbey itself from the outside, and I stood peering through the open doors with a picture of Poets Corner in hand. 

I walked out of this museum feeling like I was beginning to see the relationship between story, storyellers and story-hearers in a new light. The power that this can have. The way it brings complicated creatures, author and reader alike, into these spaces that can take on a life of their own. I remember reading how Dickens never saw his life as having the impact that it did on both people and culture. He wanted and expected a quiet burial, and got the opposite (an honored one). It just reminds me of how connected our lives are to the world, and the worlds, that we occupy, and how deeply embedded story is to the ways we see and live and understand this world. To stand where such important aspects of my own life took shape and came to fruition was humbling.

Much here to accompany me on the next part of my pilgrimage, which was to see John Wesley’s gravesite, chapel, and museum. Here though my story takes a turn. Remember that dead phone? Well my walking map once again has led me down a dead end, this time due to a single street name that ultimately shifts to a number. What is a single direction is actually a bunch of sharp turns down different blocks following this numbered route. The issue was, my directions stop at “go straight at (insert street name).

Did I mention it was dang hot out? I stoppped at a cornerstore to grab some water. Here was the first time I opened up my wallet to actually use a small amount of cash I got from the currency exchange center before I left. I hand it to the guy behind the counter. He hands it back telling me he can’t take it. I look at him puzzled. “Euros” he says. I can’t take Euros. I need Pounds.

Turns out when I asked the teller for money, at which point I specifically stated I was going to LONDON (for whatever that’s worth), I inadvertently asked for Euros without thinking. We both had a good laugh, and then both of us blamed Brexit. Nothing like getting into a healthy discussion on politics in a foreign Country with someone you’ve just met.

T

I came back to this friendly corner store worker after finding myself coming to that dead end. He pulled out his phone and helped direct me where I needed to go. Unfortunately I would have to settle for the statue and glimpses inside Wesley’s Chapel. I would however continue to bring the importance of this space alive through my reading of two books, the first being Perfect Love: Recovering Entire Sanctification by Kevin Wawtson, a robust history of Methodism and it’s central theological commitment, the second is Love Divine: A Wesleyan Systematic Theology by Thomas McCall. Here my interest in Wesley connects back to my family heritage. Somewhere along these lines, moving from here through England and into Ireland, are the roots of my dad’s side, with my family found in a legacy of itenerant preachers travelling with Wesley, and Methodism’s eventual seeding of the Pentecostalism that I was born and raised within from both sides of my family. This stuff I knew loomed much bigger than my individual life, but what I so appreciated about being here was simply being able to imagine the ways in which our roots, and even further the different ways we respond to those roots, and even at times challenge these traditions, can help us make sense of why we have the questions that we do. Where certain awarenesses and concerns and values emerge from. While I am not Methodist, I can see that theology of sanctification built into my lineage in a rich way. The ways I was forced to grapple with these theological realities comes from this long history. For me I find that endlessly fascinating. In some sense, I am here because they were once there. in this space, on these grounds building, unbenknownst to them, the foundation for my own inherited life and journey of theological inquiry.

From here I begin the journey back to Paddington Station. The path takes me up to the Coal Drop Yards, the old market grounds where you will find the Word on the Water Bookstore, a bookstore on a boat. This boat sits on the Regent Canal, a towpath (the common name for walking paths all over the UK) that runs from Victoria Park all the way to Little Venice, which is situated right behind Paddington Station. In-between is the Camden Market or Camden Locks, which seperates the river at this junction point, climbing up to the level of the market and then carrying on around the northern end of Regent Park.

My intention was to walk the whole towpath, but my body met its limit. I ended up stepping off of it at the midpoint of Regents park and decided to take a Black Cab (just to say that I did) back to pick up my luggage.

From here I found my way to my hotel for the evening, just at the far edge of Kensington Gardens, very close to the Palace grounds and the Peter Pan statue. A small room with a nice bathroom and, yep, you guessed it, no air conditioning. My feet were killing me, but it was so hot in my room that I actually decided to head back out. Notting Hill was just a few blocks away as well, so I grabbed an ice cream and tried to bide my time for some of the cooler night air to settle in.

In these quiet moments, with the long days holding the light well into the late hours, I spent time thinking about what I most admired about this unfamiliar place. It had been merely a day, and yet it felt like I was a long ways from where I started when I first arrived at the platforms of Paddington. The authors I read cited the true power of this city not in it’s big attractions, but in the hidden spaces. I recalled learning from a local that “hidden gardens,” closely related with Secret Gardens, capture this sense of a city built through layers and layers of storied history. A garden is another word for yard, and what makes London so unique is all these yards, some big, some small, that were once walled off or hidden from view get unearthed and become part of the modern landscape. They become spaces to seek out, to find and discover through alleyways and lanes and seemingly random corners. As I heard one person put it, “the secret garden is a hidden, magical sort of place that is disconnected from the rest of the gardens… not tied to a specific time or place.” Here they are referencing the story, but it applies to the ways London becomes a space built to contain this kind of magic. The same idea spills over into hidden courtyards, and squares. This is where I found places like Belgrave Mews, or Spital Yard, Goodwins Court, Grotto Passage, or Pickering Place (London’s smallest square). When you add in the fact that at any turn you might be passing by one of the city’s oldest pubs, the old haunts and childhood homes of endless figureheads and writers and inventers, and what marks this city is a city of endless discovery and exploration. Learning the language of the city becomes your most important skill, laden as it is with symbols and story.

Welcome to London. Pleased to make your  make your aquaintance.

Someone asked me later on during my journey as I ventured deeper into England, what I thought of London. My one response: London is a lot. I am still figuring out what that means, but it’s not a bad thing.

What I do know is that in some spiritual sense a piece of me belongs here, although I am only just learning to what end. I might live worlds apart, but in many ways this sort of journey is about uncovering the ways in which we are all connected.

I’m sitting in our upstairs room by the printer, slowly and methodically printing pages off for my upcoming trip, now one day and one sleep away. Pages of walking directions in an effort to ensure my first day there, an early morning arrival, is as prepared as possible. These walking directions are the product of weeks and weeks of creative planning, piecing together a concoction of priority sites and off-the-beaten path detours based on my shelves of old and newly aquired travelogues, travel books, and guidebooks.

For anyone interested, here are a few of my favorites (also including Rick Steeve’s great travel guide on “England”)

Full disclosure, this is my favorite part of travelling. A quiet mantra I came up with for myself and that I often repeat: being there is the aim, wherever “there” happens to be, but the process of bringing the trip to life is what sustains the journey. In my case, “there” is England, beginning with my eventual arrival in London.

Truth be told, I could describe any trip I take in the same manner. That sense of invigoration and excitment. The anticipation. The act of imagining these places and experiences I am about to encounter first hand. I’ll never outgrow that needed sense of wonder. This trip though is slightly different. Not simply because the trip is marking my official road to turning 50, but because this particular trip has been one I have been planning for a long time now.

With a caveat. Had you asked me a number of years ago, this particular trip commemorating my 50th would have, without a doubt, taken a different shape and a slightly different path. That path being through Ireland, not England. Ireland has been on my life list ever since becoming aware of my family heritage. It was my dad’s side that once found it’s way across those lands to Ontario, Canada, where our more immediate lineage became fairly well documented. It wasn’t all that long ago that those lines were eventually able to be connected across those waters to our family back in Ireland, via pictures that look like they could have been copied straight from our own extended family photo frames.

A slight hesitation, a twinge of concern, ended up redirecting my focus.  I knew that Ireland was the kind of place that required an investment in getting a car and heading out into the countryside. I worried about how well my celiac diagnosis was going to cope. This small concern nudged me ever so gently towards the second option topping my life list: England.

Why England? Yes, the reasons could be endless. Why not England!!?? However, for me my particular vested interest was England’s literary past, although I didn’t know just how vested my interest was and would be until I started to dig in to the possiblity. Here, suddenly, I found myself face to face with my childhood, being as I was a veracious reader from a very young age. These were the authors and stories that shaped me as a young kid, forming my worldview, asking the same questions I was asking, teaching me about the power of the imagination and igniting a desire for seeking truth.

Things ran deeper still. For all the attention that had been payed to my Irish roots, it turns out my mom’s side runs straight through England. Here both sides of my family line would eventually meet, largely by way of a shared connection to John Wesley. The Pentecostal roots that would branch off from Methodism and find its way to Canada were seeded in this very soil.

As i said, my vested interest loomed much larger than I initially knew. Someday, as I would come to imagine standing on those high, rocky shores of the Cornish coast, looking out over the waters directly towards Ireland, I would love to officially connect those lines myself. My connection to Ireland grew from my adult years and the stories I have encountered through my interest in history and the celctic past. But it felt fitting to begin here in England, with my childhood, a journey that would come to take on a timely resonance these last few years in my writings in this space as well, before these plans ever became a reality. I had been contemplating for quite some time what it means to understand my life story, spending time on a project in efforts to do just that. Even earlier this year, I was struck by a few voices speaking to this sort of pilgrimage, the idea of returning to your childhood stories, an act one such author called “growing up into our childhood.” And here, then, was the opportunity to put my feet on the literal “literary” ground.

To stand at their gravesides.

To traverse the grounds that shaped their childhood and gave inspiration to their stories.

Even to weave it into a story all its own based on the path I travel.

It all begins in London. As my printer spits out another page, I see the bold lettering on the bottom: Charles Dickens Museum. A route that begins with the traditional English Breakfast of course  (shout out to Bill’s), weaves past the infamous Baker Street residence of a certain prominant sleuth, and through the cobblestone streets Dicken’s once would have traversed. From Chancery Lane (Bleak House) to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese to The Old Curiousity Shop and Covent Gardens.

But I am not there yet. More pages continue to churn out. I see walking maps to the Musuem of Methodism, the route to Roald Dahl’s home town, directions to A.A. Milne’s countryside abode and the old Pooh Sticks Bridge that inspired his creation. There’s pages for Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, the legend of King Arthur, Richard Adams and Watership Down, the Bronte sisters and the Yorkshire connections to Robin Hood. There’s Whitby and the famed steps of Bram Stoker. There’s H.G. Wells in the small town of Woking, the richly inspired Cotswolds (including Shakespeare), and of course Oxford for Susan Cooper, Tolkien, Lewis, and the Inklings.

As the voices in my numerous online travel groups would say: that’s a bit much for just over a week. Maybe, but I’m game. You only turn 50 once. Or, you know, the old adage “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Even if plans go a bit awry (and they will, and they did), this is the process. It’s what will sustain the journey, and, God willing, continue to give inspiration for a return (which will, I promise, include Wales).

Finally, the last of my many pages has printed. I pick up my handful of sheets, very much aware of the questionable looks I am getting from that thing called the digital age. This to me feels right. Phone down, the challenge of piecing together directions page in hand, likely getting lost, finding my way again (hopefully). In any case, it’s time for bed. One more sleep. My bag is packed. Or at least it will be when I make the wise decision to sneak back down and remove one more book.

Speaking of books. Knowing myself in this moment, that stack of books waiting for me beside my bedside is going to be the more likely company for the time being. 

“Why won’t God communicate in a way we can understand.”

This is the question Odysseus poses to Athena as he seeks to understand the tension of a world, his world, bound to such suffering and seeking hope for it’s restoration. For Odysseus, his journey is a physical one, but his pilgrimage is internal, and what frames this pilgrimage, wrestling as it does with the question of God’s communication or presence in the mess of things, is met by a simple call: the call to remember.

This point in the film hit me hard. I’ve written elsewhere about how, at a point in my own life when this question loomed particularly large, God broke in (via a world shaking spiritual experience) with the exact same words. Since that day all those years ago I have found myself on this precise pilgrimage. 

What the story of The Odyssey gave to me this time around, or more specifically through Nolan’s translation/interpretation of the story, is a clarifiying context about what this pilgrimage is and why it matters, both for understanding the tension that we find in the world, and for locating my life within it. For Odysseus, he finds himself standing on a three fold precipice:

1. The line between his past and his future 

2. The line between the old world and the new

3. The line between death and life 

On the first front is this movement to return to what his past represents, which is to return home. To that familiar space before the world turned and when innocence had not been stolen. The imagery here is particularly powerful, as this movement overlays over top of one of the most powerful elements of the human experience, which is the process of growing up into the world and the loss that this represents. Home here can translate just as readily to our notion of “childhood.” For me, this is what I was called to remember. A time in my life when it seemed I could still hear God speak. In this story however, in Odysseus’ internal pilgrimage to return home he recognizes something important. Not unlike, to borrow from a book I recently read called Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children (Mac Barnett), where it is argued that we don’t grow old, we grow into our childhood, to return home, to remember the past is to grow into our childhood as an adult. This means, returning home requires attending for the lived life, not erasing it. It means standing in a space once familiar looking out over everything we are now forced to reconcile from a different vantage point. It is not returning to a space where the tension is erased, it is returning to a space where that tension that we feel can be known and reckoned with, with all of the regrets and failures that come with it. 

It is also, in this story, not simply a matter of ones individual life. Any such pilgrimage, as the second point underscores, is forced to attend to the larger narrative of this world we exist within. Here this can be said to be about history, but in the framework of this story history isn’t held captive to the past, rather it is alive. It is present. It is a movement in and of itself. Here Odysseus finds himself reckoning with a world that, in view of the story,  has chosen to defy the gods and make its own way. This is a world, framed here as a biting critique on the rise of modernism and the failed promise of the enlightenment, finds itself lost on the seas of it’s own ambitions, uncertain about what it means to see the human through the eyes of God, to see God through the eyes of the human (now as our creation), and equally uncertain about what it means to see the world being made in our own image. One thing rings true here to the experience of the characters in the story: we can seek to leave the gods behind, but we cannot outrun ourselves.

Which brings me to the third line. It’s not surprising to me that we need to seek out the old stories to find this long ignored truth about the world we experience and observe. What defines the tension is this simple and intuitive truth- Death opposes Life, and Life opposes Death. What really caught me off guard here is not just the way Nolan gets this, as modern adaptations are no stranger to burying this simple intuitive notion about existence in a modern ethos bent towards the romanticization of Death (usually by reducing the modern story to morality tales or lessons or appeals to utilitarian idealism), it’s the way in which Nolan understands the necessary place of narrative approaches in making sense of this world and our lives. The battles waging within the human experience are given coherency in how we understand the cosmic story. One of the great lies of modernism is that these two things can somehow be ripped apart. More strikingly, Nolan weaves a story that connects the human journey (which is largely bent around the ways in which the act of remembering reveals who we are) to the question of who God is. So much of the wrestling in this film revolves around the question of what God desires of creation itself, and of the humans existing in relationship to the larger created order. And one of the biggest questions is this: is God a God of Life or a God of Death. Or more specifically, does God care for this creation, or are we left to fend for ourelves as God sits at a distance leaving us to do to one another what we will in the name of remaking the world in our image.

I penned a more indepth write up on this idea here, but in a very real sense much of this story exhibits an uncomfortable relationship to the modern ethos it is critiquing. Precisely because of the way the Greek myths have become a kind of ammunition for the modernist narrative of leaving the gods behind and remaking the world in our own image. This narrative loves the Greek myths, precisely because it allows us to create distance between myth and reality, fiction and truth, by collapsing the old world into a singular portrait of myth, and recasting these stories through the lens of what we now call reality. Any particular God or story about the gods can just get subsumed into this same singular conception that has come to be known as modern myth, and our institutions enable us to invent categories to ensure they cannot break out of this tightly guarded box (a category called classicism, or the classics). 

Towards this end, the startling thing about this film is that Nolan’s interpretation never allows the story to be subsumed by those tendencies. It allows the story to function as the critique that it is, which is precisely what allows the story, or the tensions within, to challenge us with it’s questions about the nature of this process of disenchantment. Does the truth that we believe about this world actually map on to what we find? And if it doesn’t, how does that unsettle our senses in a modern, enlightened world? How does, in the words of Athena, a story like this actually open us up to giving up control? This is perhaps the most challenging thing for a modernist to do (speaking as one myself).

I recently got back from a pilgrimage to England (from Canada) which was planned as an effort to return to and remember the stories of my childhood. To walk those spaces that gave them life. In a very real way this was an act of learning what it means to grow into my childhood, now traversing these spaces, these memories, as an adult. All the way through this film I had this trip in mind as I was watching Odysseus’ own journey unfold, beginning in London where that line gets drawn in the history of Britian between East and West, walking the streets paved with both the towers and the ruins looming large and visible. And to make my way slowly to the ocean’s edge, looking out over those waters to the fascinating connections between Homer’s Odyssey and the Irish shores, standing as I was simitaneously in the soil of the deep roots of the Arthurian legend. A world of stories that awaken the unseen world in very real ways. Where the historical context for these stories awaken the clash with Empire that is still present in the divide that East and West represents, finding in it’s own sacred lineage and history a means of making sense of the cosmic narrative amidst the world’s familiar tensions.

In a very real way, Nolan hasn’t just made one of the film’s of the year (which I would make a case for), and he hasn’t just made one of the best film’s of his career (I would also make that case), he has tapped into something larger than himself. He has given us a story that is by it’s nature immortal, precisely because it reaches towards something universal. It is a story that is rooted in those symbols and patterns that reaveal those greater Truths. This is as human as stories get. It’s also transcendent. It’s spiritual. It’s revelatory. It’s prophetic. It reaches for the Divine in very real ways. For me, I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on how the author’s of my childhood understood this in a very real way, finding a similar and shared restlessness with the world that had been handed to them, a world where those gates of Troy were stormed in efforts to bring about the new order of human conquest and ambition. Author’s who’s stories seek in the pages they produce, pages that are intimately tied to the landscape they also inhabit, a better story, a better narrative that can actually make sense of the world they inhabit. A practice that, as it is said in the film at one point, pushes out into a moment in history where, in the absence of literacy people were handed songs. These songs became their stories. These stories became their invitation to remember. This act of remembering becomes a means of engaging their relationship to God.

I am in the midst of reading N.T. Wright’s newest book, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal. There’s so much there that connects with the spirit and message of Nolan’s The Odyssey, inviting us to imagine a world in which God has taken up residence, not remained distanced from. A world we aren’t looking to escape, but a world that is being transformed in the overlapping of both Heaven and Earth. As Odysseus says, “I am not dying, I am exiled.” This is the image he has of the already-not-yet nature of this present tension, a world in which we find both the forces of Life and the forces of Death in constant battle. In evoking this word exile, a word that I am confident would thrill Wright’s own popular emphasis and favoured imagery, he is also evoking this picture of a homecoming, of being at home in the world carrying the tension forward into/towards, as Odysseus’s own hopeful expression states, the coming dawn, the image of a transformed world in which God takes residence among a battered and broken creation. It’s a moment of true transcendence in the film, and one I will be carrying with me for a while. As the opening script declares, this is a story about a world which still knew magic. In the film’s closing image, this becomes a world we are tasked with remembering.

8 days

That’s how many days I went without watching a single film. More if you include the days leading up to my departure. And technically counting.

That might not sound like a big deal, but for me it’s very much out of the ordinary.

So much so that, upon returning from my trip, I became particularly aware of the fact that this anomaly seemed to be unearthing something that ran a bit deeper. The more I thought about it, the more aware this became: I was feeling disconnected from my love of film as a whole.

And the stats seemed to bear this out. A perusing of my Letterboxd page helped solidify this simple fact, showing a 60 percent drop in the number of films watched reaching back to this same period (January-July) a year ago.

Thus I have found myself theorizing on the eve of Nolan’s latest big screen blockbuster (The Odyssey) about the reasons for this disconnect. Certainly part of this has been the larger reality of the ongoing erosion and codifying of online communities and cultures that once promised lifetime connections across different interpretations and experiences (those communities replacing the physical communities I once thought to be eternally present as well). But such a sharp drop seems to suggest something more localized to 2026.

One place to begin fleshing this out is noting the simple fact that when I left for my trip and the screens, for me, had turned mostly dark, online discourse had just transitioned from the doom and gloom of reporting on Supergirl to it’s most recent robust attack on Moana. Logging back in upon my return, the first thing that flooded my feed was the imbattled discourse leading up to the release of Nolan’s The Odyssey. And this is not even to note the plethora of smaller films that continue to be buried underneath the finely tuned rhetorical online gamemanship.

That’s when I started to wonder. I had effectively detoxed from these convos and was seeing it, however briefly, through somewhat sober eyes. The joy, for me, of going to the movies continues to be challenged by the nature of this perpetual discourse and the media headlines that fuel it. What makes this more complicated is that stepping out of online discourse doesn’t address the source of the problem: the communal nature of this unique artform being continually challenged.

That’s one part of a working theory. Another thing hit me however, this one perhaps more prevalent to my own particular circumstance and journey. This trip I had embarked on, more of an intentional pilgrimage towards rediscovering the literature that had formed me beginning in my earliest years as a veracious reader. Walking the grounds that gave these authors and their stories their inspiration. This was also a pilgrimage towards rediscovering the source of those stories. Of coming to understand better why story matters in the first place.

Beginning in London, walking in the footsteps of the likes of Dickens and Wilde, reaching as far West as the rugged Atlantic shoreline that holds the history of the Arthurian legend in it’s weathered soil and looming cliffs and as far north as the lore surrounding Bram Stoker and the Bronte sisters, ultimatley ending in the streets of Oxford where the enduring legacies of Lewis, Tolkien and, for me, my favorite living author Stephen Lawhead remain alive and well. The likes of Coleridge, Richard Adams, A.A. Milne, Roald Dahl, Shakespeare, Beatrice Potter, Agatha Christie and Virginia Wollfe, the Robin Hood lore, all dotting the space inbetween. My encountering of these voices and these spaces lingers in my spirit with an ever renewing sense of awe as I settle back into routine. These were the voices through which the idea of story gained it’s power over my life, the seedbed for what would become my equal and passionate embrace of storytelling’s visual form. Thus, in many ways this was returning me to my first love: books. Perhaps in ways I don’t yet understand, this is also the way into rediscovering the tradition of oral storytelling that precedes and informs this literature, along with my love of film, a form that would proceed from it, as well.

Retracing these steps in my memory as I attempt to preserve this pilgrimage within a framework of it’s own emerging narrative, I am picturing those looming cliffs stretching out over the ruins of Tintagal. Perhaps the true climatic moment of my journey, arriving as I do finally at the great expanse of the Atlantic looking out over that great divide between the old world and the new.

I am standing there looking out over the waters listening to Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, letting his passionate play, as I heard it put, on “a theology of the Grai” open up a world long buried by my own modern, adult senses. I have thoughts of Drout’s majestic critical work on Tolkien’s works, The Tower and the Ruin, envoloping my awareness as well, with his capturing of Tolkien’s own impassioned image of the ruins of these castle walls on one side of me and the great expanse of the chaos of the waters pushiung in from the other holding the existing tension of those dualing forces, the Spirit of Life and the Spirit of Empire, together in a coherent narrative of that necessary euchatastrophy.

It all evokes this powerful sense of restlessness and wonder within me, moving me to consider where precisely the narrative of this journey pushes towards. The same feelings that I have found expressed in both Tolkien and Lewis as they describe their own wrestling with the erosion of their own once thought to be infinite community called the Inklings in the face of their own unique awareness of this growing tension that has come to be known as modernism. The necessary question for them: from what source does story gain it’s power. In a world that, even in Tolkien and Lewis’ day, is pushing forward towards a sharp disconnect between the evidenced power of these once enduring stories and the emergent elitism of the classicism and criticism which would come to dominate their world on both sides of this percieved break in history, this is precisely what comes to motivate someone like Tolkien, immersed as he was in the stories that informed his world, to capture and thus preserve the true source that gives these stories their life.

In Erica Stevenson’s The Odysssey Effect: How Homer’s Epic Poem Shaped the Woirld, she outlines, as a scholar in the field of the classics, how the enlightenment period reflects this movement towards elitism in a field (the art and study of the stories of the classical world) once accessible to the people of that world (and enlivened) by being both a product of and for the story tellers and hearers. Story, taking on the rhetoric of that invented term “classics,” now becoming a distinct product of the historian. A product that, for anyone taking a course in the classics or the classical world at a given reputable university/college even still in our time, gets molded and handed down to us by the select ones able to study them and thus control their translation and interpretation.

More importantly, not just handed but pre-molded in the spirit of that same enlightenment influenced modernsist lens. Soaked in the kind of intellectualism that serves to further entrench this distance between the hearer and the story. On one hand stating, as Stevenson points out, that the act of history is always an act of the imagination held captive to the interpreter, while similtaneously handing the scholar the hidden wisdom that now drives a wide, wielded sword between it’s redefined notions of myth and reality. Here story becomes bound to the very western foundations which have been built through that precise practice of “othering” the ancient world into being within this framework of thought, a practice used to justify our brand of intellectualism giving rise to the so called higher criticisms, branded as it becomes within the hiearchal systems of the Victorian age and codified by the continued reapppropriation of the Greek philosphers. This is, one might say, what we can call the modern, rhetorical framework. In this framework, ones access to the “classics,” or more importantly their meaning, not only operates as a sign of belonging to this higher criticism, the classicists then become the true bearer of their “meaning.” This becomes the means then of preserving the myth of progress that holds the enlightened world together.

As Guite insists in his introduction to his masterful book, along the way we’ve lost the language of story. We’ve lost the ability to actually be hearers of story, precisely because we’ve lost any sense of their actual source. That they have any source at all outside of our reconstituting of the classical world itself. This is what the distance brings about. Peer behind the veils of these intellectual systems and what you find is the same theoretical approaches for dealing with the diversity that we actually find within this world soaked as it was in Story. The only way to deal with the diversity in the modernist point of view is by reducing this to a single genre we now commonly call myth (in the modern sense of the word). Rather than the notion of a unifying narrative opening up a world full of stories across space and time, the creation of the classics becomes the silent indoctrination into a dominating modernist framework.

And that matters for this single reason: the modernist framework could arguably be said to be the only moment in history that, percievably, refuses to recognize it’s own operative myth. In fact, it sees itself as operating above such antiquated ways of being and seeing in this world. Which is precisely why, as Stevenson so aptly outlines in her book, classicism must function at such a distance from the people. What those like Guite, acting as they do as modern prophets of our present time, are proclaaiming through their life and works, is that when people learn to tell and hear these stories, it invites us into the greater Story to which all of thse patterns and symbols, contextualized as they are into our space and time, belong.and point towards. This is where history becomes a living, breathing entity that indeed can be framed as a pilgrimage.

It is also not suprising that the ones educated into this idea called classicism are often the same ones using the old world myths, which once functioned as a means of opening us up to a world hidden and unseen, as prooftext against the actual power of these old world myths. You can see this alive and well in the debate over this recent adaptation of The Odyssey, which underscores the two competing understandings of myth that has become so prevalent in the modern age. This could be what we might call a delicious irony. The way into attacking and/or dismissing religious or spiritual truth, for example, is to a devoted modernist to study and to come to love the Greek myths. Because, as claccisism will tell you, it’s all about categorizing these myths within a singular conception called the classical world, where we can safely draw lines between the old world and the new. And for western society, owing it’s own existence to the Greco-Roman world we have reconstituted as the great enlightenment project of our time, the true force of this movement from a world of Story to a world of the classics is a movement towards a percieved rationalism that allows the new to do away with the old altogether. Instead of finding a world filled with diverse stories by it’s very nature, the dichotomy that we find within claccisism sees it as a war between monotheism and polytheism, to which the proper modernist will claim a secularized version of the latter. In truth, this truncated version of the world only betrays what is actually true about it’s shape, which is that it’s diversity brings a shared monotheistic allegiance into conversation with a polytheistic world. This is how diversity exists. The modernist tendency to set these things at odds becomes grounds for creating this sharp dichotomy between myth and reality, giving the assumptions claccisism makes regarding creating and upholding the necessary and needed distance between the higher criticisms and the storytellers (which gets the label “rationalism”)  a percieved justification.

Meanwhile, the very thing that gives these stories their power is the very thing this form of institutionalism is actively stripping away. We remain seduced by the self wielding power this kind of rationalism hands us, but only in so far as we retain some sense of control over what it is allowed to reveal (in theory). As Stevenson puts it, this justification comes from our ability to single out the particular god’s of Homer’s epics and use that as our reasoned means for purging the world of the whole of religion. Of course this isn’t historical, modernism says, therefore the whole of religion occupies this same shape. In other words: it’s all Greek, as the saying goes, a phrase that brings with it all of the assumptions of a supersessionist point of view.

Which is where it needs to be said: this is, in fact, not rational. In contrast, for the ancient (or classical) world, evidence suggests that they fully understood the power of their operative stories or myths as a window into the greater Story that holds rational and reasoned history together, a word that simply evoked that once richly experienced sense of the enduring source lying underneath all the world’s stories. Something Tolkien and Lewis were accutely aware of. Something that can actually honor and make sense of the diversity of all the world’s stories. 

Back to those cliffs with the castle ruins on one side and the ocean on the other. It became powerfully aware for me, recognizing the storied layers of this landscape. This castle was built over top of a legacy lost to us but aware to the builders of it’s time. To get to the reason for the castle we have to dig further and recognize this simple fact, and that digging brings us to that perpetual question that runs through the whole act of history itself: why did they build it? What motivated them to build it?

The answer is: Story. Or their stories.

When the modern approach has weaponized our attempts to answer this question by predetermining the ancients to be lesser than our own constructed academics, designed as they are to reshape the world in our own image, there can only ever be one answer to this question: they were less educated and thus lesser than us. Thefore, to engage their stories means we must actively strip them of what makes them lesser. This becomes a mark of so much of the West when it comes to adapting these stories into our time and place. We thus mire something like Homer’s works, to come back to Nolan’s The Odyssey, in this veneer of self justifying rhetoric. To imagine a people wholly versed in the art of story and storytelling apart from this higher criticism is simply foreign, and increasingly a lost art in modern academics, and therefore we become the necessary conduits of the world we believe the classics must reveal in order for them to be allowed to say anything at all.

When it comes to this Arthurian landscape, and similarly with the legacies of Robin Hood further to the northernly, eastern part of England, we cannot dare to imagine the ones building this castle did so because they were aware of something we ourselves are not. That they were rooted in the stories that formed them precisely because they revealed something very real about the world they both experienced and understood. That they preserved the Arthurian stories because these stories were part of the larger world of Story, a reality that immersed them in the very world these stories sought to then open up. To acknowledge this would leave us feeling like our own appeal to this carefuly crafted thing called higher criticism is losing its ability to uphold our sought after sense of superiority over the past, as though we have a greater window into what is true than they did when they crafted this fortress against the harrowing forces beating up against it’s back, building their stories over the it’s source. Or perhaps betraying the fact that it never had this ability in the first place.

Yet, what this space, and the likes of Guite, are attempting to retrieve from the muddied landscape that our modern senses have obscured is our ability to allow these stories to once again unsettle in the ways they did for their original hearers. To understand how, for the ancient world, these stories were not operating as empty metaphors. They awakened them to what only the imagination could, a world in which the very patterns of our stories reveal it’s source. Where, as Guite sees it, story has the power to “set us upon the numinous shores of Faierie in all its mystery and meaning.” Where he finds the unifying relationship of the source of our stories evidenced in the whole of history.

There is a reason, as the foreward to his book says, the world would cease to be without the story of Arthur. What it means by this is not an elevating of Arthur above all other stories, but rather that in this space we find a way into all the world’s stories. We find a historical moment in which this practice was alive and well, fostering the heart of storytellings and story hearers. A way of making sense of all the world’s stories. All stories draw from the same source. This is why Story, and the stories that become our windows into a true narrative, holds power.

We can debate what this source is, but what the modern world has largely forgot, and pretended not to need, is a world that can be opened up to us in precisely this way. That what drives the stories we tell is an awarness of the source that gives them life. That a source actually exists. There is an irony to the fact that we live in a time when history is, as it was famously put, no longer a thing. We have arrived at the end of history. It cannot be buried, forgotten in the way of these old stories, and it can no longer be lost or gained, because we have surpassed it. Therefore it can never be something that needs to be discovered or imagined, nor preserved. We are no longer tellers or hearers, we are the drivers of a world now brought about by an act of our own making.

And yet, it’s not just these continued adaptations like The Odyssey that remind us of the Western world’s indebtedness to the past, it’s that we remain entirely ignorant of the ways in which these same patterns and symbols are the very things running through the life giving stories of our time. Sadly, what gets lost in this ignorance is the very diversity that awakens us to this power. A world where the classics have been reconstituted and reduced to modernist interpretations is a world built on utility, not Story. it’s a world where film gets reduced to the tehcnicalities of it’s technology. Where the modern script trades life giving metphaor for idelogy and moral “lessons.” What struck me in reencountering the narratives of my childhood afresh is how harkon back to a forgotten history of storytelling that didn’t adhere to rules, but to patterns. Patterns that reflect the lives of the storytellers and the hearers. The best of the modern voices, and indeed I would include Nolan here, tell stories that are able to open us up to the rich tapesty that is the human experience defined by life and death, order and chaos, suffering and salvation, despair and wonder. An expansive rendering of the world rather than a narrowing. The reason these are the enduring sotiries is because they reflect the enduring Story that connects us to history. We become players in the human story rather than the drivers of it.

Just because I continue to enjoy connecting my books, figured I would look at my June reads through the lens of specific pairings:

The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation (Michael DC Drout) and Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading (Lucy Mangan)

In The Tower and the Ruin, Drout spends a good deal of time, using the available tools of literary/textual criticism, tackling the subject of the genre of the Lord of the Rings (and the broader interests of Tolkien’s creations). Of interest for him is how the ways in which such a stark cross section of readers with different beliefs tend to claim LOTR as their own. Thus, setting Tolkien’s creations in context and looking at the world he created it within, with it’s own sets of questions and concerns and interests, becomes a way into a necessary conversation about what this work is and why it continues to have the power that it does even still today. Rather than assuming that this work is expressing our own wordview, Drout’s approach asks us as readers of his work to allow what we can know and what we can say about Tolkien’s own intersts to critique our assumptions.

Which of course brings to mind the thorniest part of that conversation, which is the simple question of whether LOTR is theological in nature or not. In this sense, tendencies to define LOTR according to genre become ways of categorizing it and boxing it in to the fantasy works that surrounded Tolkien. The issie is, as Drout argues, such categorizations don’t make sense of what the text actually is, nor does it have a particularly strong explanatory power when it comes to making sense of the unique power it seems to hold as a text. It might feel too risky to allow the text to actually be what it is, and yet that’s our best way into understanding what the text actually is.

What’s interesting to me is reading this alongside Mangan’s Bookworm, a memoir that can’t help but find itself tip toeing around the elephant in the room seemingly on every fifth page, attempting to justify the formative place Narnia has in her childhood as someone who also sees it’s percieved blatant christian allegories as a problem. She takes the complete opposite approach of Drout, embracing a rejection of any form of book banning, but finding the corrrective in recontextualizing the works (in this case of her childhood) through the lens of her adult assumptions (in this case a strident appeal to materialism). I found this to be a deeply frustrating process in the case of Bookworm, even as I very much appreciated the spirit of the book, choosing as it does to take our childhood seriously. Who she is is because she read, and I very much share this in common. Certainly, one of the great curiosities remains over why Tolkien escapes such criticism and Lewis does not.

The Affections of Christ jesus: Love at the Heart of Paul’s Theology (Nijay Gupta) and Perfect Love: Recovering Entire Sanctification: The Lost Power of the Methodist Movement (Kevin Watson)

Love at the heart of all things. For Gupta’s captivating work, exploring the intersection of Paul, for whom scholars have often puzzled over the absence of any mention of the ministry contained in the Gospels, and the Jesus of the Gospels. For Gupta, we have to look at the foundation of love in the Shema to understand the relationship between these two sources, a study that breaks out of the narrow confines of our modern definitions of love and into the world of a formative concept rooted in both the qualities of that which informs their worship, and their participation in it. For Watson, a book I picked up out of interest in my own family heritage and roots, and as well to accompany an upcoming trip to England, Love is at the center of the Methodist conviction and theology. Love in this sense is seen through the defining theological paradim of entire sanctification, a theology that has been lost in much of the church today. Here we find love not simply as a source, but as the transformed life (and creation) itself.  Watson does an excellent job of outlining what this theology is and why it matters to the Methodist Tradition, and even though it’s primary audience is Methodists, I found it to be a great source for those who aren’t as well (it’s my history, but I know very little about it). And more importantly a good window into my own family history.

The Gospel of Being Human: How Asking Better Questions of The Bible Reveals Who We Are (Marty Solomon) and Every Step is Home: A Spiritual Geography from Appalachia to Alaska (Lori Erickson)

I loved Solomon’s follow up to Asking Better Questions of the Bible, a book that essentially takes a deeper dive into one of the dominant reasons this matters (to asking better questions and a failure to do so). Which relates specifically to how we understand God, humanity and creation. What hangs in the balance is the very narrative through which we gain our beliefs about these three things. For Erickson, it could be said that her interest is in asking better questions of creation. Her particular journey is one of exploring the ways a world soaked in the presence of the Divine informs our understanding of the same three things. Hers is definitely a progressive spirituality, although I recognize that in itself is a somewhat ambigious label when not defined. I found it to be a bit too surface for my liking, but I did appreciate how she is reaching for a more expansive defintion of home here in this world, asnd how she sees the world as a stage upon which to find the Divine.

Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live (Michael Murphy) and Strange Buildings (Uketsu)

Murphy does an excellent job, as one intimately connected with the profession of architecture, of outlining our connection to buildings. I have long felt this, and been fascinated by it, understanding that archicture is an outflow of who we are. We can tell so much about a society, and indeed our humanity, by the buildings we construct and the cities we design. Murphy outlines his book according to types of buildings, and each type correlates with his own story. As we move through significant moments in his life, we begin to understand the role the buildings play in it. More than this, we understand why and how it inspired him to invest in this archicecture.

If you are unfamiliar with his name, his name is behind the inspired design and construction of the memorial and exhibit in Montgomery, which functions as a climatic point in his story. But each type of building sets the stage for this inspiraiton, and I genuinely loved coming along for the ride. He has a way of holding great uncertainty alongside a willingness to see the possiblity of deeply rooted transcendent truths, never allowing the utility of the archictectural discussion to erase an equal need for greater revelation to lie behind it.

In Uketsu’s work, my introduction to this series, the spirit is much the same (seeing the spaces and buildings we create as intimately connected to who we are and how we live). But his work is fleshing out a mystery. In some ways he works in the opposite direciton, beginning with the the mystery and gradually stripping away the layers in order to find the truth of what becomes these interconnected stories on a material and physical level. It is a bit hollow to that end, but it’s definitely a very unique structure. Hard to follow at times in translation, but always interesting in the effort to try and keep up with the puzzle pieces.

The Magic Faraway Tree (Enid Blyton) and The Enchanted Castle (E Nesbit)

Two books about learning to see the world beyond the veil. The Magic Faraway Tree is definitely heavier on the allegories and symbolism, making for a rich study of characters and themes and more centered around lessons. The Enchanted Castle is the richer story, being the more singular of the two books, but also the more formative read on a narrative level. I loved them both for what they were, owing themselves both to the grand tradition of English literature and children’s storytelling.

The Midnight Train (Matt Haig) and This Book Made Me Think of You (Libby Page)

One book about a life examined looking backwards through your own eyes, another about a life examined looking backwards through the eyes of another. Very different books, Haig reaching for an inspired spiritual journey filled with existential questions and cosmic interest, Page’s book a more grounded look at grief and transformation. Loss plays into both in their owns ways, and so does hope. Both, for me, proved to be memorable, although Haig’s was the more impactful.

Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children (Mac Barnett) and Unseen Existences: Of Heaven, Earth, and the Divine Mystery in All Things (Brian Zahnd)

Why this pairing? Because both are books about reclaiming a more robust undestanding of what this world is. Both books are looking at the shape of this world we occupy, Barnett navigating the chasm between the world of the chid and the world of the adult, lamenting and calling out the ways we modernists have come to see growing up as a rejection of childish things, Zahnd challenging the disconenect between an inadvertent sliding into forms of physicalism in a world that is defined by these unseen existences that modernists have rejected. Both books struck a chord for me in their own way, hitting at some important feelings and thoughts and convictions that have been following my life lately. If Barnett opened up a window in to my own journey of finding myself in my childhood (and those childhood stories), of learning how to allow my adult self to converse with my child self in ways that illuminate the truths of this world and this existence, then Zahnd is a reminder of why this kind of seeking matters: because there is actually Truth, or a true reality there to seek.

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth (Patrick Keefe) and The Discovery of Britian: An Accidental History (Graham Robb)

A kind of unlikely pairing, but for me these two books reflect this central truth: that however we normalize our day to day experiences in this world, the actual shape of the world is always this kind of crazy. Keefe’s tackling of this mystery is a peek behind the curtain off what’s actually going on in places we visit regularly regarding big money and organized interests. Robb’s book, which is uncovering it’s own mystery, in his case discovering the story of Britian from the ground level, is pulling the curtain off some commonly held narratives that simply do not reflect what the history actually is. On the largest level, this applies to the narrative of conquest and immigration. But it also plays out on other small levels. Keefe’s book is exciting, Robb’s book is unfortunately pretty dry, especially in the second half where some of his underlying (and in many ways anti-religious) motivations come to light. But both books are a good reminder that the world isn’t always as it seems.

The Man in the Stone Cottage (Stephanie Cowell)

This one pairs with books I am reading currently. It’s a complimentary fit with my upcoming literary tour of England, looking at the Bronte sisters and weaving (using the historical fiction genre as it’s tool) a speculative story rooted in certain truths about who these individuals were. I enjoyed it. I knew very little about the Bronte’s, but this filled in some gaps between some of my struggles with Wuthering Heights and Emily’s own worldview/life. Opened up the whole Yorkshire territory as well.

Exploring the meaning of Coleridge’s great poem, Malcolm Guite writes,

“He (Thomas Pfau, the cultural historian) goes so far as to say that The Ancient Mariner is a “parable about the philosophical predicament of modernity.”

The poetic imagination can hold open for us a shape or a space we have yet to grow into.

One aspect of the Enlightenment which had huge implications for modernism was the divorce between reason and imagination and the consequent reduction of knowledge itself to a so called “objective” realm of quantifiable fact from which all value or meaning had been drained, which in turn led to a reductive, mechanistic, and purely material account of the cosmos…. He saw from within, as it developed, the deadening effect… He wanted to challenge the philsophers on their own ground and show that the insights of imagination are insights into reality itself. In particular he wanted to deliver his age from what he called “the tyranny of the eye,” to alert us to the formative reality of invisbile qualities and values to counterbalance our obsession with “visible” facts, with the quantifiable, with dead things that can only be weighed and measured.

(As Coleridge wrote)

“… Always the human intellect circles the knowledge of these mysteries, never touching the centre.”

• The Mariner (Malcolm Guite)

Sometimes I spend time fleshing out thoughts in my head. Other times I just need to get them down on paper so they can perculate. This quote was one of them. But the more I think about it, the more restless it is making me, and the more i need to flesh it out. So here goes:

I’ve been delving into Guite’s book (The Mariner) in preperation for his newest (Galahad and the Grail), as well as for an upcoming literary tour of England that I have planned. Coleridge was the founder of the Romantic Movement in England, which of course had a direct impact on Lewis (see the book The Last Romantic: C.S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology by literary critic Jeffrey W. Barbeau). In both cases, Coleridge and Lewis (and the great English Romantics that span the time between) occupied this space within a world that was becoming increasingly subsumed by modernism (or the promises of the great modern experiment) and yet equally seemed to have left these thinkers disillusioned with the world modernism had failed to bring about. This is in fact what helped to define the Inklings, that now infamous group of debaters, was this unique moment in time where such a critique was able to break through and capture the imagination of it’s thinkers without behing held captive to a love of nationalism and identity that has come to mark the modern age. These were writers and thinkers and philosophers and artists whom understood what it was to distinguish between the two different narratives that make up this world, the narrative of Empire and the narrative of Truth.

What’s especially unique about this moment in time is that these were people whom held deep rooted differences and disagreements, unified as they were by a love of the debate and the need for cynicism and critique. The sort that could build deep bonds, where heated arguments met with the mutual companionship of their pipes and pubs. What bound them together was this intuitive awareness of the difference between the myth of modern progress and the notion of the greater (capitilized) Myth, or as they often put it, the True Myth of the imagination. One was a product and construction of developing society, the other a responsiveness to the shape of Reality itself.

Encountering Coleridge in the pages of Guite’s book, a writer and critic of the modern myth whom sees the enduring power of these Romantics as a witness to the power of this (lost) imagination, able to speak to the collective disillusionment that seems to cycle through every successive generation, had me thinking more about why it is that I have come to be drawn to these figures over the years. How it is that no matter how far I veered into the story of the modern myth, they consistently pull me back by critiquing my understanding of what it means to “grow up” into the pursuit of a greater (and different kind of) knowledge of this world that we occupy.

Ceratinly, a big part of it is the space these writers occupy in my childhood. If I didn’t know a whole lot about who they were when I was young, I knew their stories intimately. More than that, their stories helped me to make sense of things I felt but could not entirely explain. It helped give voice to my restlessness.

Equally so, it is striking to me, having recently finished the book Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Marc Barnett, a book about the ways in which the stories of our childhood and our adulthood are forever interconnected, that encountering this voice (Coleridge) afresh through the eyes of Guite, whom defined “the poet” (or the storyteller) as “a person who retained a child’s capacity for intense vision and wonder,” how this common theme seems to be found all the way through this colleciton of Romantics. Or, as he puts it, 

“In the Poet (Storyteller) was comprehended the man who carries the feelings of Childhood onto the powers of Manhood, who with a soul unsubdued, unshackled by custom, can contemplate all things with the frehsness, with the wonder of a child.”

Even more startling to walk through the literary voices that surround Coleridge in this appeal to a lost Romanticism. Virginia Woolf’s grand vision of the “realm of childhood” holding together innocence (or wonder) and the world’s injustices. Lewis, whom famously wrote, “Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for.” A citation that echoes with one of his favorite sentiments, that “When I became a man I put away childhish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” Tolkien’s fierce defence of the fairy tale as the bridge between worlds. Lewis Carroll’s lament, “I’d give all the wealth that years have piled, the slow result of life’s decay, to be once more a little child for one bright summer day,” a sentiment that rings out with his famed and imaginative proclamation that “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

I am also in the midst of reading the book by Gyles Brandreth, called Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear: A.A. Milne and the Creation of Winnie-the-Pooh, where he documents Milne’s own wrestling with this seeming chasm between his child and adult self. As Milne saw it, some people grow old and become fifty, other’s grow up to finally discover their childhood. For Milne, this is where he located a true knowledge of the world. Every single one of the characters in his book becomes, in their own way, a subtle critique of the modern myth, each character on their way to discovering that great Truth about this thing we call existence (borrowing as he does from the great philosophers).

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”

– Winnie-the-Pooh

Another thing that holds all of these writers and thinkers and artists together: their love of the philosophers. This was as true for Coleridge as it was for Milne, whom was as much at home with these existential works as he was with the fairy tales. Here, to be grown up meant understanding how the whole world is philosophy. Like Coleridge, he took great aim at the fallacy of “high culture” and its appeal to rationalism as the great purveyor of a “grown up” intellectualism, an intellectualism that craves the boundaries of reductionism even where the logic of the lived life refuses to cooperate. 

And, as it was with me, one of the strongest images for him to this end was the image of the river.

Coleridge agrees. As he writes,

“The iamge of the an inexhaustible river, a fountain of life and light, a force to be reckoned with, runs through all Coleridge’s writing and emerges afresh at key points in his life. He was fascinated by the river as something seen but whose source is unseeen.”

• Malcolm Guite (The Mariner)

Something Guite notes flows straight from his childhood, spending days  chasing after the source of the River Otter where he grew up.

In his book Ocean: A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus, scholar and historian John Haywood desribes the myth of this ocean in terms of it’s own holding together this chasm between this sense of a “childhood history” and the adult description of Western progress that it has come to symbolize in the wake of it’s crossing. Here, as these writers championing Enlglith Romanticism suggest, is once again the age old paradigm of two competing narratives, that of Empire and that of Truth. In crossing the ocean, as the story goes, humanity grew up. It became enlightened. It did away with the stuff of it’s childhood. And yet, as this narrative pushes forward, what we find is what these thinkers expressed: a great need for Milne’s notion of growing up to finally discover our childhood in the wake of this incessant push for a narrative of what came to be called the myth of progress.

I wonder. I am penning this three days after Canada’s birthday (July 1st) on July 4th (America’s birthday). As I was perusing my social media feeds, I came across a post that offered this sentiment about the present state of the American ethos: “I have no time for the modern virtue of western self flagellation.”

I wonder about this sentiment. I wonder whether it misses something crucial that these writers and thinkers I’ve been discussing above strived so hard to make known. First, that Canada, America, nor any nation, is not synonomous with “the West.” To speak of “the West” is to speak of a reigning narrative. Second, there is a massive difference between loving the spaces we are invested in and which we call home, and, as this post would go on to state, the “love of nation.” When we fail to distinguish between these things we are in fact binding ourselves to a particular narrative of Empire, whether we reognize it or not. As this post qualified at the front of it’s statement, it speaks to the need to not be complacent, to always be self reflective, and to be self critical. What gets missed here though is the question, to what is our allegiance and to what end. It’s a far different thing to critique a western myth than it is to critique a nation, and yet the language of nationhood hinges on the former.

When I think back on my childhood, I don’t find a modern virtue of western self flagellation, what I find, with these formative voices, is a restlessness born from the modernist narrative. The modern virtue in this sense is in fact, as Milne puts it, the valorization of turning 50, both figuratively and literally in my sense, as my birthday is quickly approaching. This is the narrative of Empire. It hinges on a rejection of the past as being that which we grow out of for the sake a grown up world (or in the sense of aging, our childhoods). And if we are to take the impassioned voices of these thinkers seriously, which ironically many whom extol the language of Empire also tend to love (see the ways Tolkien occupies a space, albiet a misappropriated one, in this grown up world), The way into a better story is in fact the Truth that we find in discovering our childhood. Another way to put this: to find the better story, the true Myth running underneath the language of Empire.

In one of the most formative moments of my life, I had what I call a spiritual experience, a demonstrable encounter with God that called me to remember my childhood in the midst of my own occupation with growing up into the myth of this adult world. I am still discovering what this means all these years later. But like these thinkers that formed my childhood, this East-West divide that I inherited at the hands of Empire (which, Ian Morris describes as the destiny of geogrpahy in his massive tome, Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History, a biting follow up to his even more biting work, Why The West Rules- For Now) only awakened me to a need for that better story all those years ago. Something I found in the page of their books. That is what I was being called to remember.

There’s something important to recognize about the river as a standing symbol. It’s source is hidden, but despite the great emptying that these rivers inevitably experience, it never gets subsumed. The invitation of any river is to be awakened to it’s presence. That’s the only way to truly discover the Truth. That’s the only way to discover the better story that it holds in it’s currents. For Coleridge, the other reigning symbol was the great image of the Lighthouse, it’s lights standing on the great shores of this eventual emptying, illuminating the mystery of it’s expanse, not as something to conquer, but as something to embrace. To find the True awkening of our childhood imagination at long last.

In the words of Winnie-the-Pooh,

“Sometimes if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping flowing away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”

In his book The Affections of Christ Jesus: Love at the Heart of Paul’s Theology, scholar Nijay Gupta weighs in on the significance of a Pauline corpus which, giving little to no mention of the ministry of Jesus that is the central focus of the Gospels, defines itself according to its awareness of and concern for specific, prevailing, pre-existing and predominant credal expressions of these early church communities. Of which, the Jewish conception of Love is the central driving force.

And just to underscore this crucial part of Gupta’s thesis. If we have become prone to seeing love as a “third order” idea within the Christian story, coming to recover a more robust understanding of the love that shaped the ancient readers and authors of the Judeo-Christian world means not just recovering love as central to Paul’s theological understanding, but of that love emerging from Paul’s own Judean context. And the way to do that is understanding the many different overlapping terms that work it’s way into a centralized concept, running through both feeling (emotion) and mind (rationality). This heart/head relationship in the ancient world the Judeans occupied was not importing a modern dichotomy but rather understanding the ways in which the very nature of a transcendent God is made known through the embodiment of a lived life. To love is as much attached to knowledge of God as it is an action.

Some of Gupta’s most interesting work here, which might prove to be too much for those only interested in the ideological conclusions, is the ways in which he meticulously unpacks Paul’s specific choices of words in contrast over others. This shows the complexity of the discussion, and even more so helps bring the larger converstaion Paul is having with his Greco-Roman context to light. And much of his interest is in forging a ground by which to say something about how Paul’s own interests and outlook is developing within that world in which Jesus’ ministry is also shaping this notion of love. If there is so much we simplly cannot know regarding why the ministry of Jesus in the Gospels reamains so absent in Paul’s writings, there is much we can say beyond mere speculation regarding what is present across these boundaries. And Gupta does a nice job of arguing his basic case that what informs Paul’s convictions is the same Shema we find Jesus unearthing in His own teachings. “Love… is at the core of Paul’s understanding of the experience of individuals and communities in Christ.” And as Gupta states, “What’s often missing in this debate (about Paul and Jesus) is the personal aspect of why God saves in the first place.” The credal language of the death, resurrection and ascencion of Christ looms large for Paul, and in fact is everything when it comes to his central conceipt:  that “Paul’s Gospel is first and foremost about God’s love for the world.” For Gupta, he states that one of the most transformational insights he gleaned through the process of writing this book, and perhaps what might be the most difficult for people to grapple with and accept, is that “Paul believed that God has a heart, and that the gospel comes out of compassion of God that lives within that heart.” To this end, “The good news of God’s love is not new with the New Testament: Jewish scripture and tradition place love from and for God, at the heart of covenental life.” It is, in other words, about the covenental story.

He ends his book with a walk through the letter to the Ephesians. Debates on whether this belongs to the collection of accepted Pauline letters aside (either way it still reflects the singular tradition and voice), Gupta describes Ephesians as “a kind of greatest hits of (Paul’s) apostolic proclamation,” reflecting back on the entire lifespan of Paul’s ministry and asking the question, does our collective memory of this journey of trusting in the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus give us hope in something true, or does it reveal that Gospel to be less than trustworthy when set in the scope of this history

N.T Wright in his book The Vision of Ephesians describes the letter in terms of a working household analogy.

Thessalonians is like uncovering a long lost blueprint or early draft for the house, imagining the life of the community, centred around the meal, unfolding from the kitchen to all the rooms in the house.

Galatians is like the kitchen, where all the ingredients are sitting around on the table inspiring debate and discussion and yes, division.

Romans is the dining room, where the cooked meal is layed out with formal precision

He doesn’t go so far as this, but in this analogy I imagine my own personal favorite letter, Philippians, being the neighborhood coffee shop, or perhaps the front porch.

Wright echoes something similar as Gupta when he describes Ephesians as that quiet, secluded sitting room in the back with a view from the window looking out over the ocean. Reflecting on the lived life and all of the grander questions about God and the world that come along with it.

A letter that both Wright and Gupta describe as being absent of the particular concerns for a particular context in a particular community in the way all the other letters are, and instead exhibiting the signs of a circulating letter which is finding it’s life in the midst of the whole of these communities, the very thing his letter in Thessalonians first brings to our imagination and which is now a fully functional reality.

Gupta adds the observation that this letter, being defined by this circulation, is refreshingly absent of conflict. The sort of thing we step back from the chaos of the household and sit with when the world seems to be incoherent and pressing in, the sort of thing that brings us back to what the story is all about and allows us to wonder about that central and important facet of the Gospel: hope.

And if Gupta is correct, this hope centers us on one thing: love. As Gupta spends his book doing, this is an aspect of the Pauline corpus that both surprises and doesn’t at the same time, something I think he makes a strong case and argument for: it’s unusual presence when played against his theoretical relationship to the formation of the Gospels going on around him at the time, and indeed as a presence that sits in conversation with the wider world that surrounds it.

The task then for those sitting with this particular letter, gazing out at that vast and endless ocean that is the weight of this world and its many questions and struggles, becomes one of ruminating on a word that is far more expansive and nuanced than modern definitions and expressions tend to allow. To make sense of love in Paul’s letters, especially when weighing it against a historical witness and a life lived, is to dig into and confront those parallel aspects that is making a home in this world and our imagination for another. Attending to this present reality while growing our imagination for the truth of the transformed creation. Of wrestling with the complicated nature of a singular legacy, while seeing past the restraints of a singular life. Love, Gupta says, in all of its dynamic, Is the thing that moves through all of these things at once for Paul.

That was hitting me this morning. Probably because 50 is around the corner. Likely because this world feels just a little chaotic at the moment. Likely because that sitting room, that ocean view, feels wanted and needed at the best of times.

Capturing this milestone in my book logging by marking the book:

The Gospel of Being Human: How Asking Better Questions of the Bible Reveals Who We Are by Marty Solomon and Reed Dent

If Marty Solomon’s Asking Better Questions of the Bible: A Guide for the Wounded, Wary, and Longing for More navigated the precarious terrain of how we view the scriptures (what they are, how it should be approached, read and studied, and why they matter to the Christian life), his newest, a collaboration with his podcast and organization partner Reed Dent, probes one of the primary issues that emerges from a failure to ask better questions about the Bible: harmful understandings of who we are in in relationship to who we believe God to be. And what binds these two things together is the question of what we believe this world (or creation) to be.

This is a book also for the wounded, wary, and longing for more, but one that begins to narrow in on the root of what either allows the Christian story to make space for this or not. Indeed, often it can be the source of these things, and that root reaches into these fundamental qeustions of identity.

It’s no suprise that there would be lot of Genesis talk at play here, the necessary soil that needs to be overturned in order to plant the seeds of a better conversation. The common refrain that pushes through the whole however is simply this: the invitation to be curious. Apart from that we do not leave the space for God to speak (or to hear God speaking). And lest we think this feels overly obvious, the challenge of curiousity, for all of us, is that we have a tendency to be curious only where it reinforces our own tightly guarded appeal to our grasp on truth. It doesn’t matter which side of the common divide we are on, the tendency is the same. And here’s the thing with that tendency: if we appeal to curiousity to legitimize our rejection of one side of the equation, we are failing to be curious about the other. Curiousity is not, then, about what we believe on one side or another of our common divides, it is rather about how we posture ourselves amidst the journey that belief represents. Curiousity is not a lifelong commitment to agnosticism, nor is it a directionless appeal, rather it is simply this: if God is true, what shapes our seeking of something we can only ever know in part on our way to the hope of the transformed life and world. In this kind of posturing, we are then free to learn how to ask better questions, ones that seek holistic understandings of this relationship between God, humanity, and creation, always allowing those unsettled parts of our senses to speak into a conversation that has the power to pull us sharply to modes of certainty we then need to protect at all costs, precisely because what hangs in the balance, we perceive, is the very idea of God itself.

Solomon (and Dent) are those rare voices that speak with a weathered and tested conviction, while also demonstating what it is to be curious by nature. They have a wealth of studied and experiential justification for trusting in the Christian story, a reasoned faith if you will, and yet they model what it looks like not to be settled. This matters to them, and they see it mattering to their primary audience (the wounded, wary, and longing for more), precisely because they know the damage that can be caused by certain theological positions birthed by a failure to ask better questions. They know how difficult it is to have that stuff scrutinized and layed bare, to feel like everything that matters most hangs in the balance. And yet that’s precisely where the wounded, wary and longing for more are. Everything does hang in the balance, because those once certainties do not and cannot make sense of the lived life, the world that confronts us each and every day. Solomon and Dent are convinced there is a way forward: asking better questions. And that way forward will bring us straight to the heart of the matter: who we believe God is matters to who we believe we are, and those things matter to what we see creation to be. That’s where the real wrestling happens. If we cannot trust that we cannot be curious about it, instead opting to build our theological fortresses on either side of that vast ocean that lies inbetween or rejecting the whole thing altogether.

There’s so much great stuff here to that end, much of it facing common translations and interpretations of paradigm shaping passages head on. One of my favorites was their observations about passages that seem to suggest God repaying generations for the sins of the fathers. It’s a small but massive example of how so much can hinge on an interpretation, and the authors show what happens when we ask better questions of that passage. Suddenly, what gets unearthed is something long buried by a lengthy history of Protestant interpretations building their own questions on a certain theological foundation. Seeing those passages through the light of God’s responsisiveness, where the phrasing is an intended contrast meant to say something about God’s love, about God’s intention to continue attending to generations caught in these particular cycles. This is not a passage about God’s essential punishment in this present moment, nor about some eternal lobbying of this punishment on to subsequent generations, it is a literary design built on an equation that ancient audience would have understood, meant to communicate one thing: God will not cease or stop attending to His beloved creation. The equation rendered in the literary design is meant to befuddle any conceptions that God would or could.

it’s worth stating here too, where Solomon and Dent locate their foundation, beyond a simple conviction that God is that which they seek, in the Jewish and Rabbinic Traditions driving and underlying Christian interpretation. This is what leads them to give the scriptures an authoratative voice and what allows them the freedom to hold something like the Protestant Tradition and its specific interpretations to the fire. it’s not aimless, rather, it is taking our assumptions and consistently holding it to the fires of the world in which these texts were birthed. We are free, and indeed invited into the process of continued midrash, meaning this foundation doesn’t hand us certain theologies, but it does anchor us in something tangible: always holding our world accountable to the world of revelation that went before us. It frees us to seek precisely by giving us a means of critiquing where we are deviating from the spirit that set that movement in play. Meaning, every Tradition needs this same internal critique, and likewise this internal critique doesn’t mean that everything within a given Tradition is wrong. in fact, every “Christian” Tradition exists, if we dig deep enough, precisely because at one point in time something left the people of that time wounded, wary and longing for more, getting curious about what was unsettling them. That’s the wonder and beauty of the journey. Every Tradition, in it’s own way, needs to grapple with where we went from curious to certain as time went on. That we in the West need to hold Protestantism, or the endless varied Traditions that fall under that umbrella, to the fires is not a bad thing or something to be feared, but rather is a necessary part of the Christian journey.

“This is a book for adults.
More specifically, this is a book for adults about books for children.”

In the opening pages of his new book on the nature of children’s literature and why it matters to both children and adults, Barnett establishes the neccessary rule for the ensuing discussion: “When it comes to children’s books, kids and adults are forever intertwined.”

Barnett goes on to underscore a simple fact that makes this true, which is that by and large, the ones writing children’s literature are adults. Which of course begs the question of this existing power dynamic. The culture of a child, meaning the world it is being shaped by, is simitaneously the culture adults are shaping for that child. The stories a child encounters are the stories we (grown ups) are telling.

And yet. And it’s an important “and yet.” And yet, oe of the most important dynamics of children’s literature is the very thing justifying Bartlett’s desire and need to pen this book about it, which is the role of the child not just in hearing these stories, but in engaging them. Which is why, at it’s most fundamental level, good children’s literature doesn’t instruct or explain, but works to invite that skill that children intuitively hold: to make believe. To engage the imagination. To encounter a story and allow it to open up a yet unseen and unencountered world of newness.

Make believe. A word that evokes notions of that which is not true, a definition that has more in common with the didacticism of the adult sense than the ways children engage truth. Barnett evokes the image of liminal space, of straddling a threshhold, of loosening our grasp on reality that adults so desperately cling to in our efforts to conform the world into something we can control. In this sense, having one foot in both worlds, that of the story and that of our flesh and blood lives, is to open ourselves up to a conversation with a world we cannot control. To bring our fears and questions and uncertainties to the table and ask, what do these tensions reveal about the world. Here we learn to “marvel,” to “blur the boundaries,” and ultimately come to know both how and what it means to be changed by a story.

I kept thinking about who the target audience for this book actually was. Is it written to encourage adults to encounter the beauty of children’s literature anew? It is written to encourage adults to understand how to populate our children’s world with better stories? Is it written to adults to help them to understand the child’s mind and world?

Likely all of the above. I took a very particular road into this book for myself however. I imagined the book speaking to my adult self in an attempt to reengage my inner child. I imagined it helping me to understand these two intertwined elements of who I am. It invited me to consider my own formative grounds, the stories that linger in my memory, books that tell the story of my own growth as a person. Of coming to grips with the questions I was asking as a young 5 year old kid, and seeing which stories met me in that liminal space between those questions and the newness. At least part of why I took this approach is because I am in the midst of planning a boots on the ground pilrgimage through the stories of my childhood and beyond. Thus, this book couldn’t be more timely.

To this end, there is something Barnett absolutely gets, or at least I feel he understands a particular point of crisis that exist for my relationship between my adult and child self. He gives it different terms. He cites the trap of utilitarianism. Here he is speaking to how such an adult and particularly western worldview filters down into the way those adults write children’s literature, but for me it’s that child self noting the disillusionment my adult self feels, when he is able to be honest, with the world I find myself stuck within. A world in which my questions, those tensions, render me to positions of being isolated and misunderstood, precisely because, as Bartlett devotes time to later on in the book, this adult worldview, the dominant worldview it would seem in spaces where western art is being produced, consistently closes me off to the realities my child self once knew to be true. Even where storytelling is championing, the sad reality is, the sort of didactive approaches that utilitarianism requires runs rampant through the whole.

And this doesn’t happen in a bubble either. At it’s core is a worldview that has long since normalized this pattern of thinking that assumes the past is lesser than the present. This is the myth of progress. Here Barnett helps unpack how this makes itself known through particular prejudices, however hidden and often made willfully ignorant they are, which accord with how this myth works in a utilitarian world. We are born, we are formed against our lesser view of reality, we grow up into people with a greater view of reality. And what drives this lesser-greater dichotomy is our allegiance to a kind of truth reduced to facts. Children make-believe. Adults embrace reality. Growing up is, in this way, predicated on the necessary rejecting of the things our childhood once knew to be true. On a grander scale, this applies to our view of western history as well. i just finished Mary Beard’s newest book, “Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old,” which proved to be a fascinating and unexpected compliment to Make Believe given how she draws out the ways we (read: westerners) are talught to approach antiquity. Regardless of the degree of nuance we are willing to entertain in our examination of this cross-cultural movement from our present space and time into the world of antiquity, the narrative is so embedded that it inevitably guides and shapes the process. Here the past must be lesser in order to justity where we find ourselves today. This is how the modern historical imagination functions. Why? Because if we lose this narrative movement, we lose our sense of control over the world. This is why, as I heard it put, this worldview invented the concept of prehistory to begin with. Prehistory becomes to modernity what the child’s world becomes to our adult selves.

And what gets buried and lost and demeaned in the process? The ancient world in Beard’s case. The child’s world 

This is why Barnett can be so bold as to say at one point that “most books published in this country are propaganda.” Propaganda for what? Ironically in a world that has become so adept at singling out and demonizing that old world religiousity as “indoctrination,” the truth is that in a reality where the ones writing children’s stories are almost always adults, propaganda is a natural part of how this works. The issue comes from ignoring what it is that is being propagandized, which is more to Barnett’s point I think. Meaning, a failure to ask and to recognize the simple truth of adults forcing a utilitarian worldview into the stories of children by way of a heavy tendency towards didaction. This completely ignores that “There’s a gaping chasm between childhood and adulthood” that author and story must find a way to cross. More so, it ignores that crossing that chasm cannot be a matter of assuming that we, as adults, have the correct view of reality and must then communicate our truths to the child.

Good children’s literature leaves space to talk back.
Good children’s literature allows our adult and child selves (or adult and child) to meet in equal space.
Good children’s literature doesn’t talk down
Good children’s literature ask big questions that are hard to answer,

And recognizing that children and adult are engaging the same questions is part of the necessary conversation.

And most important is coming to understand the power of story. Returning to Beard, there is this weird relationship in the West to it’s assume Greco-Roman roots and allegiances, and this plays out in the constant out of fashion and back in fashion nature with the Greek myths. A lesser reocognized factor in our continued reclaiming of these myths as our own is the way the myth of progress tends to assume our didactism can be transplanted onto the mythic imagination. The figuratifve “childhood” stories of our western society, now grown up, at once convinces ourselves that these stories tell the story of our adult utilitarianism while simitaneously operating on the assumption that we have progressed beyond the old world storytelling. This leads not just to incoherency, but a complete disconnect from the conversation. This is a complete aside, but it’s one of the real concerning factors of, for example, modern Western assumptions retelling the Narnia stories. Or a modern retelling of the Odyessy bringing Greek mythology back into fashion. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s that it’s done without an awarness of the chasm.

This is what my child self knows, and it is what my adult self, with it’s lifetime of wrestling with the same questions, consantly needs to hear. Not that one or the other has a greater inroad to truth, but that we need one another. One of the biggest things my child self needs, something Bartlett helps give words to as well, is not just the freedom to confront and engage what he calls the abyss of our questions and the world’s tensions, but to know it’s okay to exist there. Not with answers but with doorways to walk through which can help illuminate it. Teaching me that growing up does bring with it the potential for revelation to break into the midst. One of the biggest things my adult self needs is the freedom to engage my child self’s ability to be in this liminal space. To know that growing up is not about control, but about a continued appeal to that revelation my child’s self had the ability to access. while standing in the abyss.

One last aside here. If Barnetts own sentiments decry the systemtized utilitarian tendencies of children’s literature in America, it also opens up a particular awareness of those older authors, many of them occupying space in Medieval England where children’s literature was first emerging and developing, having a unique ability to understand the simple power of the story. They were not yet soaked in a culture that continues to sharply dichotomize myth and reality. They also wrote stories that did not discriminate when it came to age. They functioned as much as myths for England as they did imaginitive invitations for children. They did not restrict, they opened up the world. Which is why they retain so much of that romanticism. Not inconsequentionally, much of that was my own formative grounds as a child.