Pints With Aquinas - Enchantment in a Disenchanted Age (Dr. Martin Shaw) | Ep. 570

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Martin Shaw is a mythologist, storyteller, and New York Times bestselling author of Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us. Together, Matt and Martin discuss the power of fairy tales, the need for a quest, and a profound 101 night vigil in the woods that lead Shaw to Christianity. Whisky and cigars included. Ep. 570 - - - 📚 More About Dr. Martin Shaw:  Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us: https://a.co/d/03ZWk5Qg Learn More: https://drmartinshaw.com Dr. Martin Shaw is a writer, mythographer, and Christian thinker who has authored seventeen books. He holds a visiting position at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University and is a fellow of the Temenos Academy. He founded the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University and is director of the Westcountry School of Myth in the UK. For thirty years Shaw has been a wilderness rites-of-passage guide, working with men and women seeking a deeper life. - - - Today's Sponsors: Seven Weeks Coffee - Save up to 25% with promo code 'PINTS' at https://sevenweekscoffee.com/PINTS Good Ranchers - Get $25 off your first order and FREE meat for life when you use code PINTS at https://GoodRanchers.com   Catholic Match - Download the app or head to https://CatholicMatch.com and find your forever. St. Paul Center - Share your faith with others this Easter Season by joining the Easter Accompaniment Challenge. Sign up and become a member today at https://stpaulcenter.com/pints  Charity Mobile - Visit https://charitymobile.com/MATTFRADD to get started. - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You'll find the same regular prices online as in-store. Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. What do you think the story is we're telling ourselves in modernity? For the first time in my life, I wonder if we're being exposed to too many stories. I never thought that before. If you're not careful, your phone is issuing forth trans dates from the moment you wake up in the morning. And usually those stories, those narratives are trying to tell you that you're not quite enough. I meet a lot of people that don't seem to be on any kind of quest anymore.

There seems to be no quest. We've always had rites of passage. There is a point where it is a very oddly normative thing to do to go out and wrestle death as a teenager. But that would be four days and nights on a mountaintop. That would be stalking a leopard and stealing one of its whiskers. Now the problem is that primordial ambition still lives in kids and it's meant to. It seems that God is a phenomenal storyteller. Everywhere we have evidence that beauty matters.

And I think that that is part of why in such disassociative times, we've got young people turning up at Catholic churches and Orthodox churches. I was 17 when I came to, or Christ came to me. I just encountered someone I didn't think existed, and my life became more beautiful. Everything became more colourful. Christ becomes the myth made fact. Somehow it's as if all the myths and the stories knew this amazing thing was coming.

And then 2,000 years ago, I'm getting a bit of the old goosebumps now. falling out of the sky, you know, falling out like a beautiful painted arrow is Christ. Do you know this stuff of old, I presume? Do I know this stuff of old? Yeah, I mean, is this a regular drink of yours? It's my favourite, you know. Yeah, yeah, it's outrageous.

It feels a bit cliché to like, like a ball. No, no, no, no. Well, it's become more popular, but I mean, there's a reason. Yeah. You know what I mean? There's a reason for the cliche. It's delicious. It is.

The king drinks Lafrovaluer. which is an entirely different proposition. Have you had Lefroig? Yeah, I had Lefroig. That's a real cough medicine. But I can't tell, is that PD artificial? Is that Pete artificial that flavor? I wouldn't know.

My goodness, he's a very healthy measure. Well, we're going to be here for a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, we have started in case... Oh, right, okay. Sluncher. Sluncher. It's really lovely to have you on the show.

I'm delighted. Thank you. Now, you've just had a massive tour of the United States. You've written a brand new book, which I just completed. Is that the way to first? phrase it? Probably not. I just finished it yesterday and it was really lovely. It was written very well. I sort of think it's the sort of book that if someone had have handed to me when I was a 17 year old prior to

coming to Christ, dabbling in the new age because I wanted the world to be mysterious, but I still wanted to masturbate and look at pornography and all those things. Yeah, yeah. And if you had have given me that book, I think I would have been open to Christ. So thank you. Yeah, I think it's going to help a lot of souls. I'm glad to hear that. I wanted a book to be an invitation, not an imposition. It's funny, every book you write has a secret in it that the author does not know. And I don't know. There's something in that book yet that I will find in a year or two, some deeper meaning to it that I haven't located yet. But it's a gorgeous thing. I mean, I barely had the book in my hands. I've been, you know, in this entire book tour,

I have not cracked the book open and read from it. There's so, much interest in myth and story and there's so many questions. I haven't actually got to the book yet, believe it or not, although we have, I feel like I've signed thousands of them. I think I probably have. But yeah, I'm glad you liked it. And so we'll link to it below, but it's called liturgies of the wild myths that make us. And it took about three years to write. It wasn't so much, I had a dream. I had a dream. And in the dream, there was some, presence of some kind and it said to me don't worry too much about the words but the template of the book is important now template is a word I don't use it's very

odd so that that was used so myself and my brilliant editor spent a lot of time really looking at the choreography of the book and just I'm not known anywhere for getting to the point particularly quickly storytellers are not you know we'd be out of a job if we did but this time I I wanted to make sure that each chapter, as you know, there'll be a chapter on death or evil or passion. And I wanted to create a few handrails that I hadn't put in before exactly for those 17-year-old kids who were looking for adventure but probably in the wrong places. Beautiful. Yeah, well, congrats.

I have to point this out, it became New York Times bestseller. Did you ever think that would happen? No, I did not. What does that say about you? Go on. Well, it says God is good. It says God is good. That's what it says to me.

But I mean, there was no, there was no, I didn't allow a place in myself to fetishize that as a possibility. I had no idea that was going to happen when this tour began. I had a feeling that it was good. I had a feeling that people were responding warmly to it. But I was in a taxi when it happened. and I was being driven around by this wonderful African-American lad called Jamal and Jamal was saying to me, he was giving me a kind of history of the Celtic race, it was phenomenal and he was saying to me, he said,

I just don't have the courage to be a writer, I'd love to be one, but there's never any success with writing. And as he's saying it, my phone is buzzing in my pocket. And there's, you know, five missed calls from Manhattan Penguin Office. And I said, just a second, Jamal. And they say, you have just crissed. crashed into the New York Times bestseller list. And I said, brough, brov, this has just happened.

And we pulled over and I hugged Jamal on the side of the road. And I said, you know, you know this is as strong a meaning for you as it is for me. I mean, you're a born teacher. I've just experienced this in the cab. Take courage and write. So actually, if it's a win for me, it's a win for all of us. That's how I feel. I want to thank you because I listened to your interview

on Socrates in the city recently. And you were talking about this Greek fella who was your cab driver and the discussion you got in. It's another one. Well, the reason I want to thank you is it is so easy to start treating people like things in a transactional way. Yeah. And hearing that, I rebuked myself because I fall into that too. You jump into the Uber and you're like, can I just, can we not talk, please? Now, maybe you don't feel that way, but I do.

And I rebut myself for it. And I got into a few lovely conversations yesterday, especially with a beautiful woman named Solonelon. And we got to a lovely discussion and I think it was a real blessing for both of us. And that was because of you. So thank you for treating people like humans. I do my best. I'm looking for moments that are not transactional but transformative. And they can happen.

They can happen. There's almost too much grace to handle once we start paying attention to it. We live in this culture with an illusion of scarcity. We don't have enough. What if we have enough? What if we actually do have enough? What if there are pinpricks of the eternal from the moment we get up to the moment we go to sleep

but do we lean to the grace or not? That's what I'm interested in. And that in a way is what the book is about. It's saying, look, you are, you're surrounded by opportunity. You're surrounded. Even the times we're living in, which for most people are a little frightening and stressful. on the other hand, no great myth worth its salt begins on the day that was just like the day before.

It begins, and I said this a lot in the last few weeks, no pressure, no diamond. There's a certain kind of acuity of pressure that comes in with the myths and the stories. You know, you leave the shire. You leave what is familiar. You take on something that makes your knees quake. But in the business of that, you start to grow yourself back. up, you've become a real human being. And the thing I've noticed recently is, I'm lucky I meet people from all walks of life

and I meet very successful people, but I can often tell they have no quest. They have no quest. And you can see it somewhere around the eyes. There could be an enormous amount of money in the bank, but they have lost some essential questing, dare I say, chivalric spirit, no bless oblige, you know. brought from the dung heap to dine with princes, and we have to earn our name. Isn't that a gorgeous idea, earning your name? And so even when I was on long walkabout from Christianity, I think the fundamental truths of that strange Middle Eastern mystery cult just have kept moving through me

all these years. I had this thought today. I don't know if it's profound or not. I think it is, and you can help me shape it. It was something like attend to what is small, and your world will become larger. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's terrific. William Blake always says, you can't be a Christian if you're not an artist. And I keep saying this.

It doesn't mean you and I have to get the watercolors out necessarily. It could be a good idea. Who knows what talent lies within you. But it's a way of beholding the world, which is exactly what you've said. So Blake, you and I, we're walking along. We see a thistle on the ground. But Blake looks down and he sees a small little gray hair.

ecstatic man waving at him. And in a moment, you've entered myth time. You've entered presence. You've entered what they used to call psychic weight. You've entered a world, even now, even now is good, is very good. Even in the fallenness of things, there are these little pinpricks. But you can't be sizest. That's the thing I noticed.

If you're living in a city and you go, well, I can't have a wilderness experience unless I'm in Vermont or Alaska, you can, but you need to bring exactly what you said. You just need to bring your attention to very small things. And a practice I have with my students, I say, go out and find something you admire and give it 12 secret names. 12 secret names. Sometimes it's a good idea to do that for your wife, you know. But sometimes you can make a row and tree blush.

it's a universe that seems to want contact with us in some way. It seems to be the way that God's created it. But if we are just numbed out and just shooting in and out of church all day long or business after business after business meeting, there's a poet called Gary Snyder who has a wonderful line. He says, don't be a slave to your lesser talents. Don't be a slave to your lesser talents. So keep the awe alive in you.

You know, people... I don't understand what that means. What he means is don't be a slave to your lesser talents. He means if people figure out you're good at administration, you'll be good administration for the next 60 years. So just keep an eye that you're still pushing your edges. Yeah. Keep an eye that you're still on occasion going out where the buses don't park,

just to feel, you know, alive again. Well, it was your book and Elder Thedder. Yes, has written this. Oh, amazing. You read the little, it's thoughts to termin our lives. Yeah, fantastic. It was the two of you that helped me with this. I was coming back from getting my cappuccino this morning. I looked at a tree on the other side of the freeway and I gave it a couple of names because of your book. Oh, yeah. And then I went over and I stroked it and thanked it for existing. Wow, that. Yeah, it was really beautiful. Yeah. I meant it. I was really glad it existed. But this is my point, right? I mean, how often do I just bustle about and I don't see a thing? And I'm

wondering why I'm not even happy. It's like my head. It's like my head. I'm, head is filled with abstract ideas that, but I'm not attentive to the very little things. That if I were just attentive to them, then I wouldn't need the big spectacle. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny. Totally different subject. My, uh, when I, when I'm around my dad, he came in to visit, my accent becomes immediately thicker.

Oh, yeah. Within seconds. Yeah, yeah. And I've just noticed I'm picking up your accent because it's too similar to mine. Yes, you'll forgive me if I start sounding British. Anyway, but there you are. Chris Christ's christened chrystim in his commentary on Ephesians 5 says something like that he says never call your wife by her name alone but by other names like my beloved my lovely my sweet one that's sort of to the point yeah yeah it's there's a there is oh gosh forgive me for a minute you'll have to cut this bit out no there's an old idea that the world seeks to be admired by you the world seeks to be admired by you. And actually, if you don't have the capacity to praise,

in some way you're hurting it. If you have young people around you who admire what you do, it's important to make sure that you observe things that they do and when very occasionally they do something wonderful, tell them. For goodness sake, tell them. Now, that is not the same as blanket affirmation, which we get too much of these days. And it's, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, It makes kids have contempt for us, actually, because it's bland. But a real blessing is when somebody sees acutely something you did, and they say, I saw that thing you did. I saw that thing you did.

And it was magnificent. And you will know when you've been blessed because you feel full. You suddenly feel full. And we're back again to that notion of what is enough. What is enough? You and I, I'm sure we're both fans of C.S. Lewis. Well, Lewis writes beautifully about longing, you know, as a doorway into Christian experience. And my thought would be in modernity, in modern time, since Lewis's death especially,

we are frantically trying to replace longing with satisfied desire. Yeah. Because secular culture can do something with your desire. It can manipulate you that way. But if heaven forbid you start to long for the things that are not of this world, then you become dangerous. Yeah. And you make radical, unusual decisions from your heart, you know. Yes, Lewis, when we consider the unblushing promises of reward from Christ in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak, he says.

Oh, yeah. Where half-hearted creatures falling about with drinks, sex and ambition while infinite joy is being offered to us. And then he says, we're like ignorant peasants playing in a slum who don't know what is meant by the offer to holiday at sea. Yeah. Very good. Come on. Very good. Very good.

And Lewis, as we both know, enjoyed day drinking. He loved, yes. Louis's good health. Just luncher. Cheers. I used to. Isn't that outrageous? Yeah, I'm going to just try to.

When I talk to people who've never had this before, I say it tastes like a campfire and seawater. What do you think? Yeah. And I think there's a, there's a wee bit of Christmas cake in there as well somehow. Or it's, it makes me feel festive. Let's put it that way. Let me ask you, your book is doing so well because I think it's like water poured on dry ground. So what do you think the story is we're telling ourselves in modernity?

What is the, maybe the collective story that you see that we're telling ourselves? And maybe the story of just the everyday soul who's trying to make it through. life. Okay, I will approach that question and I'll do it in a rather circuitous manner, but I'm not disrespecting the question. I will get there. So one of the thoughts I've had on this tour has been, for the first time in my life, I wonder if we're being exposed to too many stories. I never thought that before. But we live in this kind of al-a-cart culture spiritually, you know, you know better than anything else, you know, there is no divine ground. So just pick the things that make you feel rather like a magpie.

And what I notice about modern stories, such as they are, is they often seem to be trying to seduce me rather than court me. So there's a difference in the ambition of the story. Now, to be courted, you would hope, is to bring up the best in someone, to bring out the best in someone. We're back to this chivalric notion of nebless oblige. But to seduce. seduce is different because seduction is something that is trying to get something from you.

It is trying to sell you something. You know, from the moment, if you're not careful, your phone is issuing forth trans states from the moment you wake up in the morning. And usually those stories, those narratives are trying to tell you that you're not quite enough. You're not quite enough. Or your life isn't quite enough. And if you just had this, things would be okay. Okay. So what I feel as a storyteller and a mythologist is that the great stories, the ones we really come back to, are a combination of the timeless and the time bound.

And when you get the balance right, they're the ones that we remember. So the timeless, of course, is perennial magnificent themes that last throughout time and culture. But the time bound, that is the pathos of our own lives. That is the mosh pit of our anxiety, betrayal, circumstance, the stuff that we actually live through. So I was a little punk rocker when I was a teenager. Me too. And the way I looked for intimacy was in the mosh pit or launching myself out into the audience. That was as close as I could get.

And as I get older, I would be more interested now in flamenco. I'd be more interested in something that has passion. but as I've said before wildness is the dance partner of discipline wildness is the dance partner of discipline and if you don't have the discipline bit sorted out

you you become feral not wild anyway I've gone off so I'm going to come back to your well thank you it's the I love that the fumigation of the whiskey is doing it's good so feral not wild feral not wild I would have worked a lot with at risk teenagers over the years. And I kind of like them. I like them. I think kids that steal stuff and get up to stuff, it shows a bit of hutspur, shows a bit of spirit. It shows you that they're

not completely sort of anethitized yet, that they're prepared to push the edges. And in traditional cultures, and when I say traditional cultures, all cultures are traditional in a way, but we've always had rites of passage. There is a point where it is a very, oddly normative thing to do to go out and wrestle death as a teenager. But you would, that would be four days and nights on a mountain top. That would be stalking a leopard and stealing one of its whiskers. Now the problem is that primordial ambition still lives in kids and it's meant to. A teenage boy, 15, 16, 50 times the amount of testosterone in his body than when he was 10.

And so, of course, he's going to get ugly. Of course it's going to look ugly. And that's when you need unrelated males who are not his dad, possibly an uncle, who can come in and remove them from what is familiar, remove them from where they feel they have status and a defined personality. Get them out into the bush. Night falls, you hear the sound of the coyote. they know they're going to sit for four days and nights on their own, they start to pay attention, they start to listen. And it is then you pull out the deep myths and the primordial stories that show you a bit about the business of becoming a real human being. So that's what I've been doing

for years. But in 2026, I would suggest there is a deficit of those stories. I think you could argue that in certain movies you get a kind of photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of those things. But Lewis always says, the road to hell will have no signposts. It'll have no signposts. So it won't be a very abrupt moment. It'll just be a very, very slow decline like that. And as you know well, Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton, there's a whole kind of English, to use a big word, mythopoetic Christian heritage that goes on that I feel, you know, glad to be a small part of.

Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, what do you think about something like this? We've been coughed into existence by a blind cosmic process that didn't have us in mind. We are the result of matter plus time plus chance. And not only will we die and everyone we know will die, but the universe itself is going to be coming apart in what, cosmologists call the inevitable heat death of the universe. I don't know if people would articulate it that way, but I think there's a lot of people who've, that's on the peripheries and then they cover it with maybe a sort of hedonism, which is the best we've got. Yes. Is that too pessimistic? I just think

it's ghastly. Where's the ruach in that? Where's the holy breath in that? Where's the mud in the story? There's no, as the Irish would say, there's no crack in that story. It's a lovely word. There's just no crack in it. Great story. Great word, yeah. Yeah, well, the Irish are filled with it. I often think, you know, when I was, I grew up in a kind of a beautiful Baptist home, that's where I come from. And there was this lovely phrase, get right with God. Yeah. I want to get right with God. It's perfectly admirable. Now, as Eastern Orthodox, that's probably slightly more refined to a phrase like Theosis. Yes. However, the Irish, I think Trump, all of it, with this phrase, cop onto yourself. I love that phrase.

I was telling you before the interview that I lived there for three years. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my goodness. It's good, isn't it? It's lovely. Cup onto yourself. Cup onto yourself. Cup onto yourself.

Cup on to yourself. And you immediately feel the flush of the appropriate shame it caused. So, no, those are not stories that you can hang your heart on. And life is weird, brutish, gorgeous. It is a mosh pit. and if you cannot lie back, I've been recently thinking about Christianity for me. It's like, finally, as a middle-aged fella,

you know, I got claimed by it, and it's like leaning back in the kayak of my ancestors. It's like leaning back in the kayak of my ancestors. You know, in England, people wouldn't really think of orthodoxy as our indigenous Christian tradition, but it kind of is. Yeah. Kind of is, you know. I mean, especially over in Ireland.

In Ireland, you go and look at the crosses and you think, God bless him, it would be steely-eyed Patrick of the many conversions, St. Anthony of the Desert. Yeah. So there's this very interesting, deep Egyptian relationship to Ireland. And that, it's wrong to say Celtic Christianity. It's a little easy to say. It's not quite that. But for sure, there is a lot of the things that you and I are talking about, reverence and simple joyful. nature. You don't need to be a hippie. That's not what it's about. It's just about going, wow,

it seems that God is a phenomenal storyteller. And the idea that he went around, could you imagine the notion of creation? You know, he thinks, okay, I'm not going to make one tree. I'm going to make all these trees. I'm going to go down to the very, very depths of the ocean, past where is indigo blue, down to the cold black depths, and it is there. I shall create, you know, I shall create. Now, what's that, you know, it's an old Irish story, the Voyager Brendan, Jaskonius, the whale. For me, everywhere we have evidence that beauty matters.

Beauty seems to really matter. And I think that that is part of why in such disassociative times, we've got young people turning up at Catholic churches and Orthodox churches. It's sort of undeniable. I'll tell you this. I think you might like this. There's someone I know who's a famous musician. Can't tell you who it is.

But their son recently got baptized very unexpectedly. And when they asked him, why are you doing this? He said, atheism is for old people. Atheism is for old people. And that gives me great joy. It is the last true rebellious. It does feel that way. I would love to hear not so much your origin story, but somewhere in the middle.

And I wonder if you'd, and I'm sure you, I know you've told this a million times, and I don't know how tired you are of telling it, but I don't care. I'm going to ask you to tell me anyway, because it's a beautiful story. But I wonder if you'd begin, you said you were in a band. You wrote this in the book with that fella. Yeah, yeah. And you said, you were getting to the point where you're like, I've got to get out. Yeah.

I'd love to know how you, I'd love to know a little bit about that, and then how you went from that until you had that. moment in the forest. Blimey, well look, there's, there's, there's, there's, that's a long period, a quarter of a century. Let's do it. Let's spark up, I think. I'll spark this up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you got the snipper. Good man. Now, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, actually right, 100%. I got, yeah, I used to be in a heavy metal band. You did? Yeah, not a good one. What did you play?

Uh, guitar and I sang. Okay. I was, um, the stitchwork ninjas, we were called. The stitchwork ninjas. Now, I think you're a fraction of a second younger than me. So what were your influences? Metallica, Pantera, Beatles. What is the great Metallica album?

It's got to be Master of Puppets, doesn't it? Does it? Ride the Lightning. Ride the Lightning is beautiful. The four-minute mark on Orion is glorious. I got to add a friend. This is not the conversation I thought we were going to have. This is very wonderful.

Yeah, yeah. Now, you're going to spark me up. I've never used one of these things before. Oh, you just, you know, I've always wanted to be a pipe man. It just seems cool. Like Malcolm, I have a pipe actually in the next room. I do smoke a pipe from time to time and I'd like to get into it more. But this is more conducive for a conversation, isn't it?

The pipe you're always fiddling with and yeah, that looks bloody lovely. Thank you. You're the first one to have a cigar with me on the show. Oh, bless you. This is a joy. Yeah. So you're in a band. What's the name of the band?

The name of the band was war dance. And we would have been known because we had a guitarist that had been in a band called the English Dogs. And the English dogs were an influence on Metallica, believe it or not, briefly. And so we were making records and we were touring. And I was only about 15 or 16 when this happened to me. No, 16.

And it was a bit of a shock because the lads were older than I was. And I was a sort of a fairly dreamy young fellow reading books about talliesid and poetry and stuff. And this was real thrash metal. And it also required a degree of ability to play that I don't think I ever quite mastered. But I somehow kept a foothold in rock and roll. And so by the time I was about 23 or 24, I got a – I was part of a band that got a three-album. be the word. It's publishing.

Yeah, publishing. The money's always in publishing. It's not in records. So we got a three album deal with Warner Brothers. And then somehow in the middle of that, I went and did this thing that I referred to a few minutes ago, a wilderness rites of passage. And it became horribly clear to me during that experience

that I'd been climbing the ladder, but the ladder was on the wrong wall. And I needed to leave. So I had to go back to Warner Brothers and say, do you know what? I don't want to do this anymore. And they said, well, hold on. We know you and we like you. And you've been pushing towards this since you were about 12.

For the first time in my life, I had drum endorsements, Zildjan symbols. And I had a lovely Ludwig drum kit, all of that stuff. But I just had an instinct that was not very clear. But I had an instinct that I had to do something else. and part of the way of unpacking what was going to become the great quest of my life came from, believe it or not, living in a tent for four years. Have you heard about this? I'd like to know more about it because I don't know what that means.

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And I get the impression it wasn't a regular tent. I heard it was a... It was a beautiful tent. Yeah, it was a big, black. It was a 16 foot circle, filled with furs and books and a little bit of Vino and... Come on. And, you know, a pot of stew. It was very, very lovely.

How old were you? I was, by now, I'm in my mid-20s. I'm in my... And it's the hinge between the last century and this century. And I just had an instinct to do it. I was very interested in the old notion of the bard or the storyteller. And I knew there was a connection in story. to nature that was not to do with a storyteller just being for children or just being a raconteur.

There was some dynamic relationship to the earth itself. You actually could be privy to stories when you went on a walk. Now that sounds very poetic, but if you spend a bit of time doing it, you'll cop on to what I'm talking about. So amazingly, in a time before screens, I didn't have a laptop, I didn't have an email, I didn't have a phone. I was able to disappear. Now, to be absolutely clear, I was not like Tarzan of the jungle. You know, I wasn't living completely removed in sort of pristine wilderness. I did bits of work for people.

I had friends. They came and visited. But in my own way, I had some sort of hermetic yearning that because I didn't quite have the, I didn't understand yet the contemplative dimensions of Christian history, I did something like it intuitively. And during that period, you have to stay warm. So I lit fires. I lit a thousand fires.

And every time I lit a fire, I learned a story. So suddenly, even by my maths, after four years, you got about a thousand stories. These are other people's stories. Short little folk tales. Right. Yeah. Things you've learned from books. And you're memorizing them word for word.

I knew that what I didn't want to do. do was recite these stories. I wanted to, I wanted these stories to have their way with me. To inhabit you. Yeah, to inhabit me. Because there is this wonderful old tradition of the Shanaki, the Irish storyteller, where you are a man or a woman of stories. And I, even then I thought, wouldn't it be great to be a rabbi of fairy tales? I should imagine that. Could you imagine? So, but there was no, you can understand Matt. No one was saying, and you'll learn a living after this. you're right, but there was no, there was no plan B. York Times best sell. I blush. There was, there was, there was, there was, there was no plan B for me. What I did have, and I have, thank God,

is Christian parents who loved me dearly and knew somehow, somehow in the firmament of all of this, in the strangeness of all of this, there was some really interesting thread revealing its hand. And so I have had a very deep dialogue with my parents for 30 years throughout all of this. And the thing they're very good at is they, because they love stories themselves. No matter how wild it got, they just said, what happened next? What happened next? And what has happened next is something that the champagne is popping in the shore household, I could assure you at this moment. So, okay. Tell us about the 101 day. Okay.

Wilderness. Yeah. If you wish. Yeah. And it's what's beginning to happen with, it's so deep what happened. I will talk about it, but I'm beginning to feel like, have you ever seen a radiator when fluid is pouring out the bottom of it? You know, and it needs, sometimes radiators, they leak.

Yeah. And because it was so utterly transformative, every time I do it, I can feel the... Brother, I know what you mean. But I prayed about this. this. I prayed about it actually and I felt that in the prayer God said to me, I gave you a year and a half for that experience to be private and I'm asking you now to tell people about it, take a breath and just do it. So when something really transformative has happened in your life, what you don't want to do is turn it into a sound bite or an app or a franchise. It's holy

ground and what I'll describe to you is holy ground. And this, Without this, none of this would have taken place. So the years have passed, and I am now almost 50. And the boy in the tent that I previously described has long given way to a moderately successful writer, professor. I've taught at Stanford. I've been in and out of Oxford and Cambridge University. But I can feel a little bit of distance between me and that irascible. the irascible glee of my younger self. So I decided to do something. Very near where I lived

was a, I lived in a little cottage, there was a forest. It's an important forest for me and my dad actually before me. And I decided at dusk for 101 days, completely privately, to go into that forest and to, in my fashion at that time, pray and give thanks. I felt I had been blessed beyond measure, but I was at midlife, and I was wanting, I suppose, even now, even then I still felt there was a deeper story wanting to announce itself. I had no clue what that would be. The reason it was 101 days is that that is a really long time to do the same thing. I am unfortunately somebody that if I'm not careful, I go from buzz to buzz to buzz. I like to be interested. and I thought, what would it be to have fidelity to a particular practice that you keep turning up at?

So I'd go to the forest and this is the bit that people find strange. I would often tell a story as it got dark and I would tell that story to what ever happened to be around, whether it was a fox or it was an oak grove. But one way or another, I wanted to give back something. Miraculously, I keep this up for 101 days. It's the final night. And in the center of the forest is an old, believe it or not, there's an old Iron Age fort, a very old Celtic hill fort.

And I know I'm going to push my edges a bit by doing an all-night vigil in there. It's cold, it's about minus 15. And you were planning, forgive me for interrupting you. You were planning on leaving the next day? Yeah, we were done. Was 101 days what you set out of your accomplish? Yes, yes, that was the thing. Forgive me, it wasn't 100, it wasn't minus 15.

It was about minus 5. It was freezing. So it had been a boring process. It had been a strange process. It had been exacting. And I'm wandering up to the forest happy because it's almost done. I am not in a visionary state of mind. I've probably had a couple of lamb chops.

I've had a big cup of tea. I've got my big warm coat on. You know, I'm not overthinking it. I'm not overthinking it. And I walk up through the forest and it's pitch black now. It's getting on for midnight. and I would have spent, you know, at least a thousand nights under canvas out in the bush. You know, I have a lot of that in me.

So by now, I'm used to the sounds that forests make, and I can hear the sound of a fox, and I can hear the sound of a badger, and I can hear the bell of a stag, I can hear the hood of an owl. You are on high alert, and you never quite lose the feeling when you're in a deep forest on your own that there could be spirits out there, or just something you don't quite understand, something that God deposited that we're not privy to. So all of that is going on in my head.

So I'm sitting there, I'm really eagle-eyed on what is around me, because every now and then I hear a branch break or I hear something in the distance. And I started to pray. And I would have prayed really in the way that my family pray, which is very straightforward. It's not highfaluting in any way. I would have probably said something like,

and I wouldn't have, it would be like, creator, you know. I am a small, confused, damaged human being. But for this moment, I am here in this wood. And if there's anything at all, you need to tell me or show me at this moment in my life, I am absolutely available for your presence. And then, and I'll never know why I did this, I looked up. I didn't look around. I didn't look on the horizontal. I looked on the vertical. And I saw, first of all, I just saw that the sky was filled with innumerable stars, pale blue stars. And then as this is happening, I see one of them begin to change shape. Remember, there's no hallucinogens involved in this. There's no visionary vine. There's none of that. I haven't been fasting for 40 days. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no fasting. And I just look and I see a distant a distant shape in the heavens and it's this star, or what seemed to be a star, began to move.

And it began to move towards me. And as it moved towards me, it took the shape of the tip of an arrow. And the colours were phenomenal. They're very similar to the aurora borealis, although I've never seen the aurora baris. I'd love to see it. But there were these beautiful kind of greens and whites and deep pinks and reds. And to my astonishment, this thing just fell out of the sky. And it landed about 10 foot to my right. Utterly silently, there was no noise. That's the thing I'll always think about this. There was no like thwump.

It just went into the ground. Absolute silence. And I remember even in that moment thinking, this is like something from the Old Testament. This isn't meant to happen anymore. This is a baby miracle. I've walked into the impossible. I've walked into the impossible.

And I asked, you know, I asked. It was not frightening, weirdly. I sat up, and I still sat up for the rest of the night. It really makes me laugh now that I still like, is there something else? Is there something, you know, a star? I'm still like, well, I want to make sure that I sit this out. So I sat it out for another five hours or so.

And then I come back down through the wood to my little cottage. and I am, I'm kind of, I'm very happy and I'm very tired and I still want this to be over. May I ask a question? Yes, of course. Did you go to where the thing dropped expecting to find something? Yeah. I did. There was nothing.

There was no scorched earth. There was nothing. It was as if, if you can, do you know what a fontanelle is on a baby's head? It's a soft little bit. Yeah, yeah. A soft little bit. It was as if that wood had a fontanel and some heavy, dimension fell into the fontanelle of the wood and was just swallowed up. So yeah, I'd

been looking for that and I've been back, you know, I go back and I look and I think and I wonder and I scratch my head. Then I went back to the cottage and I was just getting into bed. I remember, I remember, and I just shut my eyes as you do when you wanted to crash out and it wasn't over. in front of me, in my, in my, with my eyes closed, I saw these nine words. And the words said something very strange. They, they didn't make sense to me at the time, sorry. Oh, you're good. Inhabit the time and genesis of your original home.

Inhabit the time and genesis of your original home. Now, if it said, inhabit the time of your original home, that had been one thing. Inhabit the genesis of your original home, that would have been another. But it was this long, strange. sentence with this weird metaphysical jump in it that I still don't really understand. But that, I was suddenly bolt up right in bed. Because I know I hadn't thought about that word Genesis for a very long time, and that gave me the willis, that things were starting to happen to me that I had no purchase on.

They don't live in my imagination. Genesis is not a word that lived in my imagination. The next day, lockdown begins. I'm trapped in the cottage for a year and a half to ruminate on what had happened. Luckily, my daughter would have visited, but that was about it. And do you know what? I did not cop on, Matt, till quite what had happened to me. It took a bit of a wrestle because it was so enormous.

It was so deep. It was so strange. It was so beautiful. Even me, with all my myths and all my stories. had been rendered speechless by the power of God. And you knew it was God or of God? Yeah, of God. Whatever I thought God was at that point.

It was, you know, it was something, I suppose I've been an earthy kind of storyteller, but this was a cosmological dimension. I don't think I've ever said this in public before. I'm nutting this out with you. That was what had happened. The world had just got so much bigger for me. Yeah.

This is a god that is in the cormorant and in the movement of the river and in the bending of the barley, but also outside of it too. I'd never, that was a thought that was too big for my head when I was younger in any real way of the heart. And so bit by bit by bit, dreams came. And the dreams are listed in the book. And just before my 50th birthday, I realized. the inevitable announcement that was going on in my own heart. And I knew a lot was going to change. Why not attribute these to some pagan deity or Mother Earth or some such?

Why associate them with Christianity? I think it's, you know, I've seen some things over the years. You know, being a wilderness rites of passage guide, I've seen some, there's a lot out in the forest. that we don't really, can't really explain in many ways. But there was a qualitative difference to this. I'll tell you what the qualitative difference was. I started to love certain people again

who I hadn't loved for a long time. So something started to happen in the deep interior that was very alarming to me because compassion began to show up. And I can be filled with hubris, filled with befuddlement, filled with competition. And somehow I had been, I had, I'd entered a story, I'd entered a narrative that was so much bigger than me,

the inevitability of surrender was the only sane thing to do. So I, that's all I can tell you, it was an instinct. There's a lovely phrase in Christianity. It's so beautiful, the indwelling presence. And at some point, I realized that that, the thing behind that encounter was nearer to me than my own breath. It was as nearer to me as my own breath. And so I was going to have to go through the wonderful indignity of realizing probably not that I was becoming a Christian, but that I had been a subterranean Christian all along, but not very conscious of it.

And the things I loved in all of these stories were actually, I've said this before, but it's as if God wanted me to learn a few different languages to do with story and listening and things like that. And then at a certain point in midlife said, now, now. And that's the best part of five years ago. And I've lived in the consequence of that ever since. Thank you for sharing. Pleasure. As you can see, I'm very vulnerable. You know, this is not a, it's not a victory story, but it is.

Yeah. But it's not a, to go there, I have to go there. Beautiful. I was 17 when I came to, well, He, Christ came to me. Because I was about to ask you a question, then I thought, well, did that apply to me? And it didn't. And the question I was going to ask you was, was there any doctrinal wrestling you had to sort out before you embrace Christianity publicly?

For me, I just encountered someone I didn't think existed. And my life became more beautiful. everything became more colourful. I was like an absolute, I say this with affection, not, it's not a disparaging comment. I came back like an idiot and I was just hugging my dad and hugging trees. I would, I would, there was a golf, I've never shared this before and people can misinterpret it if they want, but there was a golf course in our little town between my house and the high school. And I would walk home and I would just go and lay out on the golf course and look at the trees.

I just, I was in love. The world had color. It was like I stepped into color. And so if you had to say to me, well, what was your view about what the church taught about such and such, I just know I met this mysterious one and my life was better. That's what I knew. And then the rest came slowly. But for you, I mean, you presumably being in your 40s were aware of Christianity, you were raised

a Christian, were there obstacles, doctrinal obstacles or some such that you had to overcome before embracing the title publicly? Oh, yeah. the public thing, I actually got outed, you know, I would have probably remained quiet for some time longer, but people copped onto it and made sort of, it appeared in magazines and things. So it's not against my will. It just was something that happened within about four or five months where probably a wee bit more quiet would have been a good idea. Yeah, there would have been all sorts of wrestles that I would have had. I'd always admired one of the things, I admired about Catholicism. And obviously I'm not a Catholic, but I admire about Catholicism, is it always seemed, and I hope your viewers get the respect I'm now giving it, it seemed an undefended, an undefensive type of Christianity.

What I mean by that was, you know, when I was growing up, there were amazing interfaith dialogues between brilliant Catholic thinkers and people from other faiths. And they weren't trying to sort of crush everybody into the, ground around them. There was a generosity of spirit. So I knew there was sort of a philosophical strand in certain elements of Catholicism. And my sister and her dear family who watched this show, especially while Jim Francis, my nephew, who will be watching cheering at this time. Giney Jim, and I'm honoured. Thank you. That's beautiful. Yeah. So I, so I, but what I didn't really know

about was the deep contemplative dimensions of the desert fathers and mothers. I just didn't know about it. I knew a bit about the saints, but it took a while. And of course, the reaction amongst a lot of people I know would be, it would follow these lines. It would be, I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. I'm not angry. I'm disappointed. And I was having to say, look, I can't give you an apologetics for this. This isn't, this isn't mere Christianity. I don't have the genius of Lewis. I am in the grip of an experience, and I can only communicate some of that experience, and everything else is going to come later, because what I did know as a professor and as a mythologist, you want to stay close to the living flame. You don't want to become very, as Joseph Campbell used to say,

make sure your religion isn't a defense against a religious experience. What does that mean? That you bung yourself up with theory, that you end up knowing more about church histories, than you do the Bible. Ah, yes. It's tempting for us. Of course. You know, my sort of spiritual instructure in orthodoxy, after a while, he copped onto the fact that I'm a bit of a reader.

Yeah. And he said, okay, nothing wrong with reading, but easy. Yeah, exactly. Do you know what he said? He said, copy. It's not an interesting word where everything's meant to be so original these days. He said, copy. He said, I want you to come into church

and just look at the way Orthodox. people, look at the physicality of the practice, look at the kissing of an icon, the prostrations, the difficulty of confession. You know, I had to be, when I became Orthodox, I was exercised. Yeah. We all are, you know, you spit. Yes, yes. It's beautiful. It is. So the primordial sort of medievalism of it all was what I had hungered for, you know, the deer that yearns, you know. This episode is sponsored by Catholic Match. Our culture tells us that dating apps, are the way to go, but really they're mostly about superficial connections and endless swiping, where half the people don't even know what they truly believe or what they're actually looking for.

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why don't we go on a pilgrimage you and I we'll go on a pilgrimage and we'll wind up we'll go through the islands we'll go to Ila and all those places but we'll go to a few wonderful you know we'll get some wonderful I promised to do it and we'll see if there's any interest let us know in the comments yeah wouldn't that be lovely wouldn't that be Come on, the water's warm. So the problem for me actually was, okay, what about a church? What about a church? Because that was, it's one thing to encounter, as I said, the mossy face of Christ.

But what about the rubbing alongside lots of other folks in a church? That had always been a struggle for me, being one of these sort of artistic and mystical characters. So first of all, I went to the Baptists. and I love the Baptists and I saw there's an image that remains with me of a guy coming in it was packed for a start

it's very interesting and people tell you there's all the churches are empty in England they're not all empty that's nonsense and there was a fella in there who'd clearly just come off

a building site and he had his fatigues on he had his luminous jacket you know he had a kid hanging off him bless him and there were tears streaming

this is the Baptist Church yeah the Baptist Church Bovey Tracy Baptist Church and they were so nice to me and so kind and they didn't put a pamphlet in my hand or anything. So that was great. I had high hopes for my local Catholic church. Unfortunately, it was around the time of Pentecost and the guy giving the sermon suddenly did this, he said, and now we come to the tongues of fire. And I, sorry. I know, I know. And that is absolutely not like any other Catholic I've met since. Not at all.

But that, that reduction of everything to metaphor. And it's interesting as a mythologist. You think, well, isn't it all metaphor? It is, but it really isn't. I don't think this is all one series of, you know, associations, or metaphors after another. It works on so many levels. Everything Christ does is like a stained glass window. You know, everything he does.

You can see it from so many angles. So I'm a Signs and Wonders guy. I think all of that stuff happened. I think he really did come back from the dead. I just don't think you get the energy. I don't think you get the energy of the acts of the apostles. if something real hadn't happened. After a while they'd be like, okay.

He's born in my heart, don't you see? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's all go get killed for that. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So anyway, in the end, there comes this Sunday when I'm in a shopping center, like a mall of America type of thing. And in the middle of the shopping center, there's a church. They just cannot knock down because it's so old. It's an old Anglo-Saxon church.

It's beautiful, devonian red stone. It's not even brick. And around these shops, there's a shop selling vapes and pornography and, you know, bongs and all that kind of stuff. And I thought, well, I'll just go through this door. And I walked straight into something, you'd know it well, divine liturgy. And I... Did you mean to? Did you know the church was there? Did you go there for that purpose?

It's hard to remember. Probably, probably, I was looking for that. And I'm also a long-term pallor-pool, Kingston. We've known each other for years and Paul's Orthodox. I'm sure he was probably saying, you must go and check this out. I certainly rang him afterwards. But I entered this ceremony that somehow immediately supplied me with what Young used to call participation mystique. I was around other people.

No one was paying any attention to me. That's what I loved. I didn't have to sit up or stand or anything at all. priest barely looked at me, but I suspected heaven and earth were meeting in this ceremony. And I knew I loved it, and I loved it to such a, such a degree. I was so overwhelmed. I did a very naughty thing. I didn't know it was naughty. I took communion. I was a Christian, but I wasn't a catacumine yet. Right. I couldn't. My body walked me up there. And because of the looks, they probably, they said, we thought you were from some other diocese, you know. I was already

halfway in. And I almost crashed on the way home from the car. I was driving through lights and people were saying, boom, bleep. And I was saying, I've been to church. I've been to church. You know, I had to come down and lie in a dark room. I had to lie in a dark room. You know, Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. Yeah. Do you know? So I was done for. Beautiful. What did your friends think? I mean, we've kind of been through this, but I mean, The angry, I've disappointed, not angry thing. Was that what you received from a lot of folks? Not my close friends.

I'm pleased to report that I am loved. You know, I have people around me that love me. And they've got big, creative, philosophical minds. They just didn't quite see this necessarily happening. But I was never an occultist or anything like that. I wasn't a member of a, none of that. What I was, and what I think I probably remain to a degree, I'm a romantic.

And there are lots of Christian romantics. So, so I was never, it never occurred. I love mountains and trees and rivers and lightning storms and otters, but I don't worship them. I never worship them. But when my heart hurts, I like to go and sit in those places and be quiet. That's what I like. But somehow I never lost touch ever with the notion that there was a creator of some kind.

So my friends were Some were baffled It was certainly the gossip of the town For a while And some people felt it Because certainly Christianity can be so politicised People associated it

With political moves Rather than this eruption of the heart That had actually happened to me Yes I'm so thrilled to hear your description Of what happened to you Because Which was happiness.

Yeah, yeah. You're looking about when I came back from that trip, yeah. Yeah, and so my mom and dad would know this. I'm not sure if anybody there, for six months I was in an awfully good mood. Yes. I was in an awfully good mood. I've shared this before, but my mom started meeting. So it was a pilgrimage to Rome.

That's what did it. And afterwards, I was dressed in the goth. I wasn't gothic. I didn't wear the makeup, but I dressed all in black. Nice. Into all that, you know, angry at the world and angry at myself and whatever. deeply insecure, I think. And after the trip, my mum

met with my bishop because she was afraid I was brainwashed. Okay. That's it. Yeah. Wow. That's it. Just that kind of joy, that kind of. I know exactly what you mean.

My poor dad, I mean, he got home and I'm like, I just want to hug him. I'm sure he preferred it if I ignored him, but I couldn't help it. I loved him. I wanted to hug him. Well, I was and remained a lecturer, one of the things that I do. and if I got anywhere near, if people would say, has anything interesting happened to you recently,

I'd say, well, do you really want to open that door? Because what would happen when that door opened would be tears. Yeah. You know, it'd be tears. I wish you could meet a dear departed friend of mine, Evie Muldoon. She was a nice name.

Beautiful Irish woman and she loved me a lot. You know, when you grow up. up. Most of your friends' parents are just nice. So they don't seem weird. She cared about me, you know? And she, man, she loved Jesus. And here's the point. She, when she, she, um, she didn't love Jesus. She was just kind of like a raging, angry feminist who, who accidentally met Christ when she was in her mid-50s, I think, and then just became the most beautiful, bizarre woman ever more of herself than she ever was. And I remember people getting really offended at this and say, well, what do you think of gay people?

And she said, well, I don't think much about gay people. But if you're asking, I think they're deeply loved like the rest of us, you know. Nice. And that kind of goes back to your point where it's, you talked about this compassion in your mind. Yeah. It's like, you're, okay, so you're upset because you think she's joined some bigoted, awful political group, but hasn't her joy and her love only increased? Yeah. Well, yeah, I suppose it has. Well, that's interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I want to thank Blaine Eldridge. That's John Eldridge's son. He's a popular author. Okay. Blaine is his son. John came on my show recently, and Blaine sent me a book of yours.

Wow. Smoke hole, what was it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Smokehole. Is that what it was called? Yes, yeah, smoke hole. Look, it's something like Seeking the Wild in the time of the spy glass. The spy glass is how I would think of the internet and social media.

you and all that stuff. Forgive me, did you write that fairy tale about the woman with the silver hands? That's an old Polish fairy tale. Was it your sort of interpretation? Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've read that to my kids two or three times and I cry every single time and I and my kids love it and I was reading the lost adventures of Sir Galahad to them the other day and my son Peter said, read that one about the woman. So thank you. Anyway, so I want to say thanks to Well, yeah, please, you know, the Eldridge, you know, that dad, you know, John, wild at heart, all of that stuff. That's very important material. And he would be the first, I'm short, and he's drunk deeply from the waters of one of my great mentors, Robert Bly, who wrote a book called I and John at the beginning of the 90s. And I was lucky to travel with Bly for a few years, as were other people.

I'm nothing special in that regard. But we're singing from the same hymn sheet a little bit. Yeah. Talk to me about fairy tales. What would you like to know? Well, here's what happened recently. I was in a bookstore in Franklin, the standard gorgeous bookstore. And owned by a fella who smokes his pipe in there, which I appreciate it.

And I was looking around and I felt sad because I realized that I've wasted my life on horror and porn and heavy metal. Yeah. And here I am a 42-year-old. man and I haven't even really read the nursery rhymes and how could I ever catch up and so it's just this not from the Lord clearly just a feeling of sadness you know it's sadness in the sense it was like a really despondency is what I felt and that's why I said to myself you know I need to read the old tales that I should have read and should have been read to me when I was six that's why I picked up the lost tales of Sir Galahad why am I telling you that I don't know except to say this maybe and that's

you know Lewis and his introduction to the lion in the witch in the wardrobe, he dedicates it to his niece or something. And he says, when you're old enough, you might pull this, when you're old enough and you start to enjoy fairy tales again, you might pull this down. So I just want to talk about fairy tales in general, because I think there's a lot of people who are watching this. And they sympathize with where I'm coming from. They're sad that they weren't introduced to the good stories, let alone the great stories.

And I think that the fairy tales are a way to enter into that world, whether they be Brothers Grimm or the Russian. fairy tales or what have you? Yeah. And I would be oddly sympathetic for Christians that are possibly a bit ambivalent or a bit hesitant and say, well, look, why would we need anything that's not in the Bible? But I'm a great fan of Augustine, and I believe all truth is God's truth. I really do.

And so you're going to be amazed. If you go to those, if you trust Tolkien, if you trust Lewis, if you trust that tradition, you're going to be fine. It is no replacement for the Bible. It is no replacement for scripture. But you'd be amazed at how underpin, underpinning a lot of fairy tales are Christian themes. And if you really want to go deep on that,

you want to jump into the Arthurian tradition. My dear friend Malcolm Gite has just written a phenomenal new retelling of some of the Grail stories. He is the perfect ambassador of those tales. I mean, he is... Do you know the name of it? Because I know it just came out. I was actually in this bookstore and I saw an advertisement saying that it was coming, but unfortunately, I don't have the title.

Well, it's, I don't have the title because he's actually, he's been writing a series of them. And I know when I get back from this, I have to write the forward to the next one. So, secreted within fairy tales and all of these myths are wonderful illustrations of the conditions of living. We live in a very therapeutic age. I think one of the most dangerous things that has happened to us is we are obsessed with individuation, not service. So in other words, my truth, me, I can be anything I want to be. Now, the reality is myth says, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can't be anything you want

to be. You have something quite specific to do, and you need to listen to the conditions of your life, accept that you stand on divine ground and there's probably a very particular mandate for how you to live and so the fairy tales show us a lot about the conditions of living they show us fairytales are interesting myths are sacred stories okay that's what they do

a big myth generally explains poetically how we got here in the shape that we are think of that as the ocean of myth But a fairy tale is like a little tributary. It's a river. It's a story you can put in your pocket. It's a bit smaller. But it contains in it real generosity of spirit and often incredibly Christian values.

There'll be three brothers. There'll be three sisters. And it's the brother that kisses the wounded. It'll be the sister that kisses the wounded that receives the information to take you to the next bit of the story. So there is a kind of a fundament of goodness in a lot of these stories. I'm not somebody at this point who would say all myths, all stories, you know, everything is, pointing in the right direction. There are stories that I don't tell anymore, you know, if there is no redemptive quality, if there is, oh yes, this is just occurring to me,

if there is no resurrection in these stories, I don't want to know about them because it's black magic, you know, and I don't mean that in a cheap, sense of the word. I mean that that notion that Lewis picked up on, that Christ is the myth made fact, that's for real. That's real. Somehow, somehow, it's as if all the myths and the stories knew this amazing thing was coming. This amazing thing was coming. And then 2,000 years ago, oh, I'm getting the, getting the, bit of the old goosebumps now, falling out of the sky you know, falling out like a beautiful painted arrow is Christ. And Christ becomes the myth-made fact.

And we are living in the disarray of that encounter ever since. That's why we have so many different church traditions, because he's too mind-blowing. I was frightened of Jesus, you know. I was frightened of him because I actually found we have combed over the beatitudes to a point now where they go down like a chant. But I never did that. I knew that was weird. I knew Jesus was odd.

It didn't seem like bear wolf. It didn't seem like Odysseus. It didn't seem oddly heroic. I even wondered if it was a bit feminine for my young self. Of course. Of course in the sense that I, not that it is objectively, but of course,

I mean, you're a young man, you want to go take over the friggin' world and you're being told, blessed of the meek. You're like, well, maybe later, but not now. Yeah, yeah, not right now. I've got my kingdom to create, you know. And there's a sense in which that's clearly true.

So how do you marry the two? Well, I think probably we had a good go at that in the 12th and 13th century. I think the, what had happened after the Crusades in Europe was a recognition that not all young men were going to become monastics, but we couldn't remain brutes on horses. There had to be a refining of character. And that is when the chivalric tradition comes in. And that is the Arthurian stories and the like. So what you get in the Holy Grail, for example,

is the notion of, I've probably used this before, nebless oblige, you have to earn your name, find a way of being in the world that means you are wired to be of service. You are wired to be of service, that you're not just on the take. I think I was saying earlier on that I meet a lot of people that don't seem to be on any kind of quest anymore. There seems to be no quest.

What you need, as we know, forgive me for stating the obvious, is to be in awe of, we need to be beautifully defended, we need to be beautifully defeated by love. And that's what I'm in there. Yeah, yeah. The shock waves of, you know.

I remember reading a poem, I forget who wrote it and I'm going to butcher it, But it's something like that. It begins, oh, you many unassalted cities, have you not longed for the enemy to overtake you? Until in something, tiredness and hunger you receive him. He says, look, stand from your balcony. There he stands as far as the eye can see. And you know he can hold out longer than you.

The one who will overcome you is working in silence. Something like that or not? Nothing like that. No, no, absolutely. It's so lovely that you've taken these words into you and curated them. There's a Persian poet called Rumi, and he says, learn poems by heart because they dive cold on the page. Yeah, that's right. So as Christians, we should be learning things by heart so they don't dive cold on the page.

That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to rehabilitate myself by making them part of me. Yeah. Yeah. And I really encourage, and again, I'm not unique here. You know, many of us grew up with this sort of banal education and we're sad that we, you know. Like the first time I ever read a book, ever. I was 17 years old.

Wow. You know, I got away with just pretending to read books and getting a sea because I somehow fluffed it. Yeah. And then I read The Joy of St. Francis after my conversion. You know, that was lovely. And then, anyway, started reading after that. Yeah. What's your favorite fairy tale?

And you have to pick one. Well, because you've mentioned it, you could go a long way with the handless maiden. Yeah. Go along with a handless maiden. This is a young woman that very early on in her life loses her hands. And it's the journey of how do you grow your hands back? Now, interestingly, that story became very real for me during COVID because of don't touch anything. Do you remember?

I thought, wow, we're kind of losing our hands. And what happens in the story is that she falls in love with a very well-meaning fella. And he says, well, what do I give the woman who has everything? I'll buy, I'll make some silver hands for her. And so he creates these hands. And she says, that's very sweet of you, darling. It's like a sweater that you get at Christmas. I'll put them over there.

And I think that sexually, young men especially, are becoming silver-handed. They're losing their sense of intimacy. And these silver hands, you can go to your phone now for anything that you want. because actually real sex is scary, it's intimate. You have to show up, you have to be present, you know, and everything seems to be becoming more on our terms and more controlled. But there's such a lack of imagination in pornography. There's such a lack of imagination.

In the old days, you know, even in God, God bless them, you know, the wild old pagan world, you'd have had Dionysus involved in that. you'd have have affrodite involved in that. You'd have had a bit of imagination, a bit of style, a bit of narrative, a bit of spontaneity, not just these kind of cookie cutter episodes displaying themselves over and over again. And what is the inevitable result? Impudence. Impudence.

You've got teenage boys. Good God, if they can't get it up, there's no help for the rest of us. We've taken a terrible wrong turn there, and one of God's most profound gifts to us, we are, you know, we've thrown under the truck. Now, you spoke a lot about this in the book. So I'll ask you, maybe you don't feel qualified to offer advice, but let's see, young man out there, he's hooked on porn, he hates these hooked on porn. He knows it's stupid, but he also loves it.

Yeah, of course. You know, if he didn't love it in a sense, he wouldn't do it. And how does he grow his hands back? How does he move away from this siren that's led him into shipwreck? Yeah. I remember once a story of a fellow that had been fasting out on the hill for four days and nights. It's not myself, but it's somebody that I knew. And he'd really done good work and he'd prayed and he'd wept and he'd gone through a very difficult repentance.

And he was walking back to base camp. And on the way, sticking in a bush, you don't have this anymore, but back in there was an old mag, the old magazine. And before even he'd got back to base camp, he had accomplished himself. with this magazine and the sheer power of those images I would not be immune to it I wouldn't be immune to it I wouldn't want anybody to see this and think that I'm somehow floating above it of course I'm not what I miss though as I get older interestingly is sex is terrific but romance that's the stuff now Lewis wrote a lot about this is the difference between Amor and Eros now Eros is that world of what Joe Campbell used to call the biological zeal of the organs for each other.

You know, that. But Amor is a kind of love sickness that comes in. And you pine and you think and you brood and you have a beloved. And there's a softness. And again, your imagination is present. And I think inevitably there will be a move back. There has to be a move back. I'm a Christian, you know, Jesus keeps telling me not to worry.

You know, that's the, it's very irritating, isn't it? Yeah, it's, for me, I find it the most radical of his teachings is like, stop worrying. You know. And you want to be like, I'm sorry, do you not understand? I know, I know, I know. I keep getting, as you can imagine, all I ever get asked about is AI. And there's part of me that has things to say about AI. But there's also part as a Christian that I have to say, and still.

Yeah. And still. keep an eye on the miraculous don't keep turning towards you know that we know in Christianity that inside if you look into the deep heart of a demon there's an angel

and I meet people sometimes that you know I've worked in prisons I've worked with people that have killed other people I've worked with wicked people but what I do is I just look and I look and I look until I locate the angel and I speak directly to that part of them

because I'm a sinner too Yeah. One question I had for you is why is it in the fairy tales that it seems like if you're with the gentle old man and the strong old woman. Yes. It seems to me that there is a bit of that going on. If you're a strong young woman, maybe I'm not saying women can't be strong in a feminine sense. Clearly they can. But there's something like if a man is gentle too quickly, something's gone wrong. And in a way I think if a woman's too strong in the negative. sense too quickly. Something's gone wrong. But I don't know what you think of this, but my theory is it seems like if a man and a woman do their job right, they stay on the conveyor belt of life and allow the Lord to heal them or something, that you have, the man becomes gentle in a way that's healthy and the woman becomes strong in a way that's healthy. Yes. And I mean, of course,

there are also, you know, there's a medical narrative to that as well. You know, women do, once they've got through menopause and the rest, they gain energy as men go through something called Andropause, which is we lessen in a way, you know, is it in John, you know, I have to become small so they can become big. And there is a kind of a balancing out. You go to any

church and you're going to meet extremely dynamic older women who seem to have reserves of energy that some of the fellas, maybe not. And I think so, I think that there's a kind of a medical element to that. And I also think in fairy tales, for

a long time, they were not considered great literature. So they belonged in a way in the dominion of the older ladies who were raising children. And so a lot of that tradition, that wonderful, powerful, undomesticated tradition of fairy tales, often women have been the custodians of that, you know. And ironically, in it not being taken seriously, it means it's rather uncontaminated. It's still got protein in it. It's not as sophisticated as a modern novel, but that gives it its power. Look, are you tired of sending your money every month to a phone company that doesn't share your values?

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Mobile and see for yourself. To get started, visit Charitymobile.com slash Matt Frad. That's charitymobile.com slash Matt Frad and use promo code Matt Frad at checkout. I have some questions here that have come in from our viewers on fairy tales. Nice. Let's hear it. This fellow says, Matt, this might be dumb, but why do fairy tales feel more true than a lot of modern novels? Like I don't mean factual. I mean true, true. I've thought of that. Beautiful. Well, first of all, there is a phrase that I have repeated to the point of exhaustion, but it's really good. In Mexico, they talk about the fairy tale tradition as the

river beneath the river, that at some point in your life, you will go through something so profound, facts of the matter will not do. And if you cling to facts, you'll have the facts, but you won't have the story. You won't have the story. Now, one of the powers in fairy tales is the fact that they are, they're communicated in a very truncated form. In actual fact, you know what it's like in a court case when someone's writing at great staccato speed? Fairy tales in books, which people have turned into anthologies, they've kind of short-handed the tales. And one of my jobs as an oral storyteller is to loosen up the synopsis so I can tell it over three hours, where in a book it's five paragraphs. And one of the things I'd want to advise anybody, if you're interested

in storytelling, is do make sure that you know that in a way you're getting synopsis of stories, that you then, that's called the matter of the story, but the sense of the story is what you bring to it in your telling in that moment at that time. So when we talk about the handless maiden, I had the matter of the story, but if I'm immodest for a second, the reason you probably responded to it was the sense that I gave to it.

That's where the originality is. And I think in that compression, there's a kind of directness and a power that gets through, we have become far, we're probably too sophisticated, too sophisticated for our own good, you know. James Joyce, the great writer, had a phrase, aesthetic arrest. An aesthetic arrest is when you suddenly have an encounter with the numinus.

You don't have an encounter with a theory about the numinus. It is actually happening in this moment right now. And there's something about the, The lights being lowered, the fire being worked, the story being told. And you just go, my soul, my soul is announcing itself at this moment. There's a lovely old idea that the soul is not convinced by much that we do. My soul has no clue about being on the New York Times bestseller list. It's really not interested.

Thank you, though. Yeah. You know, my spirit is, that's an interesting thing. spirit and soul and fairy tales are not the same. My spirit is very, very pleased. But the soul, that Jonathan Cross domain, is deeper than that and actually comes forward in duress and it comes forward in confusion and it comes forward sometimes in uncertainty. One of the things that kept me away from Christianity for so many years was in the West it seems so extroverted. It seemed like I really kind of extroverted, like the Great Commission on Helium.

You know? Yeah. And actually, I long for what in orthodoxy we would call you, you know, hezekastic. Yes. Silence. I need depth as I get older. Do you mind pass me, though? I will, sir.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. So I, yeah. So somehow fairy tales get us there very quickly. The beginning of every fairy tale usually announces the problem. So it's really interesting. Fairy tales will say, once upon a time there was a queen and there was a king

and everybody loved them, but they could not bear children. So that tells you that something in the center of that community or kingdom is no longer productive. It's no longer fruitful. And what we learn from myths and stories, just like Jesus on the donkey coming into Jerusalem, genius comes from the margins. When the center is in crisis, the juice,

usually comes, and there's a lot of ridicule that will come with this character, comes from the edges, and then they bring the thing, often in a sacrificial manner that is required for the restoration of the kingdom. When did you start describing yourself as a storyteller? When did you decide, you know what? I am a bloody storyteller, I'm going to claim to be one. I would have been circling around the kind of things I do now for about 30 years. So quite young, I'm only 54. And in storytelling terms, that is a child.

You know, that's the wonderful thing, is you don't get good at this till you're about 84, so I'm still a rookie, you know. We've all got time, God willing. I think, you know what it is? Other people started to tell me I was. That's it. It came from, because for me, it's quite a word.

It's a powerful thing. It's a very fashionable word these days. Everybody claims to be a storyteller. And I think other people started to say that I was one. I tried a few stories. I was fairly mediocre. I didn't like the sound of my own voice much. I didn't know.

I often say, people say to me, what's great storytelling? I always say it's a wild way of telling the truth. So myth is not a fiction. It is not a seduction. It is a way that you try and announce the truth in a room without the use of the word I. Because myth is about the big we. I see.

You could be saying, I am 54 and I am rather unhappy and, you know, I'm in love with Dawn, but I don't think Dawn loves me. You can say that. Or you could say, you know, in the middle of, in the middle of his life, a man woke up and all the crows were nesting on his roof. Okay, well, what happens next? What is this strange image that's just arrived? Images seem to have a power that theory.

do not. And being in church yesterday, for example, I was in Dallas. The wonderful thing about, you know, a beautiful church is that writ large for your eyes are the great stories. Wow, there is the road to Emmaus. There is, you know, oh wow, there's, since Serafin of Sarov. You know, these great stories are revealing themselves to us. I don't think we're meant to live in a kind of, you know, landscape where all the deep sensuality of the experience is to be deprived of us. I think that's awful. This fellow says, I'm presuming it's a man, can you ask him why we're drawn to stories where the hero has to leave home?

Is that just a narrative device or does that say something uncomfortable about growing up? In the myths and the stories that we love, there are three phases. Severance threshold return. It always happens. We find this all over the world. There was a very famous book about it in the mid-20th century called The Hero with a Thousand Faces

by a recovering Catholic called Joseph Campbell. I don't think he ever got past Vatican 2. I think that's what was going on for Joe Campbell. A lot of people struggling with that, yeah. You know, but he was onto something. Now, to be fair, and I have to have my professor hat on for a minute, it's not like all myths mean the same thing, and they're all simple and they're all interchangeable,

But we do detect that stories often begin with a severance from what is familiar. That's the thing. That's what you mean by the severance. So in other words, you are suddenly placed in a moment of peril or crisis or opportunity. And if you don't follow the adventure, that is called the refusal of the call. And people do it every day. They see the opportunity and you go, this is too big for me. I can't do it.

I'm going to stay to my steady little life. But those are, I'm afraid to say, those are not the people that myths remember. Then you enter threshold. Now, threshold, to use a very modern word, is what you call liminal experience. Liminal means your time out in the wilderness or out in the world where nothing is certain,

where information comes from unexpected dimensions, and you learn things about yourself, you simply could not know if you'd stayed with the familiar. However, the really important bit is the third part, which is what we call the return. So in other words, you could stay out in the liminal forever. But the difficult implication of a myth is that in the end, it has to be of use.

What you've learned has to be of use for more people than just yourself. So in other words, it's a circular process where you return to the dimensions of your life that you previously knew, but with new, deeper information. In my own way, I'm going through that process with this Christian journey

and with this book in a way, it's been coming back out of, again, I haven't quite processed it like this until now. I'm returning and saying, if this is any use for anybody, this is what I learned on my 30-year walkabout. But don't think that reading the book gets you off the hook of doing it yourself. That would be dereliction of duty. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like Frodo and Sam coming back to the Shire and Frodo having to leave. I know that feeling. Yeah. What do you mean? Actually, as I'm thinking about it now, I'm thinking about veterans. I've worked with folk that have come back from Iraq and even,

further back with Vietnam, and they will have longed for home, longed for home. But the horrors that they have experienced and the complexity of being a warrior and how you can be, you can go within 48 hours from being in a battle situation to, you know, a barbecue in Dallas. That's, that gives you the bends, that stuff, especially if you can't articulate your story. So actually, I've often seen that in, in soldiers. that there's a way in which they did not come back. Also because as well as the horror out there that they may have experienced,

they also probably experienced peak encounters. You know, that moment where life is sublime in its life, death, vivacity and the comradeship of other people. So there's a story I tell called bearskin. I can't tell it today, but it's too long. But it's all about when you come back and you actually find that the village doesn't want you to come back. They say, we appreciate your function there. But there's no place for you now because we can see.

This is the, well, I don't know if it's exactly the same, but it's like when Christ cures the demoniac and sends the demon into the pigs. And you'd think everyone would be thrilled. They got their friend back, but they're all, they drive Jesus out of town. They do. Do you think that they were worrying about the price of the pigs? Yeah, I don't know. I think that's a serious question.

They were more concerned with the price of the pigs. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of pigs. That's a lot of meat. It is. Yeah. Right. This fella, again, don't I, says, does he think dragons represent something specific or are we reading too much into it?

Yeah. I guess that's a good question for us. I mean, how annoying is it for you when people analyze things to death. Should we just read them and not worry too much about what dragons dragons represent and so on

or is there a place for it? There is a place for it. There is a place for it. Now dragons being different things in different cultures, of course. So you would have a dragon in the West that is to do with

dragons always seem to collect things that are useless for them. Virgins and gold. They can do neither. They can do nothing with either. There's nothing that could be done. Whereas in other parts of the world, if you go towards Asia, dragons are sometimes seen

as tremendously sophisticated spiritual realities. So, in other words, I think it is fine to swim around and myths and symbols and metaphors of these stories. It is a symbolic universe that we're inhabiting, but not when you're stretching it on the rack of allegory all the time. Yeah, you go. That was what, you know, that was what Tolkien struggled a bit with Lewis. He was saying, is that, you know, you're making your points far, that they're too ornamental, you know, the Christian narrative. It needs to be more subsumed, although I think, as we would agree, that Lord of the Rings has lots of, you know, Catholic value systems in it, but it's fairly embedded. Yeah. It's, yeah.

It's native to it. It's not artificial. No. No. It's interesting that there's no explicit religion, is there, in the Lord of the Rings that I can tell? No. Because it's just part of the air and the trees. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Tolkien dealt with, you know, I would be familiar with the backstory of the, you know, all that Anglo-Saxon material, all the little bit of Irish that he was pulling upon, a lot of Norwegian and Scandinavian. A lot of that stuff is substantial, but it is not conventionally Christian, let's put it that way. And he does this incredible balancing act for all the way through that story. Coming to America and talking to younger folk, to be honest, I wish I could tell you that I'd, I can use immediately a language of myth and story that they all relate to. It takes a bit of time because there's such a deficit of that education. So over Christmas, me and my friends, we watched Lord of the Rings one, two and three. For me to remind myself, that is an absolutely valid form of, you know, metaphors and scenes to explain things to the younger folk that I meet on this tour. Some of them wouldn't even know the Odyssey or Bear Wolf or anything. All right.

Question here about, where is it, on enchantment? Yeah. Iron in the blood says, Matt, I'd love to hear him talk about enchantment in a disenchanted age. And this kind of brings us full circle to the beginning as to why your book's so popular. And, you know, our friend Rod Dreyer's book has come out on this as well. Everything wonder. So let's maybe talk about this. We live in a disenchanted.

Anyway, this person says, can fairy tales actually restore a sacramental vision of the world? they're accused of being nostalgic escapism. But maybe let's just kind of begin to wrap up here on this idea of why we need to, yeah, be re-enchanted and how to go about that. As you will imagine, I have a slightly conflicted relationship with the word enchanted. Because I always feel that Christ is a breaker of enchantments. I think he's about, as you know, utter reality. Utter reality. However, I know the kind of enchantment that they are referring to,

and I see the good in that. What is it they mean if you could give it another word? Well, it's, let me think about this for a second. I wonder if it's something like, if I might offer something, something like, you know, reality pregnant with meaning, as opposed to just sort of two-dimensional and who gives a shit anyway. Yes. the great psychologist James Hillman would call it the poetic basis of mind. And when you lose the

poetic basis of mind, this is an especially fallen universe. Now, it's an interesting thing for me as a Christian. I have to say, I've never had difficulty in accessing wonder. I've always had a kind of repository of that in me. But I must admit, the sorrowing of life and the brokenness of life seems to part of my new contract with Christ. Like I see it all the time now. I just see it. I see it. And it fills me with compassion, not anger. But I know that if you gaze into evil too much, what happens is it burns you out. And over the last 25 years or so, I've worked with a lot of young people who've been, as you should when you're young, you should care, you should be engaged in the world. But if you keep eyeballing wickedness, you're gazing into an abyss that is going to hollow you out. Now, in

myth, the way that you do it is you have a shield. And when you're facing a monster, you look at the shield so you can see the rough shape. But the shield, to use a metaphor, is your art. It's your skill. In some way, you are protected from the velocity of the encounter. The art does the, the poem does the work, the story does the work, because that moves our hearts. When we are disenchanted, we are further away from our own hearts. And when we are further away from our own hearts, we start to make very bad decisions as far as I can tell. And we are not behaving in a compassionate way. We do need stories and myths to live by.

We are storied people. we hunger for it. And I remain optimistic that even in times, even with the kind of duress we're experiencing now all over the world, I would almost prophesy that there will be a generation of storytellers that come to take that on. No pressure, no diamond. And if anything could come from my book, Litigies of the Wild,

it's a love letter to that generation. But I don't want to, I want to make sure that people understand when I say a generation of storytellers, I'm not talking about everybody's under 25. I'm talking about, you know, the visions and the dreams of the elders and the youth together.

Too many older people are too silent. You know, I feel that's something that I just have to say. I notice it all the time in churches, you know, we need to know what you have learned from your decades. of being on this planet.

What are the things that you want to pass on? You should be somewhere in your life in a position of eldership. Yeah. Thank you for writing the book. It's again called Liturgies of the Wild. Let me throw you a softball. Why should people pick it up?

Where should they pick it up? Well, you can kind of get it anywhere. I'm pleased to say. It's the first book of mine ever that you can actually walk into a store and find. If you are interested in a deeper life, This book is absolutely for you. If you are not, it's probably not.

Yeah. And I listen to it on Audible. And thank you for reading it. I always love when the author reads his own book. Bit of a slog. That's where you discover the mistakes. Oh, isn't it? I've only read one book of mine, and it's amazing because you're trying, you've got to do three things at once.

You've got to not bungle the words. Yeah. You've got to insert the meaning. Well, maybe that's just two things. But there were so many times, I swore I read that paragraph right, and the fellow's like, no, you missed. You didn't say this word. Okay. It is a slog.

What's interesting is my brilliant editor said to me, most people do not read books in one go anymore. They read differently. So she said, what you have to do, and there is a bit of this in the book, is every, say, 10 pages, you reintroduce a theme you've previously mentioned. Because there's a good chance they haven't picked a book up for a week. And so I noticed it in the book that, there's a kind of reprise every few pages.

And that's not lack of imagination on my behalf. It's just the fact that people read in a way that they didn't used to. So they need little reminders as they go. A few things to hold on to. And I love the different stories, the fairy tales that you kind of insert throughout that, yeah, kind of put you in this different frame of mind. I really enjoyed it. Final question.

I like to ask people this. What's something that you do that's very unimpressive for leisure? Don't say reading the Odyssey. No, no, no. What's the, what do you do to rest? Because you've been on a grueling trip here in the States. Presumably you'll be heading back to home. Tomorrow.

Go home tomorrow. Go home tomorrow. Then it all begins again on Sunday. I like mixed martial arts. So I enjoy watching that. You know, you have to be so diplomatic sometimes in public life. It's nice to watch something that is not diplomatic in any way, shape of form.

I love to cook, you know, slow cooking food throughout the day. I like to spend a lot of the day on my own. Then I like to walk for two hours. Then I like to go to sleep. Then I like my friends to come round. After the sleep? Yeah, yeah. Do they come over at night or in the morning?

They come home. They often come home early, come home or come round early evening when the food's ready or they've brought something with them. And so I like solitude and then I like the, I love to hear the latch being lifted. Nice. Yeah. Martin Short, thank you very much for coming. Well, that's your man.

Thank you for having me, Matt. It's wonderful.