Pints With Aquinas - On Pipes, Poetry, and the Christian Life (Malcolm Guite) | Ep. 579

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Malcolm Guite joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation covering Arthurian legend, the friendship of Tolkien and Lewis, and the deep human longing for mystery and enchantment. Ep. 579 - - - 📚 Resources Mentioned: Galahad and the Grail: https://www.rabbitroom.com/merlinsisle More on Malcolm Guite:  https://malcolmguite.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@MalcolmGuitespell https://www.instagram.com/malcolmguiteofficial - - - Today's Sponsors: Hallow:  Deepen your personal relationship with God today. Visit https://hallow.com/MattFradd to get 3 months free.  Exodus 90: Download the Exodus 90 app to start your 14-Day free trial or visit https://Exodus90.com/matt to learn more.  Charity Mobile: Visit https://charitymobile.com/MATTFRADD to get started. Free Phone offer with code MATTFRADD  PreBorn: Make a difference for generations to come. Donate securely online at https://preborn.com/PINTS or dial #250 keyword 'BABY' Catholic Match: Download the app or head to https://CatholicMatch.com and find your forever. St. Paul Center: Start your 30-day free trial today at https://StPaulCenter.com/pints - - - 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

You may yet walk through Merlin's Isle by Oaken Ash and Thorn. The ancient hills do not forget, and you might wake their wisdom yet. Who knows what wonders might be met on this midsummer morn? So I have taken up the tale. Thank you for taking up the tale. Everybody loves Arthur. And I loved Arthur before I was a Christian and after I was a Christian and in between. Would you tell me a bit about the relationship between Tolkien and Lewis?

Because people are fascinated with that. I think they're fascinated with it because we are starved for true male friendship. The word intimacy is now a euphemism, right? We've lost the way in which people can become incredibly close. I think there's a lot of young men in particular who are quite rightly sad about the fact that they feel like they don't belong to a culture. You only think you don't belong because you don't remember. You've been robbed by the last two generations who've just stopped remembering the long stories and the old stories. And in fact, story itself, to be a person is to be a person.

to be precisely in a story. We're on Holy Saturday, culturally right now. We've had a good Friday of utter destruction of the sacred and the divine, but Sunday is coming. Did you come in from England? Yeah, I came in last, what is today? A week ago on Tuesday.

Okay. I think I flew in, yeah. I had Martin on the show, Martin, sure. Oh, yeah. Well, I was supposed to have been seeing Martin in Oxford, and he couldn't make it be. He and I know each other well. Yeah.

He's writing the forward to the second volume of this. Beautiful. It's amazing. Well, this is great. It's a joy. Thank you for taking the effort to be. I'll be on the show. I've watched your videos from time to time and always love them.

And when I told my YouTube people that you'd be on, they were thrilled. Oh, it's great. Well, I'm very glad to be here. Yeah. Are you surprised? Well, anything that has both the word pint and Aquinas in it, you know, I'm in. Because I like both. Yeah.

No, I'm glad to be here and glad to, you know, to, there's something, well, we speak in England of a quiet revival. You know, it's English so it's quiet. But there is something of a recovery. I think there's a deep yearning for mystery and enchantment for, there has to be more than just, you know, the mere concatenation of sort of dead material rattling about in the cosmos. You know, people aren't going to, that doesn't satisfy you for long. And I think that desire, that return takes different forms.

And sometimes, you know, people don't realize that's all in the faith. You know, there are deep, deep mysteries to plumb. There are great spiritual heights to climb. But, you know, for a while, at least in England, it felt like Christianity was just like moralizing sermons and fundraising jumble sales, you know. So to recover the mystical tradition, to recover the medieval tradition, I think there's a real desire for it. Right. And in a way, England was sort of like the epicenter of the new atheism with Dork and the kitchens. Yeah, yeah.

And so you had those buses. God probably doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah. But then, you know, those guys are coming out the other end of that now, some of them. Yeah. And there was always a massive contradiction between the kind of bleak material reductivism of the official New Age stance. But the fact that they kind of still needed to sneak over the divide and borrow language of purpose and beauty and meaning, which their actual science and philosophy couldn't provide.

I remember I was once present when Richard Dawkins was being in. And so the interviewer said to him, Professor Dawkins, what is the meaning of life? And, you know, without a hair's turn, he said, the replication of RNA and DNA. But the follow-up question was, what music would you like at your funeral? And he immediately, his face lights up and he says, Bach's B minor, mass. So like, go figure. Where did that come from? And if you have a reductive account that can't account for, you know.

for the intuition we all have at moments of great beauty, that this is more than material, that it comes from somewhere else, that there's a kind of beckoning. There was, you know, what it invokes in us, the joy which, you know, C.S. Lewis famously called, you know, the yearning for the far-off country. Yeah.

And I think one of the places that the recovery and the revival and I hope the return to an understanding in which, you know, the world is full of beauty and meaning because there is a God who is himself beauty and meaning has made it. You know, I think a lot of that is coming through the arts. It's actually coming through music and poetry and experiences that simply can't be reduced to the firing of neurons and the unwinding of self-earning.

genes. I'm not saying that there aren't, you know, there are synapses firing in both of our brains right now, but what we're talking about is never going to be reduced to brain chemistry. Right. Yeah. You know, it manifests itself at a physical level, but it's much more than that. Well, I'm honored to be able to get to have a pipe with you. Now, I got to, every time I smoke this pipe, I have to apologize. Yeah. That's ridiculous. Yeah. That's, um, it's like a man wearing a kilt in America. Yeah. You can't just wear it. You have to say, you have to explain yourself. Yeah, yeah.

So I got this from Ukraine. It's made of pear wood. Oh, wow. And I got to be honest with you, I don't love a pipe. I want to love a pipe more than cigars. Yeah. But I often find that if I have a small pipe like that, my gag reflex kicks in. Oh, really?

Right, yeah. That's weird, yeah. So with a cigar, you know, I can hold it and take it in and out. Whereas I can hold it and for some reason it works well. So that's the story. You feel these old-fashioned, these really long pipes go back to the day when people say, man, I'm holding fire, I'd better not. Sometimes I think I need, the danger of these shorter ones.

Well, you've got a beard. Is that I can set my beard on fire, like I've done it before. But I also have some longer church ward, church waters, as we call those. Yeah, that's right. You have some tobacco on you? I do, yeah. I've just, what have you got? Well, this is called Firebird.

Oh, that's cool. But listen, I'm an amateur, so you can tell me about everything. It's a great name for a start. Yeah, Russian fairy tales, I think. Yeah. Oh, this is nice because now this is what we call a flake tobacco. Okay. So it's compressed and you've got to rub it in your fingers.

Yeah. And then make it into it so it's more combustible. And I really like that. That's part of the whole tactile experience. I think the whole point, or one of the points about smoking a pipe, is that in a world where we're, everything's doom, everyone's doom scrolling, We're being distracted. We're abstracting ourselves out.

We're trying to cover 15 things at the same time. You know, and you can smoke a cigarette nervously and make all that worse. You don't even know what you're doing with your hands. But a pipe, you're rubbing the tobacco, you're packing the pipe in a certain way, you're lighting it more than once, you're scented, you're doing something bodily.

But paradoxically, that actually comes once you're smoking to opening your mind out. setting it free for conversation. Beautifully put. And for me, there's a... Yeah, you're tending to something. It's sort of like why people are preferring records to just play something on Spotify.

Yeah, exactly. And I think this is going to carry on. So I know a lot of people, you know, in my world of poetry and loving books and, you know, music and the arts and who kind of are apocalyptic and terrified about AI because it's going to take it all away from us and there's going to be this fake creativity. but it'll do the real creators out of a job. I don't worry about that at all. I actually think that it's going to be so ubiquitous and so bad,

like the internet is already filling up with AI slop. You call it slop, don't we? Yeah. Yeah. And also, when you get to the point when a film, a video is so completely fakable that you'll never going to know if you see something, a video on the internet, you'll never know if it's authentic or not.

That is going to put a huge premium on what we're doing right now. In person experience. Absolutely. Absolutely. Poetry recitals. You know, poetry recitals, a beautiful book. I mean, one of the things, you know, I like about this, you know, this book that I'm just over here with Rabbit Room is it's a physically beautiful object.

And I just want to, you know, I have books that my grandfather gave to my mother and my mother gave to me and I will. Well, this edition, just for those who are wondering what we're talking about, Galaad and the Grail, tell us a bit about this and people should just, so are they selling this edition? Yeah, there's that one as well. This is as good as it gets. That is as good as it gets. But even this main regular one is a beautiful hard back.

You know, it's got a proper ribbon for keeping your place. The illustrations are out of this world. The guy who is doing these illustrations, Stephen Crots is just amazing. Yeah, for those watching, you'll just have to trust us. There'll be links below. Please pick up Malcolm's book. I read fairy tales to my kids almost every night, and this would be something. I cannot wait to read.

So this is in one way the kind of fruit of a lifetime's love of these stories. I started with these stories where I was very young. Actually, my mother told them to me without a book in front of her. And when she told them to me, she was not summarizing a kiddies dumbed down Arthur. You know, she was medieval historian. She kind of had the sources when she loved them. So she, there's all the way she told it, you know, it had depth. It had a kind of luminous shimmering that she didn't airbrush out the spiritual and Christian parts of it.

And neither did she backtrack on all the treasurer. tragedies and the hurts and the flaws that take. So I mean, just to give you an example, I can remember it's really vivid. So you've got to think I'm about eight years old and I think my mum has decided that I'm old enough for this bit of the story. And some people might think maybe I wasn't old enough even then. So she tells me, this just doesn't make it into a lot of modern versions. She tells me the tale of the dollarous strike, as it's called, which is where this rash

knight, Balin, you know, who's kind of on a vendetta. He's already been thrown out of Arthur's court for a bit of violence in the midst of table fellowship that we know, so he's trying to achieve some quest to redeem himself. But he finds this castle where there were, didn't use, you know, just like, I've been this way before, there was no castle, you know, and of course he doesn't know it's the Grail castle. But he thinks the knight he's pursuing might be there. So he goes in, the Fisher King is there, there's this beautiful feast. They're all told to put their swords at the door, you know, there's no...

And then he sees the guy he's been pursuing, and he's concealed a dagger, and he comes up and stabs him, the dagger breaks. And he's broken the table fellowship again. He's sinned against prime courtesy and hospitality. So the king, you know, starts pursuing, and my mum starts to... And he runs out into the castle, and he's going upstairs after stair, and you know, in castles you expect to find swords or spears on the wall or shields or something, you know, and he's looking everywhere.

He's unarmed now. Can't find anything, so he keeps going. And my mother was telling me this, and I realized, no, it's all in Murray, you know, that as he gets deeper into the castle, there's a kind of change in the atmosphere. There's almost like a kind of high ringing, singing in his ears. He seems to hear angelic voices. Then he begins to discern the words, you know, man of sin come no further, man of blood, stay back, but he's being pursued.

Then, of course, he crosses the threshold into the holiest of places, because in this castle is the chapel of the grail. And the Holy Grail is there, and he comes in. And again, fall down on your face, you know, this place where you are standing his holy ground. I heard that phrase from my mother's lips in an Arthur story before I heard it in scripture when the Lord speaks to Moses from the burning bush. But this is a burning bush.

So he looks, he sees the grail. You know, this is the very Eucharistic presence of Christ, you know, shining. And above it, because this is where the hallows are, is a spear from which three drops of blood are continually falling. And we, you know, my mom says, Balin didn't know this, but this is the spear that pierced Christ's heart, you know, brought brought to our islands. And again, the voices tell him to stand back.

And then he does the worst thing. I'll say, oh, Mom, he rushes forward. He seizes this spear, this holy thing, and turns it around and sacrilegially uses it to wound the king, is where the Fisher King gets his wound. And of course, in the minute the king receives the wound, the whole part of the castle falls down, this complete darkness. And he and the king is wounded, and the grail and the spear are buried alive.

And it's like being in this epoch. Of course, it's three days and three nights. And on the third day, the stones move. And Merlin has moved them, and he comes up. And then Merlin says to Balin, you have dealt the dollar. stroke. And because the king and the land are won in wounding the king, you have laid

the land waste for three counties wide. You know, the fish die in the streams, the crops fail, the cows can't carve, everything is wasted and barren. Because you've done this and I, and you know, he has to ride three days with everybody coming to the door and curse. At this point, I have to stop my mum,

I say, mum, like, how could that even be? Like, he didn't even know what it was, although he'd had plenty of warning, you know. And how could what one person did lay so many lives and so much land to waste? That doesn't seem right, Mum. And then she kind of looked at me and said, well, I'm telling you this story because you need to know that you live in a world as perilous as that. And this is like 1965, and we've had the Cuban Missile Crisis not long ago.

You know, there's the fear of a nuclear winter. Then she tells me how, you know, I'm here because my parents love, love each other, but they take a risk bringing a child into such a world. And they have to take that risk in hope. And, you know, I'm devastated by all's butt. But my mum, unlike T.S. Eliot, my mom did not leave me in the wasteland. So she said the only thing that made Ballin's shame and guilt bearable as it rides out through this devastation is that Merlin kind of whispers a word of hope to him and says,

one day the good night will come, the grail night will come. and he will win through the wasteland and come to the grail castle and he will achieve the grail and then with the same spear that wounded the king the king will be healed and when the king is healed

the land will be healed and I was, well, it's that moment that's Galahad and you know I was waiting for the stories of the coming of Galahad and when I was out as a kid you know that it's playing nights of the round table like I didn't play it being Lancelot

because like I was never going to be picked for the school football team. Like I was not the captain of the school, Lanslott guy. But I figured it could be that guy, Galaad. Galahad who has this, you know, this spiritual life, this awareness of Christ, this desire to heal, this sense of restoring. I mean, because I was supposed to say, my mum, what tell me about it? And she said, the spear that pierced Christ's heart, the spear of long jaunders, why is that so significant?

Which says, well, look, in all our history, since Kane slew Abel, there's been a great chain of violence and hurting. And every act of violence is met with another act of violence back, and the pain and the blood just deepens. And finally, all that violence reaches Christ, the Son of God. And he is the one person who, as the spear pierces, his heart, turns it around and offers love and forgiveness. I mean, in a way, that should mean the last time a spear ever pierced a human heart.

But, you know, we've carried on with our wars. That's the way we are as fallen people. but at least that spear should have been sacred. So to turn the sacred and use it for the synonymese violence was the kind of great sacrilege. But even the greatest sacrilege, God has an answer for it.

And so, you know, the Grail night comes and the, you know. And only years later I get to, you know, by his stripes we are healed and the realization of this paradox that, you know, well, I mean, to me, the priest's poet, George Herbert, you know, shows all of that is in the love of God. He's like best lines on the sacrament ever, I think, which is love is that liquor, sweet and most divine, which my God feels as blood, but I as wine, yeah.

So I am really excited to tell you that I have partnered with Theotokos Rosaries. These are, without a doubt, the most beautiful rosaries I have ever seen in my life. Tercost Rosary sent me one maybe about a year ago or so. And I remember being absolutely blown away. You probably heard me talking about it. I've sent one to my mom and dad and uncle. I give them to some of the guests that we have. And everyone who receives one is blown away. These are just a total different caliber. And when you think about the kind of money we're willing to spend on a phone, it's like, you know, sure, you can pray a rosary on your fingers or on a string rosary and it would work just the same, obviously. But if you're looking for a beautiful, you're looking for a beautiful,

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because it's so beautiful and so sacred looking. So again, go to dailywire.com slash shop to pick one up today and thank you to Theotokos Rosaries for partnering with us. So all of that was to come, but when I went, was a, was a, was a student in the 70s at Cambridge and reading the this stuff, I realized how close my mum was to the actual Mallory, she was kind of quoting it. So it all comes back to me. But now the wasteland means something more because I'm thinking about ecological disaster. I'm thinking about, you know, and again, both the acknowledgement that we did this and we do the this because we're sinners, because we're out of line with God.

So there's another layer of the wasteland. Then later, when I'm confronting what I feel is the terrible disenchantment of the world and the effects of like bad philosophy in the 17th and 18th century and the split between the spiritual and the material and, you know, Cartesian dualism, I'm realizing that's another kind of wasteland, which also needs to be healed. but when I began to think I want to write this as an epic it was only then that I realized

that this, I read all the scholarship that said, oh, all the king and the dying king and the wounded king and the land is wasted and it's all, this is pre-Christian, you know, you know, what they call fertility rituals and myths

and, you know, not to be trusted, the book, you know, all this stuff. And, well, I mean, first of all, you've got to be careful with the word pre-Christian if you're a fully trinitarian Christian because in the beginning was the word and all things were made through in him.

You know, there is the undergirding presence of the Logos everywhere before he does this incredibly gracious thing and makes himself known to us, you know, in Jesus. But when I thought about this, I realized all these stories, I'm sure there is a pre-Christian element in there. But the point is the Arthur stories bring it to Christ. This isn't some random Celtic cauldron of generation or, you know, the spirit. of Braun. Now, is that illegitimate? Did they take some pagan

thing and give it just a Christian gloss? I don't think so. So when I was looking back at, you know, obviously if you're going to write an English epic, you kind of have to get it okay with Milton, you know? So, you know, you think Paradise Lost, right? You know, plot spoiler. But, you know, it's a 12-book epic

on two short chapters in Genesis. He doesn't even get to the moment or Eve reaches for the fruit till book 9. But when he describes this colossal cosmic turner point, this moment of our fall, so saying in evil hour, Eve's hand, you know, with rash hand she reached, he doesn't say, so this particular individual woman did a private peccadillo and it'll be fine with therapy, you know, she didn't, she, the first thing that Milton says at the moment when humankind falls is this, he says, earth felt the wound

and nature sighing out through all her works gave sign that all was lost and he's riffing on the line in Genesis cursed she'll be the ground because of you I thought wait a minute this wasteland story you know Adam and Eve are the king and queen

and there's a you know we are our royal priesthood these stories about kings are a waste story about you you know and every man is the Adam of his own soul so this story of how when we go wrong, the world goes wrong with us. And then, as you trace it out, you think,

this, it's all, it's all in Romans. I mean, the whole creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. And again, you know, nature was, creation was subjected to futility, but in hope. And in the coming of Christ and in the resurrection and in our being made new, is the beginning of a new creation. So this story, whether it was pagan in so-called pagan in orange or not, of the unhealable wound, the fall, the wasteland, and the recovery, and the turning of the recovery being through the blood of Jesus Christ in sacrament.

That's what the grail is. You know, and the blood that falls into the thigh of the wounded king that heals him and then heals the land, it's the blood of Christ. It's not, you know. So what I feel is going on there, and I think the Arthurian stories just do this beautifully. is it's kind of baptizing the imagination of our pre-Christian ancestors.

It's taking some of their deepest stories and showing that the thing that really makes sense of those stories is the coming of Christ. It's a bit like Paul, you know, in Athens where he says, you know, men of Athens, I see your religious and also. As I observed the objects of your worship, I saw this statue to an unknown God. Him whom you worship is unknown, him I preach.

You know, and so there's just layer on layer. Beautiful. But it's not just like a flat Disney cartoon or a kind of Hollywood blockbuster where people are just knocking each other off horses for two hours. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I like seeing people knock each other off horses. Don't get me wrong.

I want to get back to that, but before we do, let's talk about tobacco. All right. Everybody wants to know what is your favorite tobacco? Okay, so I've got two if I'm allowed to, because it depends where I am. Have as many as you wish. If I'm upstairs in my study in the house, it needs to be an aromatic. My wife will tolerate an aromatic. Exactly the same as my wife.

So I tend to, there's an English one Well, there's one called Kendall Black Cherry. That sounds lovely. So this is pretty, this is not the one I brought from home. It's one I got that's pretty similar here. This amazingly is called Grand Mariner. I bought it in Alexandria, in Virginia. But, okay, but sorry, the Black Cherry one, what's it called?

It's called Kendall Black Cherry. Kendall Black Cherry, right. And so the one I smoke indoors. But I like, I smoke Peterson Pipes and I love some of their tobacco blends. So there's a, there's a flake tobacco like that, but except instead of being in little long flakes, it's in little tiny coins. Yeah.

Why? Is there any... So originally when they made that tobacco, the tobacco is called Deluxe Navy Rolls. Yeah. It's just, it smells like baking bread, actually. Yeah. So what they did was they, when the British Navy was a thing,

and well, it still is a thing, but when they were sailing out for months and, you know, you got your tot of rum, but you also had got tobacco, and they compressed the tobacco into, long tubes, like thin rolls, literally. And then they would slice, they slice off those and they become coins.

So that's still done, it's still pressed that way. And you buy the tin and it's got these like round coins or lozenges of curled tobacco. And you just, like a couple of those, you break up in your hands and you fill your pipe. But I only smoke. That's the aromatic. No, the aromatic is the candle black cherry.

So the, but the one. The deluxe navy rolls is more full on English. Is that the brand? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's what Peterson who make it. But it used to be Dunhill, and then they went. Do you prefer an English blend to an aromatic? Yeah, I actually like the, I mean, I like the aromatic,

but if I want a real pipe, a real strong bowlful that's going to wake me up and accompany me in my writing. Yeah. The kind of thing where, like, Lewis, C.S. Lewis in his preface to St. Athanasius on the incarnation. Yeah. It's a great, great book, but great preface. He talks about the unexpected.

to joy that comes in reading hard theology and just getting your mind there. Yep. And he says, when you're going through a bit of tough theology with a pipe clench beneath your teeth, a pencil in your hand, and suddenly the spirit sings as you're doing it. So that's, I need stronger tobacco for that. But I smoke that down in my heart, my writing heart at the bottom of the garden, which is called the Temple of Peace, you know, more in hope than expectation. but so yeah and I have I have some other more robust blends that you know got

Latikier and Parique and you know so the cavern dishes and the Virginia's are the milder end okay and then you can get these you know much stronger flavor you don't want too much of you you make your own mixture you're kind of mealange as the French call it and may I borrow your lighter yeah yeah and then why I don't I have some really nice old lighters, but I never travel with them because you can randomly have your lighters taken off you. So I don't want to lose a good one, so I travel

with, we all need to do mine again. But this lighting and relighting is a whole part of the experience. Talking apparently was always constantly relighting his pipes, you know, and thinking in between and, you know. Yeah, for some reason when I smoke the church warden, I find I have to relight it less

and I don't know why that is. Anyway, so this, I got this really nice temper while I was here. It's like horn and wood. So I sometimes name pipes and tempers and this one's called Storm Crow. And the reason why is I've just seen the prelude, the forward to the next volume, which Martin Shaw, my friend has written. And I first met with Martin on the wings of a massive storm that was sweeping through. and it blew out all the lights,

and we had like three days in his cottage by candlelight. Come on. With nothing but single molten fairy. Come on. Anyway, so in the preface, it says that because of that, he and his friends all call me storm cry. May is the month we honor the Blessed Virgin Mary. And what better way to draw close to her son than through prayer?

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Again, that's hallow.com slash Matt Frad for three months free. Brothers, summer's fast approaching, a season we all need for rest and a bit of breathing room. But if we're honest, it's also a time when faith can quietly take the back seat. That's why I'm really excited about what Exodus 90 is doing with the Kings of Summer Challenge. It's a beautiful invitation for men to slow down, pray and reflect on Christ's kingship over our lives and the astonishing truth that through baptism, we actually share in that kingship ourselves. This year's theme is The Return of the King, led by one of my favorite people in the whole world, Joseph Pierce.

If you've ever heard Joseph speak or read his work, you know how deeply he ties Tolkien's universe to the heart of our faith? I've had him on the show a couple of times now to talk about Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, and he is truly a knowledgeable and wise man. Through the challenge, we'll journey not just through the big, biblical books of kings, but through Tolkien's world itself, seeing how the kingship of Christ calls us to order, joy and renewed purpose. So if you're longing for a summer that's deeper,

more centered on Christ and full of meaning, this is for you. Join the Exodus 90 Brotherhood today and sign up for the Kings of Summer Challenge starting May 25th. Download the Exodus 90 app to start your 14-day free trial or visit Exodus 90.com slash Matt to learn more. That's Exodus 90.com slash Matt. Download the app today and become the man God created you to be. So did you say you name your tan? I named the Tampa Storm Craig. Could you name this pipe for me? Hmm. Well, there we are. Well, I think I would call that pipe Thorin. Thorin, all right. I think it'd be Thorin Oak and Shield style of pipe. And you'd be smoking long bottom leaf in it. Okay. Deal, done. Thank you. Or Southern Star. Yeah. And the whole pipeweed thing. I, I still.

I started wanting to smoke a pipe when I was like 17 or 18 on reading The Lord of the Rings. Right. And I've been smoking pipes ever since. And I remember when I like, I told my, I thought, I've got to tell my mom I'm smoking. She'll be really cross with me. My parents didn't smoke. So I told her I was smoking a pipe and she said, oh, a pipe, that's all right. Your mum sounds terrific.

And then she remembered that when she was a little girl, when her dad, her dad smoked a pipe, my grandfather, who I never met. And he had, he only lit the pipe when the day. day's work was done and he was relaxed and ready and they knew it would be story time. Oh, come on. Oh, come on. Yes. And so they loved it. And then my uncle and my mother would get on the arms of the chair and he would read to them and tell them stories while smoking a pipe.

So my mama's loved pipe smoke ever since, you know, and she's totally fine with her son smoking a pipe. Yeah. And it's interesting what you said about your wife because I'll smoke a pipe in our living room while reading to the kids. My wife loves the aromatic. She sees it more like incense than anything else. but she does not like the smell of cigar. Yeah. I know, cigar, that's just the fact.

I smoke cigars. I like cigars as well, but I smoke them down in my hut. Because they don't have a great room note, as they say. But that does. Whatever you're smoking now, is a lovely room note. This is an aromatic that I bought in Virginia, and it's called Grand Mariner.

Yeah. Which I guess is a play on Grand Manier. Okay. But also on ancient mariner. And I'm a big, big Coleridge fan and the rhyme of the ancient mariner. a key text. And why do you like...

Do you want some Lugge of Wollum? I'd love some, thank you. And why do you like Peterson's? Well, one of the earliest pipes I bought was a little, small little Peterson system. When I went to Ireland, when I was 19, I had a long, slow ramble round Ireland.

And so obviously, Peterson's an Irish make. But also, I kind of, they had a literary ring for me because, in those days, like, this was before I returned to Christian faith and I was a kind of weird mixture of existentialism and like little bits of Zen that I'd picked up or whatever. But Samuel Beckett was a really important writer for me and I kind of knew waiting for Godo by art practically. And there's a great bit where a character called Potso

is smoking a pipe and then in the second act he loses it and he says, a genuine Capon Peterson he says. You know, it's like I knew that. I was very satisfied. When I was an undergraduate in Cambridge I did a bit of theatre and drama I mean I was studying English literature so the European theatre group put on a production of waiting for Godo in which I played lucky the poor suffering servant who but they needed a pipe and I still had that Peterson I bought in Ireland you know and I produced it and so the pipe that Potso in Beckett had inspired me to buy was then actually smoked by the that very pipe smoked by the character on stage.

How many pipes do you own, roughly? Oh, I have a guess. Yeah, I would say probably 30 at least, I would have thought. Yeah, it's becoming a problem for me, too, even though pipes aren't what I predominantly smoke. Well, I tend to, now I'll only buy a pipe if I, like, it's to celebrate some special occasion. That's nice. Yeah. When I went to, for the first time as a scholar in residence at the kilns in Oxford, which is C.S. Lewis's house.

Like, I went down to the same pipe shop that Lewis and talking very. visited in Oxford, and I bought a C.S. Lewis pipe. And later when I did a talking lecture, I bought a talking pipe, which was a church warden. So I have, you know, a lot of the pipes. My dear friend Jimmy Aiken, who loves a good pipe, says there's two kinds of pipe smokers. There's those who just stick it in their craw and that's it. And then there are fiddlers. Yeah. They're always do, and that's me, I think. I'm always fiddling. Yeah, it gives you something to do with your hands. Yeah. But it is nice. It's more of a contemplative activity, I find. Yeah.

No, it is. But I'm on my own, you know. You know, it's, I wrote a poem once called Smoke Rings from My Pipe. I remember you reading it on one of your videos. And, you know, I leave the world with all its hopeless hype, its pressures and it's ever-ringing till, you know. Wingers and winters each with their own gripe. I pack them in tobacco leaves until they're blown away

and smoke rings from my pipe, you know. Then I free. Then at last my real work has begun My chance to chant To exercise the skill of summoning the muses. So I associate pipe smoking with the calm comes Before writing poetry. That's beautiful.

Yeah, slancher. So Lagavulian I love Isla Maltz. I spent a good one guy. When I was getting this boat to the point Where I thought, okay, it's deliverable but it's meant to be read out live. Water here, too. In this one, is water in case you need.

So my friends and I went to the island of Isla. Yeah. And the deal was that we would go around the distilleries in the day, and including to Lagovulin. And then in the evening, I would read them evening by evening the whole poem. This particular one. So, you know, anyway, well, as you know, the Isla mults, are they got this slight smokiness and peatiness.

And I like some smoke with my smoke. So, ah ha, it tastes like, I've always said it tastes like, um, campfire and sea water. Yeah, exactly. You can kind of, there's a bit of Atlantic seaweed kind of. Mm-hmm. But then I'll have other peedy scotchers that feel artificial, even if they aren't. It just feels too much. No, this one, but this one, because this is 16, it's had a chance to mature and smooth.

Mind you, I wasn't very mature when I was 16, but you know, that's the way it was. What do you say? I'm sure you have encounter Christians who might say, look, your body's a temple of the Holy Spirit. You shouldn't be smoking bloody tobacco. Well, the first thing I'd say, just on the health front, is that pipes and cigars are in a different category

from cigarettes because you don't inhale. So you're not taking this stuff down into your lungs. You're tasting it on the tongue. You're breathing it out. And I think you've got to balance the benefits. Well, the other thing, if I might just interject. A mulberry cigarette has about 14 ingredients.

Yeah. You smoke a premium cigar, or if you're using premium leaf, you've got one ingredient, namely leaf. Yeah. Exactly. And so one of the problems about that we have a tendency now, which is part of the whole problem of our culture, to medicalize everything, to see ourselves as machines.

And I have, you know, maximize the ideal impact. and output and all that stuff and through, just as if... Yeah, productivity. You know, and that completely misses most of what it is to be human. One of the things that it is to be human is to belong to a culture and a story and a tradition which you receive and carry on. So I was conscious that, you know, my two of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien, not only smoke pipes, but smoke pipes together and discussed and read their books

while smoking pipes. Then I go back, another of my predecessors in the whole Arthurian venture, Alfred Lord Tennyson, inveterate pipe smoker. You know, and so there's a tradition, just like there's a tradition with pubs and pints or, you know, single mults.

You're no longer an isolated individual. You're not doing something for an immediate sensory hit. Of course, there is a sensory hit. But you're interpreting that and celebrating it because the pipe is a kind of sign of belonging to a long tradition of gentle, meditative, parlor side or pub side or fireside, mellowed, thoughtful conversation. That's what's going on, you know, when you're like, it's kind of what we're doing now.

Yeah. And there's a lot of young men in particular who are quite rightly sad about the fact that they feel like they don't belong to a culture. Yeah. They want to. What's your advice to that? Well, I think I'd want to say you only think you don't belong

because you don't remember and you don't remember because you've been robbed by the last two generations who've just stopped remembering the long stories and the old stories and in fact, story itself I mean, I remember when I first heard the term

postmodern, right? And I rejoice because I thought, oh, thank God modernism is over we can get back to the long, you know. And then I discovered actually, no, this is kind of hypermodernism. And the thing that they, you know, the thing that postmodernism was most supposed to critique or do away with was the idea of what they call the meta-narrative. Yeah. So the big, overarching story that makes sense of life that we're in.

No, no, no, there's a suspicion of any kind of narrative in the death of the author. And then the suspicion is that anybody who, the narrative is about power. And then the meta-narrative is that there is no meta-narrative, which they didn't even argue. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But they, yeah.

So the people who are behind this, you know, ultimately are the three, as it were, masters of suspicion. So Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. And we then get what people call the hominetics of suspicion. So you think that what you see is not what you get. You have to unmask it and there's something sinister behind it. And the sinister thing behind it is power and the powerful against the oppressed. Now, there's an element of truth that some narratives have been set up.

to control others. Any good thing can be abused. But because narrative and storytelling and even myth-making can be abused, and you can think of the false, the kind of hideous exploitation of myth, say, in the Nazis. You know, you want to resist that. But the fact that there are false narratives doesn't mean that there isn't a true narrative. Mm-hmm. Any more than the existence of monopoly money doesn't disprove real money. Exactly. You know, and in fact, the analogy of currency is very is very apposite here. Words can be devalued and they can be revalued and there can be a kind of inflation and then they can be, you know, and it's the

advertisers and they're politicians who are causing verbal inflation and words are, you know, sounding bigger and bigger and meaning less and less. Yes. You know. Lewis's critique of how we use the word gentleman. Yeah, poets have to come back in and restore and and redeem that. So there's a brilliant... Anyway, some of... But the really interesting thing is some of the philosophers and philosophers of language

who were most associated with that dismantling of narrative, that uber suspicion, which of course reduces you, if you're not part of a story, what are you? You know, if you don't remember anything, you are literally dismembered, your fragments of personality,

your little bits competing. And then, you know, eventually it all goes down to tiny little reels and short. which you endlessly scroll through but have no connection with each other. But to be a person is to be precisely in a story, and its narrative is what gives coherence and meaning to events. Otherwise, they're just random. It's just like one damn thing after another.

Now, these philosophers of the sort of, you know, Derrida Foucault, you know, who took this, all this stuff away from us, of course, then turned it on themselves and began to suspect even whether language was real, whether we don't all just, we're in our isolated skulls and it's my truth versus your truth and I've no idea what you make of the thing I try to mean to you. So at one point, George Steiner, who was part of this in a book called After Babel, described communication, so-called, and the use of language.

He said, we're like walled cities, each entirely enclosed in the concavity of our own skulls. And when we think we're talking, what we're doing is lobbing verbal grenades over the barricades, and we hear the dull sound of them going off, and we've no idea what damage we're doing. But the point is, if you really believe that, why do you write a 300-page book about it? Anyway, I only say this,

because George Steiner and others are now off coming out the other end of this. It's like, if the fool persists and his folly will be wise. So one of the most significant books for this world, I mean, I'm a Cambridge academic, so I do the literary-critical theory thing as well. You know, and it's not that my Arthurian stuff is my guilty pleasure. It's actually the way out of the waistlap. Anyway, Steiner suddenly wrote this bombshell book.

It was back in the end of the 80s. And it's called Real Presences. And basically, he asks the question, is there anything in what we say? And the first paragraph is like a summary of all that stuff. and it's saying, we mistake language, this is early Victorian, we mistake language for reality because we can say a sentence with the word God in it.

We think there's a God, but it's just a verbal construct. It's just our constructed truth. It's just like we speak of sunset, even though we know perfectly well that the sun doesn't set or rise, but the earth turns. We don't talk of earth turn. So these are sort of ghosts in the machine and skeletons in the kind of linguistic closet.

So you get this for two, I nearly gave up on the book, right? I'm reading these two paragraphs. I'm like, oh, come on, you know. Why are you even writing? And then the third paragraph begins, the purpose of this essay is to argue the reverse. And he says, I've tried to completely deconstruct language and everything that language has to say.

And I find meaning persists in spite of all. Where does that come from? And then he says, he uses exactly the analogy. He says, our language is current. It really does work. In spite of all our theories, we really do communicate. Corad, core loquitor, you know, as Newman says, heart, speaker, thunder, heart.

And he says, how is that? And he says, there must be some actual transcendent meaning. And he refers to this meaning as someone who underwrites all the verbal checks we pass to each other. Very good. There is a bank of meaning. Yeah. And basically he ends up rediscovering the theology of the Logoth. And he's a great Jewish intellectual, I mean, he's died now, you know, part of that sort

of secularized Jewish intellectual fervor of which there are so many brilliant examples. I'm like that gifted people, but often kind of fending off the God thing because it's such a big. And eventually he just kind of out of his linguistic things, he ends up coming up with not only a theology of transcendence, but borrowing. the language of incarnation and passion. For him, the incarnation of the word is right at the core

of the meaning of language. And he says, well, where, he says, culturally, he says, this is amazing, and I think it's really prophetic, talking about the whole world from death of God, you know, deconstruction, obviously death of God's a Nietzschean phrase,

you know, that he says, do you know where we are? We're on Holy Saturday, culturally, right now. We've had a good Friday of utter destruction of the sacred and the divine, but Sunday is coming. And are you hopeful that this sort of revival towards Christianity? Yeah, I am, absolutely hope. Part of that? Yeah.

Well, I'm hopeful just, I mean, you know, we may not have hopes in this world, but we know. I'm hopeful because this has happened before many times culturally, and the first place it happened, as Steiner actually rightly suggests, was at Golgather. Yeah. Like we've nailed that, we've buried that. That's not going to happen again. God is dead. God is dead. Oh no, wait a minute, empty tomb.

He's bloody back again. He's bloody back again. And in fact, and the man who gave him the tomb in my legends and stories brings all the holy things to England of all places, like the furthest reach of empire. But this is, you know, 18th century, they were happy. People like Voltaire were happily saying, like, all that's over, you know, we've progressed, we've moved on. What happens at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century, massive Christian, revival, particularly in the British Isles, and a twin, like, it's a kind of God's Pinser movement, because on the one hand, you've got Wesley and the whole Methodist revival and the evangelical

revivals of the Clapham sect. And on the other hand, you've got the Oxford movement. You've got, you know, people like Pusey and Newman and, you know, Manning. I mean, and Newman and Manning, of course, become Roman Catholics, but there's a whole bunch of people who say, oh, wait, the thing that's missing here is sacrament. We've totally split the spirit and the material. But here's a beautiful tradition that speaks of these things as a mystery, which says the spiritual has the humility to become material on our behalf. And that changes the matter, the nature of matter forever. I saw a great meme. It's a kid standing on a couple of books looking at a library and he says, God exists. And then the next is a man standing on several

books and he says, God does not exist. He's looking just above the bookshelf. There's a third guy who's got so many books that he's now looking at the universe and he says, oh shit, it's God again. Yeah, yeah, well, that's great. Yeah, so, I mean, let's put it this way. I mean, to borrow a phrase of Aquinas, since we're having pints with Aquinas. I mean, God is the ground of all being. So the ground of all being is not going to go away. And he doesn't need to employ kind of double glazing salesmen and insurance agents to get his word out there. It's always going to be there. He's the root and ground of being. And also, all the atheist arguments are old.

I've been talking about Aquinas again. So when I decided I was going to specialize in medieval literature, I thought I've got to read the guys, you know, I'm right Augustine. So I had Aquinas as some a contrigentiles, which is, you know, I'm a Gentile speak to me. Yep. So you may remember that. Oh.

That book more or less begins with, you know, is there a God? Yeah. It would seem not for the following 10 reasons. Right. And he gives you 10 really, and I thought, blimey, I'm an atheist. How's he going to get out of this? I'm an atheist, I've only thought of five of these. So he really, and that's totally disarming.

Yeah. Because the modern narrative is people only believe, you know, like Christianity is for dummies. Yeah. You're not going to say that after reading Aquinas. No. So the assumption I had was that now we'd seen science and now we understood, you know, more about the mechanics, the universe. We didn't need that stuff. That's the childhood of the world, you know.

Does he give ten arguments? I mean, in the sumic theology he gives two. I didn't realize it was ten in the country of the helis. He goes through why you shouldn't believe. And then, you know, in the famous phrase that comes, he says said contra. That's right. On the other hand. Said bloody contra.

Yeah. And he, yeah. I mean, I'm remembering this from our way back. So I hope, but, you know, it. No, I wouldn't fact check you in real time. I just want to see what he says. But anyway, the point is just the fact that he then sets it out in terms of argument. Yeah.

And then, okay, so I get to the summer theologia. And then there's this distinction between faith and knowledge and the proper relationship between faith and knowledge. And faith isn't plugging a gap in knowledge, but it's a foundation and ground of knowledge. And then that's developed later by, well, it's developed before Aquinas by Anselm. Yeah. Who says theology is Fides, Quirin's intellectum, it's faith-seeking. But earlier, Augustine had said, I don't understand in order to believe. I believe in order to understand.

And anybody who says, just to say that other people exist is an act of faith. Right. Because you only have the evidence of your interior monologue, your interior mind about it. Maybe you're just making it up, you know, to believe that there's a truth beyond yourself, to exercise reasoning. That's very good. That's a good analogy, right? Because I could be a solipsist and just assume you don't.

And then life's pretty bloody confusing. And I remember my dad explaining to me what solipsism was, so solipset. All right. Well, I went through a bout of that as a teenager. But as soon as you assume, okay, I'll act as if there are other people. I'll believe. And now all of a sudden, I understand what's going on. Yeah, exactly.

So the question about belief is not whether you're going to believe or not, because everybody's going to believe something is, because you've got to believe that logic actually works and is logical before you use logic, you know, analytic reason. So there's something a priori that you believe. The question is not whether you're going to believe. It's what and on what grounds. And on what grounds are you going to assess whether you were right to have put your faith there? So the question really about the Christian faith is whether it makes more sense. of the world as we actually live it, then the atheist alternatives.

And if the atheist alternatives are telling you have no real personhood, no real soul, you're just the unwinding of an enzyme and the self-robbling. How is it that you actually experience choice and the peril of choice and you experience responsibility and you experience beauty and your experience of beauty is essentially transcendent rather than limiting? You kind of have a sense. I mean, it's all there. Yeah.

I mean, even if you, even if you go back to, say like a Shakespeare sonnet, so famously, you know, shall I compare thee to a summer's day, right? You know, I mean, executive summary, shall I compare thee to the summer's day, know you're way better. Yeah. So he's going through, what's the problem with, the summer is full of promise, but it's full of, it's problematic. So you remember, you know, shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Now, here's the problem with summer. rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too shorter date. It's temporal, it flies, it promises, and it goes away, and winter comes says, your lease is up, your time is up, it's gone. What's the next line? He says, but thy eternal summer shall not fade.

Now, eternal summer is a contradiction in terms, or better still, a paradox. There's something in spring or something in said. There's more of this. It doesn't have to fly away. This is coming, this temporal, fleeting thing that you have to love and it leaves you is always telling you that there's something that won't fade, that there's something. And in this case, in the experience of human loves, paradoxically, even as the moment flies, I think there's something permanent, there's something eternal, thy eternal, so much shall not fade. And we've just, we've been left with the stories, but they're telling us there's no. eternity there's a there's a an English folk folk songwriter called Alan Franks who's got a great line and a fond of songs he says they give us the wings then dismantle the sky yeah so so yeah I think what's returning is precisely the sense of the eternal coming through the temporal and the temporal the

material temporal accounts can't account for it it's a real experience for millions of people and they don't have a philosophy that makes sense of it. I'm sitting here with a fella, I'm going to switch to the cigar. You see how quickly I did that? Yep. I was sitting with a fellow here yesterday, Dr. J. Bud Jishchevsky, who was a Nietzschean, nihilist, he said more nihilist than Nietzsche. He came to Christ.

He's a Catholic in Austin. What was he saying? Golly. Forgive me. I'm sure there was a point there, but I'm bloody lost. That's the way. Oh, I like that little clipy sound of a cigar clipper, you know. Well, that's the, that's the ritual.

It's exactly. It's all, yeah, the ritual's lovely. Okay, here's what he said. It just came back to me. He said that he ripped up his mind. That's how he put it. Like, he ripped up his mind with nihilism. Yeah.

And we're living in a time where people are longing for culture. They're longing to be reconnected to the story. Yeah, exactly. But they may have, like my friends say they've, ripped up their mind. How do we put the mind back together? Well, let's just look. We do so by remembering the things we've forgotten. And we just need to think for a moment about the etymology of the word remember. To remember is to remember, to take what has been split apart and ripped apart and severed

and bring it back together again into one hole. And we can only, if we've been, as it were, culturally and psychologically dismembered by the kind of trashy philosophies we inherited, then we need to remember deeper ones and older ones, and this is the great gift of Christianity. You know, we've been around for a while, and there's a reason for that, because we are a story being told by God himself. And I tell you an interesting thing, I noticed in the last 10 years of my chaplaincy in Cambridge, that whereas we were all being told, you know, in theological college that we should be down with the kids and like, you know, two guys in a guitar and a cafe. And no, it turns out the most popular services were the most traditional ones.

A hundred percent. That we do prayer book even song. You know, Book of Common Prayer 1660. anthems going beyond that, sometimes sung in Latin, full choir, no explanations. Yeah. No kind of cheesy little talks.

Yes. Just this incredibly power. We have erred and strayed from the United Lost Jeep, you know, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. Boy, a kid with an iPhone knows more about devices and desires than even Thomas Kramner did, you know. But I think, why is this happening?

And I think it's partly that that generation of kids, like if they buy a new smartphone, it just in the time that took them to walk home from the shop and unwrap it, the software is already obsolete. Like they have to upgrade it, you know, to the new version or whatever. And everything about them life is like that. And in that situation, you long for anything with permanence. You long for stability, you know.

And when I can say to them, look, we've been doing this exact service. for the last 400 years and we're just beginning to get it. I don't think we get it totally, but we'll get there, you know. There's head room, there's growth room. You know, it's not, you know, if you get it straight away, then it's less than you are. But if it's transcendent, it's got, you know, when I eventually returned to my Christian faith, you know, fairly thoroughly in my time as an undergraduate at Cambridge.

And one of the things that held me back from it was a fear of intellectual suicide and a fear of stasis. fear of stasis. There were some Christians in the kind of Christian going around saying, like, here's exactly what you have to do. You have to find Jesus. You have to re-life to him. You say this prayer. Then you're done. And you're right with God through the sacrificial blood of Jesus. Then you can carry on being a chartered accountant and need never trouble your mind again because you're fixed. And I thought, I don't want to do that. So I can remember actually, I was just beginning to think there's more to this Christianity than I realized because I was

reading the confessions of St. Augustine. And I got to this bit where he says, late, late, have I loved you, beauty, always ancient, always, never always knew. It hadn't occurred to me that you could call God beauty. And that although he was always ancient, he was always, I was just moving me. Then there's a knock on the door, right? And there's two ardent young, you know, evangelical guys with a tract. While you're reading. Yeah. Yeah. And they come in and lay it on the line and they say, you've got to believe this or you're going to go to hell but thank god for jesus here it is you know basically sign and i'm i'm going oh like is this the same thing as augustine i like and had those guys said what are you reading and i'd said this is what i'm reading amazing and if they'd

said yeah we too believe in that that god you know but they didn't do it they had like a set patter it's almost like this western efficiency and it kind of put me off yeah no i did thanks god i came but it kind of delayed the moment. But eventually I got there. We all have mobile phone service. It's time to support a phone company that supports us. Switch to our sponsor, Charity Mobile. They're different. They're proudly pro-life and impacting the culture of life in America. With Charity Mobile, there's no compromise on service, quality, or affordability. You get the same nationwide coverage as the major carriers with no contracts. And their customer service, is staffed by pro-life Americans. Every month, they take a percentage of what you pay and send it

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after the decision with care, clothes, diapers, counseling, everything. A new mother needs to feel supported. I remember being in that hospital room, like I said, seeing that ultrasound, hearing that heartbeat for the first time, you're somewhat removed as the father, you know, certainly compared to my beautiful wife. And so that was just such a profound moment. This may let's honor motherhood by helping mothers dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby or go to preborn.com slash pints. If you're a business owner, consider a larger gift, $1,000, $5,000 or more to help sponsor an ultrasound machine for a clinic saving lives every single day. All gifts are tax deductible. Visit preborn.com slash pints. Here's one way I would imagine people could have

remember their mind, have their mind remembered? I just, I haven't read this before, so I just, can I read two stanzas from your book? Please do. As I walked out one morning, all in the soft, fine rain, it seemed as though a silver veil was shining over hill and veil, as though some lovely long-lost spell had made all new again. And through that shimmer in the air, I seemed to hear a sound, as though a distant horn were blown, in some lost land that I had known that seemed to speak from tree and stone and echo all around.

And with the music came these words, poet, take up the tale, take up the tale, this land still keeps in earth and water, magic sleeps, and dryad sighs and naiad, is that how you say it? Nile, yeah. But you can lift the veil. I mean, God, I didn't know that I was about to read the answer to what we're talking about.

Well, that's... We're talking about isolation, cut off from culture and community. And remembering. Take up the tale. So there's a great bit at the end of C.S. Lewis's novel, that hideous strength, which kind of Merlin recovers. There's a conversation between two of the characters where he says, something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Now, Logres is the name for Arthur's Kingdom.

It's the Welsh name for Arthur's Kingdom. And he says, we've heard better than we can do. And he says, don't you see it in everything English? you know, we're a nation of poets, but we're a nation of shopkeepers, you know, behind every Arthur and Mordred, you know, after every Milton or Cromwell, you know. And it's as if we have an ass's head, we've got it,

well, we've forgotten ourselves. We've forgotten who we are, we need to recover. So in that same prelude a little bit later, that's the kind of, that's the muse giving me my marching orders. I kind of riff on that, and it tells you what I'm trying to do. And I'll just, I just... Tell me the page, too. So this is just the page of it.

after you were reading. Okay. So I talk about all the things I need to tell, and then I talk about reviving memory. And then I say this, but listen well before you start. Be still ere you begin. See through the surface roundabout,

the noise, the rush, the fear, the doubt. Though modern Britain lies without, Ferlaugres lives within, and I'm playing on the word like, You may yet walk through Merlin's Isle by Okanash and Thorn. The ancient hills do not forget, and you might wake their wisdom yet. Who knows what wonders might be met on this midsummer morn? So I have taken up the tale to tell it full and free.

So, you know, I'm hoping that what comes... So beautiful. When Lewis... Lewis, of course, had read the... Tolkien had read bits of the Lord of the Rings to C.S. Lewis. Yeah, could you imagine the room? And at one point, Talking says one of the lessons, for a while, C.S. Lewis was my only audience.

Wow. It was the only. But when the book itself came out and Lewis reviewed it, he said, there's something so resonant in this story that it is continuously, he says this, it's not an allegory, but it's written, it's not an allegory in the fixed sense that talking has a bunch of theories he wants you to get. He translates them into a story, and if you translate it back, you get exactly the same thing he thought of.

That would be very tedious. Yes. But it's written at such a deeply resonant, you know, almost baptized imaginative level, that although not an allegory, this is Lewis's phrase now, he says it is continuously suggestive of incipient allegories.

Passage after passage of that story gives us the story and the sembling the image with which to get a hold of who we are and how we are and how to keep going. So, and I mean, the power of story, I mean, one of the most moving moments for me in the whole of the Lord of the Rings is, you know, when Sam and Frodo were in mortar, and, you know, there's still a whole way to go and they're just outnumbered and exhausted and the ring is getting heavier and heavier. And suddenly Sam starts reminding Bilba of the great stories. So, I remind Frodo of the, you know, burying. and Lutheran and they've been heroes.

And he says, all those people were in dark and desperate places as difficult as the one we're in now, but they didn't give up, you know, and it wasn't the end of their story. And then he says, do you suppose we might be in a story, Mr Frodo? And I'm going, like, I'm reading this as a teen.

I'm like, yes, you are, I'm reading it. Don't worry, guys, it's not the end. Like, this is my second read-through. It's going to be, you know. But the idea, of course, if you're a reader and a character in a story, your reading says, do you suppose we might be in a story, you've got to say, whoa, do you suppose I might be in a story? Someone reading about me? Someone is telling my story.

You know, in that idea that, you know, God is speaking us into being, and he's told, is telling this great story of creation, fall and redemption and resurrection and renewal, and himself is embodying and enacting it in Christ. And then he lets us not admire the hero from afar, but actually be part of the story, literally in Christ and Christ in us. You know, that's an astonishing thing. And I think, you know, for somebody who's felt they've fallen out of any ever good story that was, and that there's no connection, no thread in their life, no meaning to the random pattern of just stuff happening, to be told, if you knew, there is a story.

And you're, I mean, there's a, there's a great story I found about the poets. Samuel Taylor Coleridge when I was working on this big book on Coleridge called Mariner. So Coleridge, as a young student at Cambridge, was really caught up in the beginning of that, that resistance to slavery, that campaign against slavery, which had been started by a guy called Thomas Clarkson, also at Cambridge, who'd recruited William Wilberforce, who was part of this, Clapham Seck. So Wilberforce is the famous guy in that story, because he was the guy who was a member of parliament and did all the thing, but there were a lot of others.

So Clarkson was the guy that really started. of the whole thing, and he's the one that did all the stats and walked up, went up and down the channel ports and other ports of Britain and talked to the captains of the slaving trades and got the bloodstained manacles, you know, and dropped them on the floor of the houses of Parliament and said, we can't do this. And year after year, it was rejected. Oh, it's slavery in economic necessity. You know, just, and there came a point where Thomas Clarkson kind of had a nervous breakdown. He just, you know, is exhausted, you know, giving up hope with the campaign, but giving up hope it did he so his friends um you know club together and like hired a cottage

for him in the lake district to go and recuperate now if you if you walk around the lake through street for long enough you bump into samuel taylor coleridge you know there's so so clarkson bumps into coleridge right and coleridge is like fanboy in clarks oh my god it's thomas clarkson you know and clarkson you know actually confesses to coleridge complete weariness complete exhaustion and then he says um you know well he doesn't say it directly to coleridge because these are englishmen and they can't you know that what he does is he goes to his cottage and writes a letter to coleridge in his cottage you know so he writes to coleridge and he says it's not just that i'm losing faith in the campaign i'm losing faith and he says i have no idea any more of the divine

and coleridge who's just returned to faith in a really vivid and brilliant way, writes back to him and says, my dear Clarkson, don't worry in the least about whether you have any idea of the divine, but never forget that you are a divine idea. You are in the mind of Christ, in the mind of the Logos, as we all were, you know, from the beginning of creation, he intends us, he waits for our moment in time, he loves us and wills us into being. He says, we are all logoy from the Logos, we're little words. And then he says, you're not only a divine idea, but the divine idea of Thomas Clarkson is being spoken into time now. And Christ, the word, has not finished saying to the world what he wants to say through Thomas Clarkson.

So, God, he says, this great says, try not to become an impediment in the speech of Christ. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. And, you know, like, it heals Clarkson because suddenly he's not doing a heavy lifting anymore. He's not trying to make it all up and make it happen. And we have, he's, so all of that entered into, when I started my sonnets on the sacred year, or liturgical sonnets, the first one was on the first of the great, oh, antiphons, O sapiensia, which speaks of Christ as wisdom, you know,

wisdom coming forth from the mouth of the most high, proceeding from one end of the university, other rightly, that, that collect, that beautiful antiphon. So, um, I, I began that poem, um, by going, I cannot think, unless I have, have been thought, nor can I speak unless I have been spoken. Come on. I cannot teach, except as I am taught, or break the bread, except as I am broken. Did you write that? Yeah, I wrote this.

Bloody hell you're a good writer. Oh, mine behind the mind through which I seek. Oh, light within the light with which I see. Oh, word beneath the words with which I speak. Oh, founding, unfound wisdom, finding me. Why aren't I finding your poetry in these bloody Barnes and Noble's bookstores? The poetry I find is quite awful.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's kind of chopped prose, really. Yeah. But the thing is, and I find this is true in England as well, this sacred secular divide, which, you know, is nonsense, is so ridiculous. So instead of putting me with poetry, because I'm a religious poet,

even though I'm probably outselling the poets on it, they put me downstairs in the, obscure dusty basement with religion and spirituality. Like it's like apartheid, you know, that's separate over there, you know, we have this. Yeah. And, you know, I'm fighting to break that down. And I'm hoping in a way this thing, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, come on. Is going to be, because everybody loves Arthur.

And I loved Arthur before I was a Christian and after I was a Christian and in between and the stories away. So I'm, you know, because I'm published by, you know, by, you know, Canterbury Press in England, it's, you know, they're great published. but, you know, they're part of him's ancient and modern secular reviews don't want to know. Well, look, I'd say everyone go click the link and buy this book, just so we can outsell the bastards who are doing such terrible job of poetry and Barnes & Noble, I will be. Would you tell me a little bit, after you've lit your pipe there, a bit about the relationship

between Tolkien and Lewis, because people are fascinated with that, and I think they're fascinated with it because we are starved for true male friendship. Yeah. You know, you even saw some debased people talking about the fact that maybe Fredo and Sam were homosexual because they couldn't imagine what two men would love each other. That's reductivism. That's two kinds of reductivism. That's the kind of Freud speaking of sex under everything and the unmust. But the other thing, this is a complete, not only do we medicalize everything.

We sexualize everything. So the word intimacy is now a euphemism, right? Yep. Now, we've lost the way in which people can become incredibly close and deeply and intimate friends, and sex is not part of it at all. In fact, in my experience, as a chaplain, I realized that not only, I mean, back in the day when it was reserved, you know, sex was reserved as a final and full expression of real intimacy, you know, between a couple, right? But now, obviously, it's, you know, so I remember a student coming and talking to me about, about how she was growing to have a real feeling of, you know, genuine, I think, love at a deep level, a kind of intimacy for someone, and they were both embarrassed by it.

So instead of letting it develop, they had sex instead. Do you know what I mean? They had sex actually to get rid of that, to get rid of that, and to physicalize. And then, you know, bam, bam, thank you, ma'am, and there you are, it's gone. And instead of that being the final flowering of something growing, it's just used. So, you know, sex and almost the opposite. So now we just don't have a vocabulary. So if two, if Frodo and Sam, you know, or, you know, two soldiers in the trenches,

I mean, a lot of what's going on as Frodo and Sam go through that hardship is the young officer and his Batman or his Subaltern on the Western Front, where Tolkien and Lewis were both officers in the trenches and both, you know, and Lewis was wounded, you know, and talking, you know. I mean, the whole description of the dead marches with the marshes with the bodies under it and the kind of waste in front of the gates of Mordor, that's part of his experience of war. And just to assume that, you know, I mean, it's just, it's just, um, risible, you know, that, that, that whole thing. Um, uh, and we have to rediscover all kinds of loving.

beautiful, tender, developed connection that's nothing to do with sex and which sex would actually override and interrupt if it did happen, you know. But, you know, that's an almost almost forbidden thing to say. But again, I think this interest in Lewis and Tolkien is partly this desire

true. Tell us a bit about them, I'm sure. Yeah, so Lewis talks about how his friendship with talking over through and overcame two prejudices in him that he brought with him that could have screwed it up. So he's born in Belfast. He's brought up in Ulster Protestantism.

You know, I mean, his dad and he had differences of opinion about whether there should be home rule or not. But they were drawing up in a culture. I mean, admittedly, there are historical reasons, but a culture which was hostile to and contemptuous of Catholics. I mean, Ulster Protestants in those days called Catholic nationalists bog trotters.

And, you know, the whole bog thing was to do with, of course, the Protestants had taken the best land, you know. So he comes with a certain amount of baggage, which occasionally shows through it. And Tolkien once made about a joke, because Tolkien was really sad that Lewis didn't become a Roman Catholic because he, talking, had so much to do with helping Lewis towards faith. But he said, perhaps that's a nice little joke. Perhaps there was an ulsteria motive instead of an ultimperstere. Yes, good. So, Lewis comes with a kind of almost unreflected on just a reflexive prejudice. Then within the, you know, the controversies and kind of different camps of the study of English literature,

there was a very sharp division in Oxford and other places between the literature people and the language people. The language people thought, people can read novels and poems all by themselves. They don't need a degree in Oxford to do it. A degree in Oxford should be hardcore learning about Anglo-Saxon vowel shifts and, you know, the Icelandic origins of certain Danish words. That's proper learning, you know. And so talking was a Catholic and a language guy. And Lewis was a Protestant and a literature guy.

So you would think, you know, it's like two strikes and you're out. But I think, you know, the Lord was at work here. But anyway, of course, what breaks the barrier is story and myth and legend. Lewis, I mean, he, Lewis at this point, as he comes up to Oxford, is an atheist. He's teaching philosophy as well as literature, and he's kind of at the bleak end of the philosophical thing. But story narrative myth poach is his guilty pleasure. Like his philosophy can't attach. So you remember the famous quotation he says in, in, in, in, in, in, he's, he says, in, in,

surprised by joy. Looking back at that time when his first meeting talking, he says, the two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On one side a many islanded sea of myth and poetry. On the other, a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly everything I loved, I believed to be imaginary. Nearly everything I believed to be true, I thought grim and meaningless. And of course, it's the coming of Christ. The myth made history, and it's Tolkien who makes that. that heals that. So what connects them is that Lewis hears that there's this thing called the coal biters, which is an Icelandic word for, as a kenning, for old men who hog the fire, who sit so close to the grate that they might even bite the coal, right? And he, talking, loved the Icelandic sagas so much that he was just willing to sit with anybody and he would show them, he would recite it in Icelandic.

He would hear that. And then everybody would just translate it, and he'd help them to do it. So it's like free Icelandic lessons, plus the great sagas and all the Norse myths. And of course, Lewis just utterly loved the Norse myths. He said, one of his great moments of joy was reading and Longfellow's translation of the Draper. You know, I heard a voice cry, Baldur, the beautiful is dead, you know, and suddenly Lewis is lived. So he basically goes around to Tolkien's Colbiter's Club, like for the sake of the Icelandic myths in spite of the fact that talking as a linguist and a Catholic.

But they bond over this, these beautiful stories. And he realizes Tolkien's love of this is as deep as his. And talking suddenly realizes this guy, Lewis, really gets it. So a friendship begins to form. And then, you know, talking does an incredibly generous and in its own way quite a vulnerable thing. His talking is secretly writing all the stuff that will become the Silmarillion and the Baron and Luthian, like nobody knows about this stuff. He started composing it.

And he basically shares a bit of his poem about Baron and Lutheran and how deep that is, because he calls himself Baron and his wife Luthian. I mean, this is. And he shows it to Lewis. And Lewis, you know, Lewis could have just, you know, treated it with contempt or, you know, whatever. It was such a weird thing for somebody to be doing, writing this song. Lewis reads it and he writes back beautifully and he does it in a wonderful, playful way.

He pretends that this is already a well-established beautiful ancient poem and that he is the editor trying to just clarify some difficulties, you know. So all his comments about the poetry are coached us this, you know, and talking loves it, of course, you know. So then, you know, they're able to talk about deeper things. And it's famously in September of 1931 when they've all gone around to Lewis's rooms this time, three of them, Lewis and Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, who's a great expert on Shakespeare and a Christian. So Dyson is an Anglican Christian. Tolkien is a very well-instructed Catholic Christian. And they're walking and they're talking about, they go out on Addison's walk,

and they're talking about their love of story and myth and how powerful these stories seems to help integrates and stuff. praising myth and Lewis says yeah I love this stuff but the problem is that these myths are untrue they're lies even though their lies

breathe through silver and talking just stops and says they're not lies and he later puts it in a poem he writes to Lewis the heart of man is not compound of lies

but draws some wisdom from the only wise we make still by the law by which you'll make and he believes that there's an element of divine truth in the great stories, and especially the stories that, you know, Lewis loves, which are all dying and rising God stories as in Boulder.

So they get onto the subject, they talk about myth, and they get onto the subject of Christianity. And Lewis says, look, even if I was persuaded that, you know, okay, there's a guy called Jesus 2,000 years ago, he preaches some very good things, dies a hideous death, even if I'm persuaded, which I might be, just on the basis of the subsequent reactions that he might have risen for the grave,

well, bully for Jesus, you know, what difference does that make to me? Some guy 2,000 years ago, this happens to him, you know? And Tolkien is saying, Jack, I can't believe you just said that. You, of all people, know the power of the story of death and resurrection. You love it in Adonis, you love it in Balder the Beautiful. You love the story of Odin.

You've even quoted it in one of your poems. that Odin hangs on the world tree in order to descend hell to try and find bot. Come on, man. And he says, yeah, but they're just myths. And talking says, can't you see that on this occasion the myth has become history?

When we tell stories and make myths, we're sub-creator, we make it up. But the prime creator can take that story which he was sending us in the first place and make it absolutely true. So it satisfies not only the mythic, resonant, imaginative side of us, which is a very important side of being human.

But it also satisfies the reason. It's actual. It's not just another made-up story. This time it happened, and it makes... And look at the way, you've got the full resonance of, you know, the dying and rising and the grain of wheat falling into the ground, all that stuff. But then you've got, like, underpontious pilot,

or while Quirinius was governor of Syria, like, you know, like if a couple of minor Roman officials get immortalized because they happen to be the apparatchiks signing the paper. paper when the greatest story ever told becomes reality. And you can, as talking is saying this, like you can see the two hemispheres of Lewis's mind, you know, quivering and coming together satisfactorily around the person and work of Christ.

So, I mean, I think talking did sort of secretly hope that, you know, he would become a Catholic. But in a way, he became an Anglican in such a way that kind of revivitized and still revivifies and renews. So that's a really important thing. That doesn't mean that they don't have tensions. Mm-hmm. And they had real differences about, I mean, you know, Talking really didn't go for the Narnia thing.

Right. Partly because Lewis just tossed these things off. Like, he just wrote these classic books in between, you know, exact papers. It's just... And, you know, Talking is meticulously working for years and years with 20 revisions. And Lewis is just writing it down with his dip pen and sending it to the press. And also, Talking wanted complete consistency in an inner... consistency in a sub-created world, which of course he does magnificently.

And he says, like, how can you have fawns and Father Christmas in the same story? Now, Michael Ward, the great scholar, has answered that question for Lewis and talked about the imaginative and mythic unity based around the seven heavens in Dante of the seven chronicles of Narnia. So Lewis was doing something deeper. But, you know, I don't think there may be in a bit of jealousy there as well as like, you know, Lord of the Rings hasn't quite taken off yet, whereas Narnia is. an instant hit.

I didn't realize that. You know. Okay. So there's a bit of tension. But hey, there's tension in every friend. And some people, some writers now big that up and go, oh, you know, they fell out with each other and everything. And that is not true.

Okay. Like, we know that twice, Talking, who was better connected than Lewis, had Lewis recommended for CBE and OBE in various honors, which Lewis declined because he actually felt that he needed to be totally apolitical and that to receive an honor from a government. might be to be supposed to be in in some sense in favor of it. And his views were too radical for some of it. So they were looking after each other, and they, you know, Tolkien, I think, always had a place for Lewis and Lewis a place for talking,

even where they disagreed. In fact, the nature of the nation of the inklings is precisely that you could be really good friends and disagree. And if there's something that they model in terms of male friendship, it would have been now, I think that's the most important thing. I don't want to be in a silo. I don't want to just talk to people who have my view. You know, and one of the things about my poetry has been really fortunate is that I find my poetry is read by people on different sides.

You know, I was once asked to be a poet in residence for the two cities, as they're called. So the city of London, the city of Westminster, all the bishops, all the priests of this diocese, the bishop of London. was kind of having this thing. And of course, you know, in a parish, if you're just a parish in a village, you've got to be there for everybody, you know, you can't be too high or too low. But in London, in central London, you know, you have like the super high Anglo-Catholic and you have the evangelical or they're not even going to wear a dog collar and you've got like super liberal, you know, I just made this up last week if it moves a ferment, but you've also got super conservative where like I entirely reject the same thing. century I live in and I'm I'm the curator of a museum, you know, all that stuff. Yes. So the bishop told me that she obviously as bishop had to visit all these different churches

and she was thinking like, what are these guys even? And she discovered it in these totally different churches, they all read my poetry. They all use my poetry in the liturgy. So she said, you've got to go and be poet in residence because you're kind of an so I'm, I am read by and I'm willing to talk to and I'm friends with. genuine friends with people who actually disagree with each other. Right. Fundamentally. So dating today can be weird.

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The whole point of pints with Aquinas is to elevate really powerful voices who can communicate and defend the Holy Catholic faith You can start your 30-day free trial today at St. Paulsenter.com slash pints, which has become an annual member right away. You'll love it. And when you do, they'll send you a free copy of the complete Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, which is, as you know, an incredible resource for anyone serious about growing in the faith. Again, just visit st.poolscenta.com slash pints to start your 30-day free trial. Sorry to derail you a little bit, but I need to ask you about Tom Bombadil because everybody wants

me to ask you about Bambidil, who everybody loves. I want to ask you, like, who he was, do you think? I didn't wear the blue jacket and the yellow boots. Yeah. Why it was, he wasn't depicted in the movies and whether that was a good thing. And why it is you think that the ring had no power of him. Yeah. So Bombadil is really interesting.

I mean, Bombadil was a character in Tolkien's mind before he wrote the Lord of the Rings, and he'd written poems about Bombadil for his children. So he's this kind of almost the spirit of the earth itself. kind of he's married to, you know, if Goldbury is the river's daughter and she's everything, you know, about the landscape of England that is that is flowing and fluid and beautiful and she gathers the marsh flowers. And Tom, with his boots and his, in his feather, is the earth kind of bounding along. So there's something primal about them. They're more than themselves. At one point, we're told he's he's called oldest. And it's, you know, like he's the oldest of middle earth. He's kind of there before, and he, so, I mean, there are some people who go so far as to say that he's almost decipher for the divine in that, you know, that he's. But I think the ring has no power on him because, I mean, for me, Tom, Tom is an embodiment of the sheer goodness, the innocent goodness of God's creation, both in its ancient tree and profundity, but also in its funniness and the chattering and chirping of birds and the weird way squirrels run. You know, God has humor as well as joy and beauty.

And I think he represents all of that. And if you think about it, you know, God knows the controversies that are ripping through your country and mine and related differently. But, you know, do you think the fallow dear care less who is president or prime minister, you know, do you suppose the chaff inches or the swallows or the sparrows in whose fall there is a special providence and for whom God cares? really have an opinion on our culture wars? I think not. They continue in their kind of goodness and our struggles, you know, they suffer because of our struggles,

but they're not part of them. And even the War of the Ring and even Sauron and the last of the men of Newman-Or and the alliance of the elves and the dwarves, vital as that is, kind of passes him by. And there's a kind of magic in his realm. So the question arises, why do we just give him the ring?

Like he picks up the ring and he flips it. It's nothing to him. That's right. But because the ring is nothing to him, he wouldn't keep it. He wouldn't preserve it. That's right.

That's not Gandalf says. But I tell you, one of the most brilliant little images in that hole when they show the ring to Tom Bombardale is for a moment, just for fun, he lifted up to his eye. And you get a bright,

blue, fecund, hospitable, friendly eye through a ring. And it is the thing of which the eye of fire, the eye of sarin, is the demonic parody and the hideous, you know, I mean, Augustine is, I mean, talking is fully Augustinian in his theology of evil, so, which is clear from the Silmarillion, that everything is good to begin with. That's right. And evil, even the Melchor at the beginning, you know, Parasic. is a twisting or bending a rye of the primarily good.

A thing has to be good before it can be evil. And even in its evil, it's still paying a weird kind of tribute to the good from which it fell even in the act of parodying it. So in a sense, having seen the terror of the fallen eye in a ring, just for a minute, you see sheer, pure, unfallen, innocent goodness looking out through the ring. I'd never made that connection. That's beautiful.

Yeah. And how is it that he didn't disappear when he slipped it on? Well, because it has no power over him because he is prior. He's unique, he's single, he's the one of his kind, and he's prior to all the making of the rings.

He's prior to even the changing of the earth and the cook. So it has no grip on him. And is this a similar answer you would give to the silly objection people give today? Why didn't the Eagles just carry them? sake. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, of course, the widening eagle, I have to, I mean, I wish to be courteous as a guest in your country in America. No. But it was an, it was an America,

it was when they were first doing a film, you know. And I'm Australian, remember. So it'll be fine. You can rip into it as far as I'm going to say. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, these, these recent tax evaders. Anyway, so the thing is, I, so it was a misunderstanding in 1776. We just get the tax reforms in, we'll be fine. But actually, we had a launch of the book in, because I'm trying to write it in a way that is a recovery of memory of who we should be, both in my country and in this one, we had a launch in London in the Temple Church,

and we had a launch in Washington a few days ago in the National Press Club. And I did sort of say, because I realized the 250, I said, you know, I realized there was a little misunderstanding. But, you know, if Arthur had been on the throne instead of George, this would never have happened, you know. But, no, going, yes, sorry. Very good. Sorry, I've missed our trip.

No, that's okay. The Eagles. So, the first idea of why don't we just use the Eagles? Yeah. Was actually in a film proposal that came to Tolkien in the 60s. And it was an American film proposal. It's written about by Humphrey Carpenter in a title called Cash or Kudos. Are you going to take the money and run for the...

first film proposal or are you going to so the proposal is to get rid of all the walking and just fly them from one place to another like literally fly them and then eventually fly them into model you know and it's an aerial campaign it was the beginning of we can do this without boots on the ground i don't think so so so of course this entirely misses the point of the novel because the fellowship is built built precisely in the pilgrimage so setting aside any plot you might think you have. Which you don't. Because like you said, the deer don't care who's president and the Eagles have their own

business. Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, you're just going to have the Nazgols coming out and attacking the Eagles. Because a big flight of Eagles heading for Mount Doom is the eye is going to see them. They can be dealt with. The ring will fall to the ground. Some will pick it up.

We're all toast. But the point about that. the hobbits is they're completely overlooked by everyone except Gandalf and that's the nature of Gandalf's wisdom. Gandalf is the wizard who notices the overlooked and the marginalized. And he tells Frodo that this is the time of the Shire, the hobbits will rise and they will do what they must do while the eyes of the great are elsewhere. So the eagles are among the great as well, but the hobbits can kind of sneak through. And but at a spirit, the spiritual level, the point is that we are all fellow pilgrims.

You know, we are sojourns. Here we have no abiding city. I mean, talking is deeply, deeply Christian writer. And the beauty of the Lord of the Rings is he doesn't make any of it explicit. It's entirely in the structure in the plot. It's embedded in the nature of the story itself. But one of the things he knows is that here we have no abiding city, that we are sojourners.

And that's why in the end the elves have to go. That's why we finish with the great kind of voyage beyond the grey havens, where he's changed. handling, actually, bail off and things like that, we have the ship burial and the ship goes off, you know, beyond the sundering seas. So there's that. And if you just flew everywhere, the testing, the trial, the experiences of hardship that make the bonds between brothers, you know, would never have happened. And actually, the eternal things are precisely the friendships forged in that, not, you know, the passing thing. So there was every reason not to do.

But he does more. I mean, I think talking is prophetic in lots of ways, but talk about talking as a Christian for a moment with Jill. So he knows all the world mythologies. You know, he knows not just the Norse and Germanic ones. He knows it all. And he knows all the great quest stories. And almost all the great quest stories from Jason and the Argonauts onwards are quests to acquire a treasure, to acquire the golden fleece, to sail to, you know, to, you know, to. to go to the garden of the Hesperides and acquire the golden apples, you know, Prometheus to go and get fire from the heavens. It's all about getting something valuable and bringing it back and achieving kind of power in kingdom by

acquiring the valuable. So he now comes in. What does he give us? The opposite. He gives us an epic of letting go. Of renunciation. The treasure is right there in the beginning. You know? Yeah. And was there ever an age that needs to be.

that. You know, we are literally, as though that old book said, consuming ourselves to death. The sickness of our soul is precisely a sickness of perpetual acquisition and pouring stuff into a hole that will never be filled. And the way out of that is the way of renunciation. It's the way of letting go. So the entire story is about letting go. And then, of course, at a deeper level, obviously the great letting go of our story, the story that you and I, although were in different churches share, is that though he was found in form equal to God, he didn't not cling to equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. And then Christ's journey to the cross, you know, the way of the cross, the via Dolorosa,

the cross is getting heavier and heavier. He falls three times. All of that is patterned into that last journey of Frodo with the ring getting heavier towards the ring of doom. And why was it important or what can we learn about the fact that the hero at the end becomes a traitor in a way? And then how... And the traitor is the one who brings about the redemption.

You know, you remember when very frightened, Frodo says to, in the minds of Moria, when they realize Gollum is following them, he says it's a pity that Bilbo didn't kill him while he had the chance. And Gandalf says, pity? It was pity that stayed his hand, you know. My heart tells me that the fate of more of us,

not least yourself, may depend upon the pity of Bilbo. And had he been, do not be, you know, can you give life? Should you deal death? Do not be eager to rush to judgment. Now, what's going on on the, I mean, there's, obviously there's an extraordinary story of grace. My strength is made perfect in weakness. There's a sense in which, even for Gollum, I mean, Gollum gets what he wants and then dies. But even for Gollum, there's a role and there's something redemptive.

So here's, like, one of the most shocking. and paradoxical statements about the passion and about the attainment comes in from Paul. I think it's in Colossians, where he says of Christ, he was made to be sin, who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God. Now, so, I mean, he takes on all the sin of the world and dies with it in order that we who are sinners

should be liberated. And Frodo is not Jesus. He's not a perfect person, although he is the Christ figure in this respect. But he too needs to be saved. He too cannot affect his own salvation or that of anybody else. You know, that job is already. And there's something extraordinary about Frodo who's like the best that a hobbit can be. And Gollum, who is the worst that a hobbit can be, has become so much that he's no.

teetering on this edge the good in us and the evil in us lot. The good I want to do I cannot Yeah and then the bit the bit which is sin breaks free and falls away and it's consumed in the flame and this and this all happens

on March the 25th yesterday and probably the most important day in the medieval calendar we remember it now specifically as the enunciation as God doing this astonishing thing of becoming tiny and helpless for us in the womb of Our Lady.

But the reason, so because that day was so important, people, why did they pick that day? Why March the 25th? So one of the things is people had worked out using the moon and sun calculators and calendars and everything. They try to work out what actual date the crucifixion itself was in the year that it happened. And in terms of Passover, and when it happened,

and they worked out it was March the 25th. So this is the day the world is redeemed. And then they just felt, shouldn't that also, if that's the day the work was achieved, and he says, Tetele's di, it is finished. Should that not be the day he begins it in the womb of Mary? Yeah. So they felt like March the 25th. And that's the only reason why December the 25th is Christmas Day.

It's got nothing to do with all this kind of, you know, neo-pagan, you know, God golly, what are the Romans called their festival? set Saturnalia, you know. It's, it works that. And then, of course, somebody came up with the idea, one of these medieval, you know, chroniclers that March the 25th was the day the world was made. So it's the day the world is made, the day the God who made it enters into it, and the day he dies for it. So, like, of course, that's the day the ring goes to the fire. What do you make of the fact that, you know, Tolkien called this, what, a fundamentally Catholic work, and yet we don't find religion in the book?

No, I mean... Which, thank goodness, because it would have come off rather... And I think that was one of the reasons I was a bit iffy about the narnia. He thought, like, Lus was being a bit too... So how do you reconcile... Someone might say, how do you reconcile that? Okay, it's fundamentally Catholic work

and yet there's nothing explicitly Christian about it. There are a few times. Certainly not... Well, first of all, talking... Middle Earth is not another planet. Okay. Okay, it's our world in a very much more ancient time.

Okay. He's telling a pre, pre, pre-pre-legent. And so the great thing, the incarnation, has not happened. It's BC. But it's so BC, it's essentially going back, if you like, if you think of Numenor as Atlantis and the island that goes under. So it's kind of, you know, pre, pre, pre, pre, pre civilizations. And yet, talking believes that Christianity is the central turning point of the cosmos and everything

before it anticipates it and everything after it is utterly changed by it. You know, Lewis took this idea up and brilliantly, I think Lewis's best apologetics essay is the one called The Grand Miracle, in which he speaks of the grand miracle, is the entire event from the annunciation to the ascension, the whole Christ event,

is one grand miracle. And Lewis says, if there was a novel, which everybody admitted was great, but was very puzzling, it's a problem novel, it's brilliant, And somebody works out that the reason why we have difficulty making sense of it is that there's a missing chapter. And he said if everybody was going around, any claim to find the missing chapter, which lots of people might fake, you would have to put the missing chapter in the middle of the book. And suddenly you would say, oh, all that stuff in the first ten chapters, I get it now.

And everything that follows, it would be the clued of both to the past and the future. And then he says, the Christ event is the missing chapter in the story of the cosmos, you know. And I think, and then it's absolutely true. It suddenly makes sense of everything, including all the so-called pre-Christian stuff. So you get anticipations, the idea of a king in, I mean, Aragon is another Christ type, in that he, you meet him a strider, you know, he takes the form of a servant, he's a companion walking with us on the way, like he comes up without being recognized to those on the road to Amas, why your heart's so troubled within you, you know.

And he opens up the scriptures to them, he says, you know, gradually they realize this stranger, this ranger, this strider, is the king who is returning. This is the return of the king, you know, and he is going to bring me a... So the hidden king is a deeply, deeply Christian motif. And the more you read it with eyes open, the more you... I mean, there's something, certainly, if you think about Galadriel and the response... There's got to be something of talking to deep, deep devotion to our lady in the way he imagines Galadriel.

Absolutely. And so it's there. Why is it not explicit? A, it would break the spell of that world. Indeed. Because none of this has happened yet. It's going to happen. But B, because, you know,

there's more to be done, I think, for making the case for Christianity, by making it the hidden root of a story that blossoms fruitfully, than by having to festoon every branch of your work with five proof texts and, you know, Very good. Just check it out, you know, if I mention Jesus enough, it'll be published by the Christian press.

No, you can tell the story at a profound level that renews people. But of course, once a person is or becomes a Christian and then they reread the Lord of the Rings, oh my goodness, you know. So it's a great preparation for Christian faith, maybe, for those yet aren't yet considering it. I wanted to ask you about the final paragraph here because the final paragraph in the return of the king, I remember the first time I read it to my kids, I finished it, and I could. couldn't contain myself. I had to excuse myself, walked into my bedroom, walked into the closet, shut like three doors and wept. Yeah. I won't read much, but just last kind of three sentences,

and I'd love to get you to comment on it. But Sam turned to by water and so came back up the hill as day was ending once more. And he went on and there was yellow light and a fire within. And the evening meal was ready. And he would that, this is the greatest line in any story I've ever read. You ready, here it is. And he was expected. Yeah. And Rose drew him in and set him in his chair and put little Eleanor upon his lap. He drew a deep breath.

Well, he said, I'm back. Come on. Yeah, I'm back. It's just, I mean, it's partly a gentle riffback on the title of Bilbo's story, there and back again. Yeah. It's so good. And one of the things that seems to me that's about is you've had these high deeds of heroism.

You've had the Battle of Helms Deep. You've had the Battle of the Fields of Palinot. But what is all that for? To sit down by the wife and the kid and the fire. They can sit with his daughter on his lap and his wife beside him by the fire. It reminds me of Chesterton's line about the soldier. The soldier doesn't hate what's in front of him. He loves what's behind it.

That's why he fights. Yeah. No, so this is really important. And also, it's incredibly poignant for talking because he came back and so many of his friends, all his friends from school who were out there on the Western Front with him didn't. But they were all defending the Shire, you know, and the responsibility he feels as one of the guys that came back. I mean, the attrition rate, particularly of, you know, young officers on the Western Front. So I think he has to finish, in a way, of course, it's a beautifully circular thing because we finish where we began.

We finish in the Shire. And you remember when Sam look, this is all not in the film, but when Sam looks in the mirror as well as Frodo, he's the one who sees the Shire being despoilated and they're cutting down the trees on the road to, to buy water, anything. And he wants to rush away, straight away, and just go back. And that would be abandoning the quest. And Galadriel says, you know, this may not happen to do it. And he says, well, I'll take the long road home or not at all.

You know, and you'll go with Frodoer to the fire, you know. So there's all of that. There's also, this is, I mean, obviously, and we now know that Tolkien was writing an Arthur poem, you know, the Fall of Arthur, which we have now some fragments of, and which was published quite recently with notes. He knows the stuff. So the big shape of the grail story, you know, all the achievements in the end,

the grail, the Galahad, who is the kind of, who achieves the grail, is kind of has to leave this world. And he goes, as it were, to Saras, to the holy city. And he goes, and persevere marries Blanchefleur and becomes the new Fisher King. And only Sir Boers comes back to Camelot to tell the story. And he tells the story in such a way that people's hearts are transformed by hearing it. But he says that actually they went out there to discover. Well, kind of, do you mind if I just, so Boers.

Your phone? Are you looking for us right there? No, this is the book. Oh, please. So Boers is my kind of Sam Gamgee. Okay. And he kind of comes back at the end, and he comes back to the chest. And he realizes that all this that they did in this journey out was really for everyone who was at home, that they would.

So, so, so, so, so, Boers starts to tell the story. And Arthur says, let the scribes take out their pens. This story isn't just for us. This is for children's children. And good Sir Boers took out his harp and he took up the tale, the tale of all our hopes and fears, the tale that passes down the years, the quest of joy. the quest of tears, quest of the Holy Grail. And some who heard it were transformed and changed from deep within. For in the lifting of the veil they saw the love of God prevail,

and likewise felt another veil that lift from their heart within. For this I know, said Good Sir Boers. We saw the Grail depart, yet it did not depart from us. For lovely and mysterious, it present, its presence seem to enter us. It shineth fair and glorious in the chapel of the heart. And now I know,

in any church where people kneel and pray and the good priest still sings the mass, their signs and wonders come to pass. The Holy Grail may come to us on any Sabbath day.

You know, so all of this stuff is to bring up. So the two more verses. Okay. The Holy Grail may come to us on any Sabbath day. This tale, this is Borstool is not for us alone, but for our children too.

So take the tale up if you can and pass it on to Maiden Man, that it may grow like living grain, both beautiful and true. And that's the end of Boer speech. Then I come back and it's the poet. And I just have two things to say, two stanzas. And so the tale came down the years in every land and tongue. An old folk told it through their tears and gave it to the young. and even I

in these dark days have heard and found it true so I have taken up the tale and passed it on to you and of course we know that Sam writes all this down and he's the one through whom the story comes but the story is in the end

like the passion is for the good of mankind it's he went to the cross for the joy that was set before him not to kind of fetishize suffering and in the end it's to restore peace to the heart of ordinary people that they may flourish. You know, I've come that you may have life and life and all its fullness, you know. I mean, there's a great poem about Christ by the Cornish poet Charles Corsley

where it's called The Ballad of the Breadman. There's a bit where it goes, he was charged with bringing the living to life. Beautiful. Where can people, we'll put a link in the description to this book, but where can they get it? Is it? So, depending on where you are, the official publication day was meant to be March the 23rd in both. I was pitching for March the 23rd for obvious reasons.

And that indeed was the publication day in England where it's published by Canterbury Press. So right now it's available. You can get it on Amazon. You can get it off from Canterbury Press. You should be able to ask for it in bookstores. It was meant to be the same day here. This is kind of an advanced copy. Now the day in USA and Canada is April the 20th.

But you can pre-order. The best place to do it is the Rabbit Room's own website. You go like Rabbit Room, Merlin's Island. We'll make sure we link to that. You get it. And they've got these two editions. I mean, even the regular edition, it's beautiful, hardback with all this incredible illustration.

But they've got another edition of a special slipcase. There were 500 of those we signed, but they like sold out straight away. So, and, you know, they've made it something that's going to last. This isn't like a paperback, read it and throw it. May I have a look at this, yeah? You know, haven't seen this. It's going to. It is really beautiful.

Thanks for making it beautiful. Thanks to Rabbit Room. Yeah, and Stephen Crotts, who's a brilliant illustrator. Very brilliant. He and I made this pilgrimage together, or Quest, you might say, into the, because as I was, I was revisiting all the sites as I was writing the poetry, and I thought, well, he's illustrating it. So we went to Glastonbury, and we went down.

It's a cloth. Plothbound hardcover, too, just so people know. And it's got beautiful end papers. It's got a proper ribbon for keeping your place and all of that things. Things that books. It's kind of like books used to be. This is a beautiful illustration of you. Yeah, he made that little.

He did that as a woodcut and printed it, yeah. So, yeah, I have that, the fuller version of that, me working on the poem as done by my illustrator. How long did it take you to write this? Well, quite a long time. I've been working on the kind of verse version of this for about five years. But when, but I've been thinking about it for 20 years before that, you know, and puzzling about how it might be done and making notes. But now, now I'm in the flow, right?

When I, but I need, like, I need time, you know, I need to have block out weeks or two weeks. I have to read myself back in it and attune myself to the ballad rhythm and things. But I've now written volume two, and I'm halfway through volume three. So I'm kind of two thirds of the way through the whole thing So volume two comes out in November And then there'll be just one a year after that To give me time Yeah

That we won in 27 and then the final one will be in 28 Which will be was I'm hoping to finish it Before I turn 70 And I'm 68 now So yeah I got a couple of years to Beautiful What do you do for fun

So let's say you get back from this big grueling trip in the United States and you wake up jet lagged. What do you do? Okay, I'm like ratty and wind in the willows. I like simply messing about in boats. I have a little boat on the, on the Norfolk Broads, on this little network of rivers and small lakes near where I live. She's an old-fashioned wooden sailing sloop, gaff-rigged, lots of string to pull. And I just like sailing gently among the reeds and reed beds there. And there's something about the wind filling the sails. There's something about just being afloat. I leave everything behind. And, you know, so that's something that's really important for me. Obviously, as you'd expect,

reading and reading poetry is really important to me. I never get, and when you're writing, you sometimes think, wait, do I need to do more reading, you know. So, you know, I have a lot of people will be familiar with my little study because it's where I welcome you every week for my spell in the library. That study is not your hut. That's part of the home, yeah. No, I've done one or two from my hut. Okay. So in the winter months and the colder months, I'm up in the study. But when I can, I write in the hut because there's no electric, like Wendell Berry, the great American poet, you know, has a poem called How to Be a Poet, which says, make a place to sit down.

Sit down. It says, shun electric wire, live a three-dimensioned life, you know. There are no unsacred places, only sacred places and desecrated places. Yeah, it's very good. So I walk down to my heart and in the very act of walking down there I'm getting myself ready to do this thing and I sit there. I have a row of pipes.

I have some very good English ale particularly like porters. Yeah. But among the bitters, I like old speckled hen. I have some cigars. I have a malt somewhere. I've got a lot of the Arthur books and I have nice old

manuscript books, like really nice paper notebooks, well-bound, and I have a fountain pen. And, you know, writing poetry recreates me. It's not like, hey, I have to work as a poet, I need to be compensated for it, and now I'll go have to do something else. I mean, you know, I'll write poetry for fun. But when I need to just not do anything else, I basically, I go out on my boat or I sit in my garden, smoke a pipe. We've got a long, thin garden and my wife planted this beautiful bed of roses right in front of my writing hut. And there, she buys the roses for their names. So there's a rose there called Ancient Mariner because I wrote a book on the Ancient Mariner. I'd love your wife already. There's a rose there called the poet's wife. Oh, my wife is amazing.

Can you tell me about her and your relationship? So she's great. So I'm, I mean, you know, I wouldn't be here doing this, you know, if it weren't for her. You know, she kind of keeps me rooted and grounded. She's very good at rolling her eyes, if any, praise that she refers to as gushy, comes rolling in. But she gently supports what I do. She's a brilliant woman in her own right. I mean, when I met her, she was tutor in doctrine at Westcott House Theological College in Cambridge. You know, she had a first in theology as an undergraduate, and she had a doctrine in systematic theology. She was an expert on, um, she was looking at, um, she was looking at at the theme of obedience and authority in the documents of Vatican too.

I'm trying to work out whether there was a consistent theology there or not. And she was a decadest in the local church. First time I met her, I literally was a preacher. I didn't know, you know anything. I was stood outside the church, right, looking at the notices. I'm trying to find a church just moving to the bit of Cambridge. And they had the name of the preacher for like the following Sunday and the title of the sermon. So the name of the preacher was, you know, Dr. Margaret Hutchison.

And I'd never heard a woman preach. It just wasn't part of my experience. But the title of the sermon was stoned or not. I thought it's got my name on it, you know. So it's just, it was a great, great sermon. And it was about the difference between the man being stoned on the, for gathering sticks on the Sabbath in Deuteronomy. And the woman taken an adultery, and Jesus has let him goz without sin cast the first stone.

It was an amazing sermon. So I sort of sat at her feet in that sense. And then we ran a youth group together. She'd like we had no youth group in that church. So she said, would you help me start? And obviously if two single Christians run a youth group together, they may as well publish the bands of marriage themselves because the youth group will otherwise, you know.

But it's great. So we married over 40 years ago. We married in 1984. But she'd ever wanted, she was a great, and from my view, I was in awe. I was a high school teacher. She was a, you know, serious academic. But she's the one who saw that I had a book or two in me.

She's the one that encouraged me to do the PhD. and she didn't want to be an academic. She wanted to be a parish priest. She wanted to just be the pastor of a place. She's got a great love of community. So when that became possible for her, you know, after 1994, we swapped roles. And I went into sector ministry, into chaplaincy and back into the university world and started writing books and doing my, academically my life work, which is to defend the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty and try and overthrow the,

the tyrannies of Cartesian dualism, you know, plus writing poetry on the side. But meantime, she was building these beautiful communities working with kind of young mothers. And she's completely, she's retired from that now. So she's completely, but she still helps out. What advice do you have for us married people? You've been married over 40 years.

What have you learned? What advice would you pass on? Your wife is wiser than you are. It's actually true. It is true. Yeah, I married up as they say. But, no, I think just exactly what we're talking about, the value of steady companionship.

And when suffering comes and trials, which it always does, there's a fundamental decision to be made. Is this going to be a wedge that drives us apart, or is it going to be something that draws us together? And the dealing with it together, suffering with it together, bearing, bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, says Paul, Paul to all Christians. But it's especially true of marriage, I think. And there are burdens that

I could never have carried alone in terms of stuff we've had to deal with. And burdens that she could have never carried alone in terms of stuff she's had to deal with. And so we, and when you've been through enough stuff together, it's almost kind of like the friendship of the trenches, you know. So I found curious enough, it's not, I mean, obviously it's great when things go really well and it's lovely and we have a great holiday together. But actually, I think the thing that deepened our intimacy in the deepest sense of that term is, is dealing with the losses and the bereavements

and the misunderstandings and, you know, your kids. And, you know, all of that, you know. So I don't know. I mean, I think, I mean, the fact that we're still married is probably more to do with her virtues than any of mine. And she's very patient and forgiving and very tenacious, which is a good thing to be. Beautiful.

What if we ended with you reading us a poem about the Blessed Mother? Yeah. Our tainted nature's solitary boast, as Wordsworth said. I would love to do that. You know, I love the Feast of the Enunciation. I like all the Marian feasts. And I have a very good friend, a Roman Catholic friend, a guy called Sean. And he and another friend who's a medieval historian, but as an agnostic, we all go on pilgrimages together every year.

And George is like the court gesture undermining it. But Sean and I take rosaries and say the rosary. And I found it incredibly helpful. Now, as an Anglican, I'm not sure I can give you the entire theology of it. But when I was thinking about, you know, the annunciation, I began to just look through all my different books. and realized I'd written five sonnets, not about, but five sonnets to the Virgin Mary. And I thought, okay, I've just got to hold my hand up

and say, that's how I roll. I know she's there. I love the Magnificat. It's true that every generation will call her blessed. And I'm one of the generations that does that. So this is a poem addressed directly to Our Lady, and I wrote it, you know, as it were, Thinking of her on Christmas Eve, she's about to bear this child into the world,

and she's had to keep him within, and she's taking on the swords that will pierce her heart, and she's doing it just as He's God so loved the world. But Mary didn't just so love Christ. She loved us, that through Christ, so this is addressed to her, and I call it Theotocos, God-Berer. You bore for me the one who came to bless and bear for all. and make the broken hole. You heard his call, and in your open yes, you spoke aloud for every living soul.

O gracious lady, child of your own child, whose mother love still calls the child in me, call me again, for I am lost, and wild waves surround me now. On this dark sea, shine as a star, and call me to the shore, to the shore, open the door that all my sins would close and hold me in your garden. Let me share the prayer that folds the petals of the rose, enfold me too in love's last mystery, and bring me to the

one you bore for me. Amen. You know, some of my more Protestant brethren say, Malcolm, what are you doing that? And I say, look, this poem begins and ends with Jesus. She bore the one for me. First thing Mary says and just do what he says. Yeah, and she magnifies a little. She magnifies a little. She magnifies. You love Mary.

You're not going to be far from Jesus because she's going to say, check out my son. You think I'm good. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, sorry. But I, I, there's something beautiful. There's something beautiful about her. And the infallel of her where she's kind of enfolding.

Yeah. Can I read, you may have heard this. This is Chesterton. He says, there is never a crack in the eye. ivory tower, nor hinged to groan in the house of gold, nor leaf on the rose in the wind to wither, and she grows young as the world grows old, a woman clothed with the sun returning, to clothe the sun when the sun is cold. All that clothing. So one of the stations of the cross, of course, is Jesus meeting his mother.

And when I decided I wanted to write on the stations of the cross. And I'm really delighted to know that there's quite a few Catholic churches that use my stations of the cross as well as Anglican ones. And the Dominicans up in. So I'm thinking about the two of them. And I suddenly thought about her looking at her son. And that connects her with. Can I redo this one as well?

I'd love that. Okay. This darker path into the heart of pain was also hers, whose love enfolded him in flesh and wove him in her womb. Again, the sword is piercing. She who cradled and gentled and protected her young son must stand and watch the cruelty that mars her maiden making. Waves of pain that stun and sicken pass across his face and hers as their eyes meet.

Now she enfolds the world he loves in prayer, the mothers of the disappeared who know her pain, all bodies bowed and curled in desperation on this road of tears, all the grief-stricken in their last despair are folded in the mantle of her prayer. I'm glad you exist, Malcolm. Glory to Jesus Christ. Amen. Thank you.

Thank you for smoking with me and drinking. This has been... Like, like, you know, I can... I can drink like a little. I can talk about talking about talking about. Who is he? Doesn't matter. All come.

Yeah. Like what's not to like. You know. Glory to Jesus Christ. Well, thank you for your good work. And this has been an absolute delight.