In Defense of the Ridiculous

I have changed what I write about.

Not because I ran out of sermons, meditations, and folktales, but because the world sounds too much like a pulpiteer—long, loud, and entirely devoid of mirth. I turned to absurdity the way a drowning man turns to air: instinctively, and with no guarantee of survival.

The stories I tell now, about bureaucratic saints, apologetic corpses, and squirrels gripped by metaphysical doubt, are not escapism. They are my form of rebellion against the great and humorless seriousness that has settled like ash over everything. When truth is wrapped in outrage and irony is sold by subscription, I find it infinitely more honest to laugh at the machinery of it all. Laughter, after all, is the last confession left to the sane.

Writing absurdly regulates me. It is how I wrestle anxiety back into its proper shape: comic, tragic, and faintly ridiculous. Each story is a kind of exorcism performed with a raised eyebrow. In a world addicted to doom and discourse, I prefer to light a small, deranged candle and watch reality dance round it.

I am not writing to make sense of the world. I am writing to remind myself, and anyone still listening, that sense was never the point. Meaning lives in the margins: in a saint’s paperwork gone wrong, a machine that apologizes to trees, or a resurrected tax assessor asking for a coffee break.

The world is absurd. So, I intend to meet it on its own terms, double espresso in one hand, keyboard in the other, laughing just loudly enough to stay human. —D.

Despite all this good stuff, I have been feeling a little flat recently. It comes to us all. Much unrealised. Everything in the rear view mirror. I’m too asleep, bad-tempered, just irritable at the world. James Hillman told me it’s important to just ‘decompose’ every now and then. Don’t make everything alright. Let Saturn and his dry, difficult, Beckett-like thoughts own the house for a minute. Let things get sepia toned. Draw the curtains. Inspect the ruins.

In the words of an old Welsh poem:

What I loved in boyhood, I now hate:

A girl, a stranger, a gray horse.

But love Hillman as I do, I can’t stay there forever (neither did he really, but he worked hard and brilliantly on the legitimacy of melancholy).

And it’s in this kind of mood that God gives me a talking to. Walks me over to my large-font-sized Bible and places his substantial, clean-nailed finger on the story of Moses and God gently sayeth:

Suck it up buttercup. — Martin Shaw 

What if the point of life isn’t about fixing, polishing, or endlessly improving ourselves. What if it isn’t self-help? What if the purpose of living is soul-work. The kind that remembers myth, story, and transformative conversation is not meant to enlighten or instruct, but to awaken: to open onto the deeper life where grief and wonder, death and newness, earth and heaven still speak. The soul doesn’t grow taller, it grows deeper. So what about deepening the soul? That’s the question we’ll sit with today.

The Underworld is the place where you broke bread with Baba Yaga, made peace with limit, were fed small scraps of meat by crows when you needed it the most. It’s the deep dip in a myth, the katabasis, the descent, the mischievous, startling bewilderment of irrational energies. Logic has little traction at such a moment. Successful returnees of the Underworld are Blake, Anna Swir, Patti Smith, Elie Wiesel. Sometimes we make these journeys alone, sometimes as a culture.

My petition is that we accept the challenge of uncertainty. As a matter of personal style. It’s the right thing to do. It’s what the Anglo-Saxons called “living in the bone-house.” We get older, we find life is riven with weirdness. We should be weird too. To know, tell, and create stories is a wondrous skill that keeps faith with the traditional and beauteous techniques our ancestors used when faced with the sudden mists and tripwires of living. —Martin Shaw

Let’s begin with a question: Where are you?

That’s the question we all ask, isn’t it? Whether we know it or not, whether we want to admit it or not. Where are we? 

In 1968, a TV show called The Prisoner aired in the United States on CBS. The protagonist, known only as Number Six, wakes up one morning to find himself trapped in a place called The Village. The Village is a seemingly idyllic place, where every need is met and every comfort is provided. But every person is stripped of their true identity. They are nothing but numbers, caught in a system that controls their every move, their every thought, and their every word.

And the question that lingers throughout the show’s seventeen episodes is simple: Where am I?

“I am not a number,” says Number Six. “I am a free man.”

But in The Village, freedom is an illusion. The people who live there are told they’re free, but they are bound by the controlling forces around them. These controllers twist the truth, twist their very souls, to keep them in line, to break their will. And the most unsettling thing is that many of them don’t even know they’re trapped.

Of course, this sounds familiar to many of us. This is the world we now live in.

We are surrounded by forces that tell us what to say, how to think, and how to live. It’s all neatly packaged and branded, wrapped up with a bow of comfort and convenience. We have the internet, social media, endless streams of entertainment and distraction. We are constantly plugged in, our minds always occupied. But is it freedom? Or is it The Village in a different guise?

Like Number Six, we are told that we are free. But when we start asking questions, when we seek real truth, when we try to break free from the stories that are being fed to us, something strange happens. People tell us to settle down, to just go along, to stop fighting against the current. They tell us we’re being uncooperative, rebellious. 

But is it rebellion to ask why we are here? To seek out the truth? To want to know who is really pulling the strings?

Civil Disobedience

We’re taught that obedience is virtue.

But what happens when the laws no longer guard the land, the people, or the soul. What happens when they only serve profit, machines, and the men who write the rules to feed themselves?

They’ve built a world where you need permission to milk your own cow.

Where the law protects what poisons the field

and punishes the one who plants without asking.

Where your neighbor is a customer, a tree is just lumber,

and childhood is a market.

But there is an older law.

Deeper than decree.

Stronger than screen.

More lasting than the lines drawn by empire.

And there comes a time, and this is such a time,

when to obey is to betray the earth, neighbor, and God,

and to disobey is to keep faith and become fully human again.

Not by protest, but by planting.

Not by slogans, but by seed.

Not by outrage, but by orchard.

Not by winning, but by tilling and tending.

So stay put.

To feed your neighbor before the market.

To kneel in the soil and know your place.

To raise children who bear heroic names, holy names older than those of banks, law firms, and lobby groups.

To grow food that answers to season, not system.

To care for the old without handing them a billing code.

This is how we recover a holy remembering.

A waking from the spell of profit.

A return to the deep bonds of kinship, not to nostalgia.

This is civil disobedience.

A loaf passed from hand to hand

A lamb raised without barcode.

A fire lit for neighbors, not content.

A psalm prayed at the ditch where the wild mint grows.

Build the economy of gift.

Trade sourdough for firewood.

Trust more than they can tax.

Love more than they can regulate.

Sow more than they can surveil.

And let the record show:

we chose the soil over the screen,

the seed over the salary,

the neighbor over the algorithm.

We did not save the earth.

But we remembered it, and we prayed and we planted.

And that, God help us,

is how the garden begins to grow again

In this episode, I read about fishermen, ecology, and the question: where do we belong, and where do we choose to live?

In this episode, a poem about the first words and the story of Cormac mac Airt.

St Kevin and the Blackbird (1996)

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river,
'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name. —Seamus Heaney 

There’s a hunger in the world now, not just for bread, but for meaning. A hunger not of the belly, but of the bones. A thirst nothing sweet can quench. No flag can feed it. No slogan can soothe it. And if you’ve felt it, that ache behind the ribs, that long pull in the chest, you are not alone.

The world we’ve inherited is wired, clever, and slick with answers. It can mimic beauty. It can parrot truth. It can fake kindness with the grin of a fox. But it cannot bleed for you. It cannot carry your name in its breath. It cannot love with scars.

What we’re living through is not mere culture shift, it is soul drift.

The words we were given—mother, father, son, daughter—once thick as old oaks, now float like thistledown. Their roots have been hacked at. They drift loose in the wind of self-invention. The old ground has been traded for mirrors and wires. And while pundits clap and parliaments cheer, real sons and daughters are caught in the riptide. Told they must choose between truth and love. When in Christ, those two were never meant to be torn apart.

This is not about hate. It is not about picking fights or planting flags.

It’s about hunger. It’s about the longing that lives under the ribs. It’s about the want for belonging, for blessing, for a name spoken with warmth.

So let’s speak plainly.

You are not your wounds.

You are not a political symbol. You are not your shame, your pride, your confusion, your hashtags.

You are not the masks you've worn to feel safe. You are not the lies you’ve told yourself to feel whole.

You are a soul.

A living, aching, wondrous soul, woven by the hands of a God who doesn’t lie, doesn’t mock, doesn’t abandon.

A starving child is a judgment on the world.

Agus sin í an fhírinne ghlan—And that is the plain truth.

And that judgment begins with us.

As a man, I am sickened. The older I get, the more I understand what strength is for. And it is not for conquest. It is not for domination. It is for standing in the breach. For using your body and your words to protect the weak. To be silent now, when children are being choked slowly by hunger, is to surrender manhood itself.

As a father, I am undone. I’ve seen my children sick with fever, weak with flu, curled in sleep after a hard day. And I’ve thanked God every time there was food in the house, clean water to give, arms to hold them. I cannot imagine what it is to watch your child waste away because the trucks won’t come, the borders are shut, and the world has turned its face to something more palatable.

As a father—Mar athair—I say this: no cause on earth is worth the death of a hungry child.

As a priest, I say this plainly and without apology: To starve a child is to spit in the face of God. And if your gospel cannot name that plainly, if your faith bends in cowardly silence while this goes on, then your gospel is not worth preaching.

I do not care what side you’re on. I do not care what name you pray to. If you can justify the slow, mechanical murder of a child by hunger in the name of safety, in the name of strategy, in the name of national pride or religious war or economic leverage, then you have already lost your soul. Tá tú caillte—You are lost.

In this episode, I discuss sitting with sadness, conforming our lives to the big “T” truth, the importance of using story to cover our everyday experiences with higher meaning and purpose, and why it’s worthwhile to comtemplate the size of our souls.

The truth is, modern man — "scientific man,” as he likes to call himself — has disarmed himself. He traded his old strength, his old faith, his old stories, for a spreadsheet and a dopamine hit. He threw out the saints and the warriors and enthroned the technocrats. In doing so, he cast off not just God, but his own courage, his own soul.

He fashioned himself into a cold machine, a calculator with shoes. And now he wonders why he no longer knows how to love with fire or stand with honor. He’s forgotten what it means to weep for the right things, to feel the blood rise in his chest when the truth is mocked or the innocent are crushed.

Instead, he grazes like a herd animal, restless, obedient, anxious.

And in this vacuum, the managers come.

With policies. With dashboards. With endless “solutions” that strip the soul bare while telling you they’ve come to make your life easier.

A Thiarna, i mo thuirse, ná tréig mé. (O Lord, in my weariness, do not forsake me.)

Tuirse is not only the sag of limbs at the end of a long day. It is deeper than that. It is the hush that gathers behind the eyes when hope has gone too far ahead and no longer waits for you. It is the weight in the chest, like a stone settling, when the sea gives no reply to your longing, and the hills echo back only the sound of your name, and nothing more.

Tuirse does not arrive only at nightfall. It can come in the middle of conversation, slipping in silently when your words falter and ache behind the teeth. It lingers in the silence of letters never sent, in the stillness of roads you meant to walk but did not. It waits in the hunger for a face you can no longer name, though your heart still knows the shape of it.

And yet, even in tuirse, there is something more.

There is a stirring, quiet but sure. A breath that does not come from you, but for you. Not sorrow, but grace. Not heaviness, but a settling—gentle, steady, and given.

Pronunciation: TUR-shuh / Uh HEER-nuh, ih muh HUR-shuh, naw trayg may

In the modern West, the hearth has gone cold. The fires that once knit family and village together have been replaced with a different flame—the flickering blue light of the screen. John Michell warned of this in his strange, luminous writings. He saw how the displacement of the hearth led to the displacement of meaning. No longer do we gather around a living fire, telling the old stories, hearing the wisdom passed down in hushed voices. No—we huddle instead around the electric glow of mass-produced stories, sold to us by the same companies who profit from our outrage, our fear, our endless hunger for novelty.

Michell said it plainly: once the hearth was the link between heaven and earth. Now, that chain has rusted. The fire we stare into now is cold, sterile, dead.

The folk tales are gone. The folk songs are gone. Replaced by noise.

And it matters. God help us, it matters. Because without the old songs, without the old myths, without the fire that once drew our gazes upward and outward toward wonder, we become small. Smaller than we were meant to be. Easily led. Easily frightened. Easily bought. It is a short step from forgetting your own songs to singing the songs of your conquerors.

And so here we are: divided, outraged, distracted. The paradise of the rich, Victor Hugo said, is built out of the hell of the poor. And our masters know it. They fuel it. They love it. They need it.

And we go on, applauding them, fighting each other, shouting ourselves hoarse over scraps.

We have forgotten who we are. Forgotten the hearth. Forgotten the brotherhood. Forgotten the great chain that links heaven to earth, earth to hearth, hearth to heart.

And unless we remember, unless we kneel, as T.S. Eliot said—not kneel before flags or corporations or the endless cult of Self, but kneel before the living God—unless we kneel, we will continue to slouch. To spectate. To slip away into silence...

But the truth is quieter than that. It moves without slogans. It walks without a flag.

It looks like this: a deaf and blind man named Tim, finding his way onto a flight in Boston, one hand stretched out into the dark. And a stranger gives up his seat, and flight attendants allow their faces to be touched so he can know they are there, so he can feel the kindness in the lines of their cheeks. It looks like a fifteen-year-old girl named Clara, spelling words into the palm of a man she’s just met—letter by letter, patience and grace made flesh.

This is the revolution the world forgets. The kind that takes no pictures. The kind that doesn’t tweet. The kind that doesn’t need a camera crew to know it mattered.

...when we say, “I am depressed,” we start to believe the sorrow is the whole of us. That it's etched into the skin, like a birthmark. That it's our name now. But when we say, “The sorrow is on me,” we leave room. Room for the truth that this thing might lift. That it might pass. That we are more than what presses us down.

There’s a similar pattern in Scots Gaelic, in older English, in Hiberno-English still found in country places. You’ll hear it in the way people used to talk:
“The fear came over me.”
“A sadness was upon her.”
Those turns of phrase weren’t just poetic, they reflected a whole way of understanding the soul. That feelings are visitations. Weather fronts. Shadows that fall, and then pass. Spirits, maybe, fleeting, but strong.

In that old world, the self was not an island but a wide field, open to the wind and the Word. And so, what came upon a person—sorrow, joy, fear—was not owned, but witnessed. Not claimed, but endured.

What happened to you is not your identity. The wound you carry, the abuse you suffered, doesn’t get to have the final word. It’s part of your story, yes. It has shaped you, but it cannot define you, because Someone greater has stepped into your pain and claimed you as His own. Jesus knows exactly how it feels to be betrayed, violated, and wounded—He knows it in His flesh and blood. He knows it on a cross. He knows it in the scars He carries still. And what He says to you, right now, is that you belong to Him. And because you belong to Him, that means your wounds belong to Him, too. Your pain is held, seen, and loved—deeply loved—by the One who carries scars of His own. And here’s what makes all the difference: His wounds can heal yours. - D.

We live in an age of collapse. Spiritually, mentally, emotionally, even physically, we are coming undone. The signs are everywhere. The old symbols no longer hold meaning. The words spoken in sacred places ring hollow. Our stories, once full of weight, have been traded for distractions that pass like dust in the air. We were given something rich, something rooted, something deep—and we have spent the last century peeling it away, layer by layer, as if we believed we could stand without the thing that held us up.

And now we feel it—the weightlessness, the drift, the growing sense that something is missing, though few can name what it is. -D.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the old way of seeing, the deep sense that a pattern lies beneath all things. Scientific materialists insist we’re nothing more than arrangements of dirt, that our griefs and joys are sparks in a gray swirl of neurons. The Gnostics preach the world is a wicked trap, that matter is a cage for the spirit. But both stray from the bedrock truth. When God spoke the world into being, He called it good. Not flawed, not worthless—good. Yet, wandering in the world we see now—hard ground, hungry eyes, a planet bristling with harm—we wonder what went astray.