The Free Press: I Saw Christ on a Hill, by Martin Shaw (Faculty of Divinity, Oxford; Founder, Oral Tradition and Mythic Life Courses, Stanford):

When I decided to spend 101 days walking into a forest, it wasn’t God I was seeking. And yet he found me.

Approaching 50 can do strange things to us.

We may erupt into an affair or splurge our life savings on a sports car. Me? I elected to stroll from my cottage into a nearby English forest at dusk for 101 days. My plan was to sit and listen, my back against a hazel tree. …

I am a mythologist, a rather endangered species these days. …  After 25 years of touring, publishing books, and teaching at some of the great universities, I was bushed. I needed tangible contact with something that wasn’t a lecture hall or publishing deadline.

As the milestone of 50 loomed, I wanted to reconnect to my roots. … In my late 20s, I headed off into the hills of England for four years and lived in a tent, to better apprehend how the ancient tales related to the land itself. … Confronted with the question of how to approach the second half of life, I went to the wilds again. It wasn’t God I was seeking exactly in the forest vigil; I was out there hoping for wisdom. In this time of infinite distractions, I wanted to develop a greater sense of fidelity to something. …

I would often go into the woods in that hinge time between dusk and darkness, and watch the shadows lengthen. Often, I was just quiet, even praying—though to what, I wasn’t quite sure. … Then one day, something miraculous happened.

It was a very chill January evening, and I had finally come to the final day of my vigil. That last night would be a journey to the very center of the forest. … For 100 days, I had walked into the forest. It had been taxing, repetitive, sometimes marvelous. A heady and disorientating few months. I learned an awful lot about simply showing up, again and again. My consciousness had gradually tuned by the devotional steps in and out of an old-growth forest.

Now I felt grounded and solid within myself. That last night’s vigil was more a formality really, a sign-off. The end of a long act of service. I wasn’t expecting anything from it. The first few hours passed uneventfully. I remember being aware of the bones of the long dead somewhere beneath me in the frozen mud of the hill fort. I made a very simple prayer of thanks, for the many blessings and disciplines learned from the 101 days, and to signal my openness to any last insights:

Creator, what would you have me do?

For a minute or two, nothing happened. I looked around, as I’m liable to do, at the dim shapes of trees and holly bushes. Nought. Nada. Business as usual. I felt relief, almost. Sometimes spiritual overhaul can be hard work.

Then I did something I never do. I looked up. Past the trees, into the atmosphere.

And that’s when I saw a star falling out of the sky.

It was a light rapidly falling to Earth, the colors similar to the aurora borealis—­the northern lights. And when I say falling to Earth, I mean it was aimed directly at me. I saw it change shape, so it became like an arrowhead, moving at breathtaking, impossible speed. This all took place over a few seconds. What I was seeing seemed like an entry into the marvelous. I’ve seen some things, but nothing like that. It was painfully beautiful. I just couldn’t move. If this was the end, then it was a pretty bloody amazing way to go.

At the last moment—and this is an event that is continually unfolding for me to this day—the arrow plunged directly into the trees just a few feet to my right. Utterly silent, these luminescent greens and pale whites were seemingly sucked into the pitch dark of the pungent forest floor. They disappeared.

I sat up for the rest of the night, agape, ecstatic. I wasn’t frightened. I even danced. Around dawn, I staggered back down the frost-glittered track set out before me. I was tired, amazed, sore, emotional. I sat at my kitchen table and gripped the sturdy weight of the timber. I looked in the mirror and patted my own head incredulously, as if checking I was still alive. But it wasn’t over. Not quite.

As I finally clambered into bed, I closed my eyes and saw nine words: Inhabit the time and genesis of your original home. I really didn’t understand what that could mean, not in my thoughts at least. My body may have. It’s an odd phrase. With little skips that make it hard to pin down, it flips like a salmon in the hand and is gone. Such words require a kind of devotional chewing. Things have to settle. But I had the most unnerving sensation that what was happening was connected to the long-neglected Middle Eastern mystery cult of my childhood, namely Christianity.

I had gone out into the bush for 101 days, peered into the mysteries as deeply as I possibly could, and found—what? The mossy face of Christ staring back at me? …

With my 50th year now only days away, I submitted to the reality of what now seemed screamingly apparent. God, the Ancient of Days, was announcing himself. For decades, myths had told me all about life, but this myth, crashing like that January arrow into human time, told me how to live that life.

On October 21, 2021, I became a Christian. Or, more likely, I realized I was a Christian. Just not a very good one. A little out of focus. Praying on a hill doesn’t make you a Christian, and I wouldn’t have thought myself as one during the vigil. But on that October evening, I finally verbalized quite what had happened. …

I’ve kept my attention on the particular mysteries of the Christian tradition rather than taking an endless à la carte approach to myth. What you lose in variety, you gain in absorption. “Falling into the mind of Christ” is how the Apostle Paul would put it. Life is generally much quieter now. I watch the skies hopefully, but I suspect I’ve had my Bethlehem moment.

And suddenly it’s Christmas, and I’m thinking about another star. This day, over 2,000 years ago. Most of us feel like crumpled-up cigarette packets by this time of the year, desperate for rest in the mayhem of the year. After the magi had met the child, they were told in a dream to go home another way. To change course. For a moment, maybe we could risk looking up, opening to encounter the deep mysteries of the galaxy. I would wish that upon all of us at this most precious time.

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