Liturgies of the Wild

Shaw is blessed with turns of phrase only the masters possess. Once you fall into this world of a wild God and bush prophets, you realise you’d follow him anywhere. Liturgies of the Wild is a journey of heart-expanding magic and redemption. It’s written with the mastery of the great storytellers.

Glen Hansard, musician

It is only in myth, and through its counterpart in liturgy, that the true depth of meaning in our world can be brought forth. Martin Shaw is our greatest living storyteller, and here he offers an enraptured validation of all that is awe-inspiring and profoundly implicit in a world where we are cabined, cribbed, confined by the explicit and banal. I celebrate the message of this wonderful book.

Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things

This is easily my book of the year.

It is heartfelt, poetic and tender, yet immensely challenging and utterly real. Martin Shaw has written a book that will help seekers, doubters and believers alike appreciate faith anew, not by reinventing Christianity, but by re-telling its story through the experience of a thousand other stories. Nothing is wasted. Every word is crafted with a seasoned storyteller's skill. In the process Shaw plumbs the forgotten depths of faith and brings back precious jewels. This is a call to life in all its fullness - untamed, honest and free. A living faith in the company of a wild God. Read it... then read it again. It will do your soul so much good.

Justin Brierley, author of The Surprising Rebirth Of Belief In God

Martin Shaw is the lost Inkling. He clears the path to God by (paradoxically) re-wilding the Way that has, alas, become so familiar that we have lost sight of its deep magic.

Rod Dreher, author of Live Not By Lies and The Benedict Option

Shaw is at home with the strangeness of the natural world as much as with the far stranger world of spirit, collapsing the distinction between the two, illuminating grit and earthiness with shafts of light. I loved this tender, honest book for the way it defamiliarizes the well-worn pathways of religion, bringing to life the power within and compelling the reader to take note: here be dragons, but also grace in almost indecently extravagant abundance. I read of Shaw’s midlife baptism and wept. I hope you will do too.

Catherine Coldstream, author of Cloistered: My Years as a Nun

Liturgies is astonishing: a journey from the shallow scoffing of the post-modern to the deep wisdom of the primal, from the transactional to the communal, and back to the rediscovery of the outer world as entirely enchanted, drenched with meaning, at once wild, inviting, and transformative. Shaw has traversed this very journey. Martin is a harbinger, a sign of the shift in consciousness that all of us, trapped in our techno-bubbles, so desperately need.

Malcolm Guite, author of Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Decades of learning, practice and refinement shine in every line of Liturgies of the Wild. And what makes it doubly exciting to read is that Martin Shaw's personal story continues to unfold in ways that he shares with his readers. Which is to say Shaw dwells in a living and expansive tradition. The vitality alive in him is movingly transmitted through his wonderful work.

Mark Vernon, author of Awake! William Blake & the Power of the Imagination