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.