I was delighted to be asked to contribute a chapter to this new book which emerged from a conference at Leeds Trinity University last year. All the contributors, including Monsignor James Shea himself, were responding, in one way or another, to the ideas he set out in From Christendom to Apostolic Mission.
My chapter focuses on education, myth, literature, and the example of Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, the founder of Mary’s Meals.
Here’s the abstract of my chapter:
In From Christendom to Apostolic Mission, Msgr James Shea argues that “there needs to be a counter-narrative to the overwhelmingly non-Christian narrative currently on offer.” In this chapter I look at different ways of creating that counter-narrative, focusing on my experiences as a teacher, children’s novelist, doctoral student, and charity worker.
As philosopher Mary Midgley points out, “The way in which we imagine the world determines what we think important in it, what we select for our attention among the welter of facts that constantly flood in upon us.” The scientific, sacred or secular myths we use to make sense of our lives are, therefore, of supreme importance. Here’s Midgley again: “Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.”
Taking Midgley’s ideas as my starting point, I explore new ways of creating counter-narratives in our schools and homes, drawing on my own experience of creating a Sophia programme – a training in wisdom – for my Sixth Form students. In particular, I look at the role of stories, including “those little gospels called fairy tales,” to use Cristina Campo’s evocative phrase.
As a practising novelist, I then offer some suggestions of ways in which we might re-enchant fiction, while also examining some of the success stories of the last century: the work of Tolkien, Lewis, and Waugh as well as the less well-known work of Fabrice Hadjadj, George Mackay Brown, Rumer Godden, Jon Fosse, Eugene Vodolazkin, and Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera. Finally, I reflect on the counter-narrative offered by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, founder of Mary’s Meals. It is here, where Theology, Literature, and lived experience meet, that we can begin to recover and renew a genuinely Christian vision of the world that is so badly needed in our times.
And here is the book’s contents page:
The Beginning of Wisdom – Creating a 21st Century Counter-Narrative
As Monsignor James Shea reminds us in From Christendom to Apostolic Mission, we are living in an age of change, which means that we need to look again at the lives we lead, the strategies we use, and the stories we tell. We need to create “a counter-narrative to the overwhelmingly non-Christian narrative currently on offer” (Shea, 2020, p.69). So, what might that counter-narrative look like?
Monsignor Shea argues that the “Christian mythic vision (the true one) needs to be made available such that it can chase out the false myths of the day in the minds of believers and inquirers” (Shea, 2020, p.69). This notion of true myths and false myths is intriguing, but it is also capable of being misunderstood simply because so many people struggle to make sense of myths at all.[1] What Mary Midgley wrote in 2003 is just as true today: “we are accustomed to think of myths as the opposite of science. But in fact they are a central part of it: the part that decides its significance in our lives” (Midgley, 2011, p. 1).
What Midgley meant by myths was not simply the stories we tell our children as they grow up — Greek myths, Norse myths, Chinese myths — but stories that shape our understanding of ourselves, often very unobtrusively. Among the many examples she gives, we might pick out “machine imagery, which began to pervade our thought in the seventeenth century, [and] is still potent today. We still often tend to see ourselves, and the living things around us, as pieces of clockwork: items of a kind that we ourselves could make, and might decide to remake if it suits us better. Hence the confident language of ‘genetic engineering’ and ‘the building-blocks of life’” (Midgley, 2011, p. 1). Here, surely, is one of the false myths of which Monsignor Shea writes.
These false myths, Midgley argues, have great power and are very difficult to shift. Nonetheless, there is hope because true myths also have great power and can also effect change. And the reason they are so powerful is because “symbolism is an integral part of our thought-structure. It does crucial work on all topics, not just in a few supposedly marginal areas such as religion and emotion, where symbols are known to be at home, but throughout our thinking. The way in which we imagine the world determines what we think important in it, what we select for our attention among the welter of facts that constantly flood in upon us” (Midgley 2011, p. 3).
Midgley’s reference to attention is significant. In an age dominated by big media, we are belatedly realising the importance of attention. As Tim Wu reminds us in Attention Merchants, there in “an epic scramble to get inside our heads” (Wu, 2017). That is why we need to learn again “how to flourish in an age of distraction” (Crawford, 2016). Finding true myths and convincing counter-narratives matters not simply because traditional stories, including the Christian story, are being submerged under a sea of transient content but because there is a battle for attention going on in our age of change. If we don’t arm ourselves with convincing stories, we will find that the battle has already been lost. But what does this mean in practice?
As a novelist, teacher, student, and charity worker, that question is often at the forefront of my mind, so I was delighted when, a few years ago, I was given the opportunity to create an enrichment programme for sixth formers in the school in which I worked. I started by going back to basics, asking students and colleagues alike what the purpose of education is. It was clear that many of them were disheartened by the factory learning they had experienced, the relentless conveyor belt of public examinations to which they unwillingly submitted, but few of them had an alternative vision. So, I talked to them about the Greeks who wouldn’t have asked about the purpose of education so much as about the end of education, a question they would have addressed in the context of a much broader question: what is the end of human existence? For Aristotle, the answer to that question was clear: it was eudaimonia, which can be translated as happiness or, perhaps more accurately, as human flourishing. For humans to be happy and flourish, we need the best that education can give us: not qualifications but wisdom. Or, to give it its Greek name, sophia.[2] That was how I came to set up the Sophia Programme, Ancient Wisdom and the Modern World in Conversation to quote our strapline. But who is Sophia? What is wisdom?