Martin Shaw, author of such books on mythology as Courting the Wild Twin, has converted to Christianity. Rod Dreher has interviewed him extensively, and the entire conversation is worth your attention.
Rod writes:
This past summer in Cambridge, the Anglican priest-poet Malcolm Guite asked me if I knew about what had happened to Martin Shaw. “Whose he?” I asked. Turns out he’s a very well known figure in mythological circles. He is a storyteller and popularizer of mythology, having taught it at Stanford University, and more recently at his own school in England’s West Country. And of late, he has become a Christian.
Martin’s story is fascinating, because he loved the mythology, the imagination, before he accepted the full truth. What pushed him over the edge is anything but tame. And where he goes, once Christ has gotten a hold of him, is similar to several other recent conversions like novelist Paul Kingsnorth or icon carver Jonathan Pageau—once he realizes he doesn’t have to choose between his craft (what means most to him) and his God (what ought to mean most to him), both those relationships catch fire. But the journey isn’t always easy.
What I’ve learned through many years of wilderness vigils is that it’s a Jacob wrestling with the angel kind of situation. You have to be gloriously defeated. You have to be made lame in a fashion. A decent laming will serve you much better than many petty victories, because it’s something you will never forget. It reminds you of your appropriate shape in the universe, which is on one knee, or both knees. There’s a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that talks about it. It says, in essence, that the trouble these days is that our successes make us small, because they’re so small. What we long for is to be like the wrestler in the Old Testament, and desire to be beaten by a greater power.