What to Expect: A Week in the Grail Chapel

Dr. Shaw’s Christian Wonder Tales series was an unforgettable deep-dive into the memory of Western culture and the storytelling inheritance of the Celtic peoples of northwestern Europe. Ever since then, we’ve wanted to get Martin back to tell us more stories. When he pitched the idea of a doing a week-long immersive storytelling event around Parzival and the quest for the Holy Grail, we were thrilled—and a little nervous. We have never done anything quite like this before.

Instead of spreading sessions across five weeks, we have secured an entire week of Martin's time. Five nights. Ten hours of story. One unbroken journey from innocence to wisdom, from the forest to the Grail and back again.

Each evening, Martin will tell a portion of this “great trickster tale of Medieval Europe”—not read it, not analyze it, but tell it, in his own inimitable voice, shaped by centuries of oral tradition. This is storytelling as it was practiced for thousands of years. It’s been told by campfires, longhouses, and lecture halls, and finally here at Symbolic World, direct from Martin’s study—and it will never be told exactly like this again.

Between the story threads, Dr. Shaw will pause to illuminate, in his own way, what the old poets hid in their verses: the alchemy of failure, the pedagogy of the heart, and why the Grail cannot be found by those who seek it directly. In Martin's hands, a medieval romance becomes a mirror. The grief-woman Sigune becomes the hard experience that tells us who we are. The Red Knight becomes every charismatic figure we've ever wanted to become. And Parzival's silence before the Grail becomes our own failure to ask the questions that matter most—and the long road back to asking them.