Perceval and the Holy Grail is more than an Arthurian legend about a boy becoming a knight. It is a mythic map of the masculine journey and the wound hidden beneath the armor.
In Part One, Perceval leaves his mother, defeats the Red Knight, learns the rules of knighthood, rescues Blanchefleur’s kingdom, and enters the mysterious Grail Castle. Yet he remains disconnected from his inner world, trapped in fight, flight, and freeze, and unable to remain present in relationship.
When Perceval encounters the wounded Fisher King, the bleeding spear, and the Holy Grail, he is given the opportunity to ask the compassionate question that could bring healing. Instead, he remains silent.
Through Jungian psychology, Arthurian legend, masculine and feminine symbolism, attachment patterns, childhood conditioning, and the spiritual power of curiosity, this episode explores why strength and achievement cannot heal every wound, and how asking the right questions can lead us back to compassion, relationship, and inner knowing.
Mentioned in this episode:
• The Handless Maiden by the Brothers Grimm
• The medieval Grail legend of Perceval, the Fisher King, and the Holy Grail
• Carl Jung’s ideas about the unconscious and projection
• Anxious and avoidant attachment patterns
• Fight, flight, and freeze responses
• Ted Lasso and the “Be curious, not judgmental” darts scene
• Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 71
• Jesus healing the man born blind in John 9
• The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis
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The full episode transcript is below.
Hi friends,
Welcome to Know Thy Soul, where we explore the stories, symbols, and truths that us back to ourselves and to the sacred within us.
We’ve spent the last few weeks diving deep the journey of the feminine through the story of The Handless Maiden.
But The Handless Maiden leaves a conspicuous gap. It tells us what the king does. He goes off to war, returns to find his wife and child gone, and then spends seven years searching for them. But it tells us almost nothing about what happens inside him. What wounds did he carry into the marriage? What did those years of battle and searching force him to confront? And what changed within him before he was finally able to find his wife again?
This is what we are going to explore through the story of Perceval and the Fisher King. Perceval moves through many of the same outward experiences as the king. He leaves home, goes into battle, takes on the role of a knight, and eventually confronts the wound beneath the armor. His story gives us a glimpse into the masculine journey that The Handless Maiden leaves largely untold.
The story of Perceval emerged from the medieval Grail traditions of Europe and has been told and retold for over 800 years.
It is one of the foundational stories of the Western world, shaping Arthurian legend, the Grail tradition, and our modern understanding of the hero’s journey.
Its themes of exile, initiation, the wounded king, and the search for wholeness continue to echo through countless stories, from Star Wars to The Lion King and beyond.
And while many people know the story of the Holy Grail, far fewer understand the deeper psychological and spiritual journey hidden beneath it.
Like The Handless Maiden, this is a story about wholeness.
A story about wounds.
A story about forgetting.
And ultimately, a story about remembering.
It is yet another foundational story that you will hear me return to again and again throughout this podcast.
In fact, we have already explored how the idea of armor connects to the ego and persona in an earlier episode.
Just as a reminder, when I speak about the masculine and feminine, I am not speaking about men and women.
I am speaking about archetypal energies that exist within all of us.
I am not a physical man, but I do have an inner masculine.
So while I cannot speak to this story from the lived experience of being a man, I can speak to it through my own inner masculine and through what I have observed in the men around me.
As always, I invite you to listen not as an observer.
But as if the story is happening within you.
And with that, lets jump in to Perceval, Part 1:
Long ago, a youth and his widowed mother lived deep within a forest.
The youth knew almost nothing of the world beyond the trees.
He did not even know who he was.
In stories, names are rarely accidental. They often reveal something essential about a character’s identity, purpose, or destiny.
If you’ve spent any time with mythology, fairy tales, or scripture, you’ve probably noticed that understanding a character’s name often helps us understand the character himself.
But this boy does not yet know his own name.
He knows little of his family or the inheritance he carries. He knows almost nothing of the world beyond the forest, and very little of his own strengths or purpose.
His mother has protected him, sheltered him, and kept him far away from the life she fears might one day claim him too.
This gives us our first clue that the Grail quest is also a quest for identity.
Before this boy can discover the Grail, he will first have to discover himself.
Or, as I like to say, he will have to know his own soul.
For now, he is simply a nameless boy living deep within the forest.
One day, while wandering through the woods, the youth heard a strange noise. Armor clanking. Horses moving through the trees.
At first, he thought devils were approaching. But then he caught sight of them: knights whose armor shone in the sunlight and whose shields gleamed. They seemed so magnificent that he mistook them for angels.
The youth ran toward them in wonder and began asking question after question. What was a knight? What was a lance? Who had given them their armor? And where could he find the king who made knights?
Something awakened inside him. For the first time, he saw a life beyond the forest, and in that moment, he decided that he too would become a knight.
There is something so naïve and childlike in these questions. This boy is still very connected to his natural curiosity. He sees something he does not understand, and his first instinct is to ask about it.
Every great discovery begins with a question, and every transformation begins with a willingness to see something differently. Right now, the boy trusts that impulse. When a question rises inside him, he asks it.
And this is our first—but certainly not our last—encounter with armor in this story. If you want a deeper dive into what armor represents, go back and listen to Episode 2. But for now, armor represents protection. It represents the persona our ego builds throughout our lives—the identity we take on in order to belong, survive, and feel safe.
Armor also has many similarities to the silver hands. Both represent an outward-facing life. Both can look beautiful from the outside while remaining cold and lifeless on the inside.
Neither the silver hands nor the armor is inherently wrong. Both serve a purpose. The danger comes when an adaptation becomes an identity—when we mistake the thing that helped us survive for who we truly are.
The boy knows nothing yet about the men underneath the armor. He sees only how brightly it shines and assumes these knights possess something he does not.
And because he does not yet know who he is, becoming a knight offers him a ready-made identity. He can put on the armor, take on the title, and become someone the world recognizes.
We do this too. We imagine the career, the relationship, the achievement, the title, or the role will finally make us feel complete. We try to resolve something on the inside by changing something on the outside.
Do you remember in one of the first episodes when we talked about living from the outside in? That is what the boy is beginning to do. He believes the armor, the title, and the role will give him the inner experience he is seeking.
That does not mean the boy’s desire to become a knight is wrong. The knights have clearly awakened something real within him. But putting on the armor will not tell him who he is.
When he returned home and told his mother what he had seen, she was devastated. She told him how, years earlier, his father had been grievously wounded in both thighs and crippled for life.
Hoping to restore the family’s honor, his two older brothers became knights. One died from wounds he suffered in combat. The other was killed in battle, his body left for crows and ravens to peck at.
When news of the elder brother’s death reached their father, grief overcame him, and he died. Terrified of losing her last remaining child, the youth’s mother withdrew from the world and raised him in isolation.
And who can blame her? She has known profound loss. The story invites us to feel her fear and understand why she wants to protect the only son she has left.
This is one way a mother wound can form. It does not always come from a lack of love. Sometimes it comes from love that has become shaped by fear.
Her desire to protect him makes perfect sense. But what protects us can also limit us. In trying to save her son’s life, she is also preventing him from fully living it.
And how often do we do something similar? How often do our fears become the boundaries of someone else’s life? How often do we try to protect the people we love from experiences they may need in order to grow?
But the mother is not the only wounded person in this story. We also have to look at what created her fear in the first place.
Her husband and both of her older sons have been destroyed by the same culture of knighthood that this boy now finds so dazzling. The very world that devastated his family is the world he believes will finally tell him who he is.
Symbolically, a missing father does not always mean a father who is physically gone. He may sit at the dinner table every night while remaining disconnected from his own emotional and spiritual life. It is not that he has no inner world; he has no relationship with it and therefore cannot guide his child there. This is the wounded inner king: capable of managing his outer life but cut off from feeling, relationship, and soul.
This is part of what I mean when I talk about the wound of patriarchy. I do not simply mean men harming women. I mean a culture that teaches us to value power, status, conquest, and achievement while cutting us off from feeling, vulnerability, relationship, and inner knowing
Already, in this opening scene—with a mother hiding her son deep within a forest, a father crippled by battle, and two brothers killed by it—this story begins in the same kind of wasteland we encountered in The Handless Maiden: a world out of balance.
The masculine has been destroyed by violence, the feminine has retreated in fear, and the boy has grown up disconnected from both the world and his own identity.
But no matter how heartfelt the mother’s story was, the youth scarcely listened.
His thoughts were fixed on the knights he had seen.
On their armor, their horses and their weapons.
And the life he suddenly wanted for himself.
And here we get our first of many glimpses of how self-focused this boy is. In The Handless Maiden, we met a young woman who was so focused on everyone else that she repeatedly abandoned herself. This boy begins at the opposite extreme: his mother tells him that knighthood destroyed their family, and all he can think about is the armor, the horses, and the life he wants. Where the maiden must learn to consider herself, he must learn to consider others.
When she realized she could not keep him there any longer, she prepared him for the journey.
She told him to help women in distress whenever he could
If a maiden freely offered him a ring, he could graciously accept it.
If she offered him a kiss, he could accept that as well.
She urged him to seek the company of honorable people.
To go to church often and pray.
She warned him not to be too talkative and to think before he spoke.
And she dressed him in a rough homespun garment of her own making.
His mother has given him a set of rules, but rules are not the same as wisdom. He does not yet have the experience or discernment to understand how to apply them, and we will see the consequences almost immediately.
The homespun garment is also worth remembering. Clothing often represents identity in stories. He may be leaving his mother physically, but he is still wearing the identity she made for him.
Then she watched him ride away.
When he had gone only a stone’s throw from the house, he turned and looked back.
His mother had fallen to the ground.
She lay motionless, as though she were dead.
Yet the youth rode on.
Even when he sees her lying motionless, his attention remains fixed on the future—on what he wants and who he hopes to become. He is still psychologically a child, unable to fully see the suffering around him or understand the consequences of his actions.
Not long after leaving home, the youth came upon a richly decorated tent.
Inside was a young maiden sleeping alone.
Remembering his mother’s advice, he kissed her, took the ring from her finger, and rode away believing he had done exactly as he had been instructed.
Of course, the boy has not actually done what his mother told him. She said that if a maiden freely offered him a ring or a kiss, he could accept it. This maiden was asleep. She offered him neither.
He is so focused on what he wants that he hears his mother’s words as permission rather than guidance. This is the danger of relying on rules without developing our own discernment.
But when the maiden’s lover discovered the missing ring, he accused her of betraying him.
Though she told him what had happened, he refused to believe her and cast her out.
Once again, the boy leaves destruction in his wake without seeing it. He is focused on the rule rather than the person in front of him, and the maiden is left to suffer the consequences.
Remember when the Handless Maiden was told that people with compassion are few? At this point in the story, the boy is proving her father right.
Eventually, the youth encountered a Red Knight outside King Arthur’s court. The knight boasted that he had stolen the king’s golden cup, spilled its wine across the queen, and claimed Arthur’s lands as his own.
The youth carried this message into the court. Arthur was deeply troubled, but the boy gave little thought to the king’s grief or the queen’s humiliation. He asked only, “Will you make me a knight?” Once again, he is focused entirely on what the world can give him.
Arthur told him that if he could defeat the Red Knight, he could have his armor.
As the youth left the hall, a maiden looked upon him and smiled. It was the first time she had smiled in six years. Surrounded by armored men, perhaps she recognizes something in this boy who has not yet learned to hide himself. She declares that one day he will become the greatest knight in the world. Once again, a woman sees something the rest of the world cannot.
In some versions, the maiden laughs, along with other members of the court, seeing a foolish boy who doesn’t belong.
Can you remember a moment when someone laughed at you for sharing an idea, asking a question, or showing your enthusiasm? I can, and I can tell you, it feels terrible.
Perhaps this is the first moment the boy becomes self-conscious and begins seeing himself through other people’s eyes. He already wants the armor, but now it can offer him something else: protection from feeling foolish and exposed.
The youth rode after the Red Knight. No one else had dared challenge him, but the naïve boy stepped forward immediately. Although he knew almost nothing about combat, he struck the knight through the eye and killed him.
The Red Knight represents raw, unexamined power. He is also the boy’s shadow. Only moments earlier, the boy took a kiss and a ring; now he faces a man who has taken Arthur’s cup and lands. Both take what they want without considering the harm they cause. The boy can defeat this pattern in another man, but he cannot yet see it within himself.
That makes the blow through the eye significant. The eye represents perception and the ability to see clearly. Remember how the devil tried to have the Handless Maiden’s eyes removed? The boy has plenty of courage and drive, but very little discernment. Again and again, he acts before he understands, leaving suffering behind him.
Then, with help, he stripped the Red Knight of his armor and put it on piece by piece over the homespun garment his mother had made. Although his helper suggested taking the knight’s fine clothing as well, the boy refused and rode away on the Red Knight’s horse.
Notice that he does not shed the identity his mother made for him. He simply covers it with a new one. And like us, he puts on his armor piece by piece.
At last, he believed he had become a knight.
But wearing armor does not give him the inner qualities of a knight any more than getting married teaches someone how to be a loving husband, or having a child teaches someone how to be an emotionally present father. A title can be acquired in a moment. Becoming the person that title asks us to be is something else entirely.
Like the maiden’s silver hands, the armor creates the appearance of transformation before any real inner transformation has occurred.
When King Arthur heard the news, he assumed the youth would soon be dead. He may have had armor, but he had no formal combat training.
Soon afterward, the youth met an older knight named Gornemant, who taught him the basic skills of knighthood over the course of a single evening. He could learn the techniques in one night. Wisdom and discernment would take much longer.
Yet the youth spoke of little besides his mother. Gornemant invited him to remain, but the boy insisted that he must leave the next morning to learn whether his mother was alive or dead.
Before he departed, Gornemant gave him a fine silk garment to wear beneath his armor. At first, the boy refused. How could anything be finer than the homespun clothing his mother had made? But Gornemant persuaded him, and he accepted the gift.
Although he has physically left his mother, he has not yet separated from her psychologically. Gornemant is the first father figure to offer him the guidance and initiation he has been missing. But once again, the boy takes what someone can give him and moves on. We have already seen this with his mother, the maiden whose ring he took, and King Arthur.
The deeper problem is not simply that he leaves. He does not know how to relate. He sees other people mainly through what they can give him or how they affect what he wants. He can be physically beside someone without seeing or caring about their needs and their inner world.
Before he left, Gornemant urged him never to strike an unarmed knight, to help women in distress, to attend church and pray, to speak less, and to stop repeating everything his mother had taught him. Most significantly, he warned him not to ask too many questions for fear of appearing foolish.
Most of this advice is valuable. The problem is that the boy receives it as another set of rules. He can memorize how a knight should behave, but he has not developed the discernment to know when a rule applies and when the situation asks something different of him.
What we are seeing is not a boy without an inner world, but a boy with no relationship to it. He does not trust what arises within him, so he looks outside himself for rules. He is learning how to perform an identity before he knows who he is.
With that, the youth rode on.
Later, the young knight arrived at a kingdom under siege. Its lady, Blanchefleur, was on the verge of losing everything. The castle was starving, and its defenders were losing hope.
I cannot help but think of The Handless Maiden. Once again, we find a wounded feminine figure and a man ready to become her rescuer.
That night, Blanchefleur came to his chamber in great distress. She told him about the siege and the fate awaiting her if the castle fell. The boy listened. He told her not to weep and promised that the next day would be better. He drew her close, and they spent the night together in affection and tenderness.
This is the first time we see him begin to respond to another person’s inner world. By morning, he vows not to leave until her land is restored. But the change is incomplete: he also asks for her affection as his reward. He is beginning to see her suffering, but he still understands relationship partly through what he hopes to receive.
The young knight rode out against Blanchefleur’s enemies. He defeated the men who had laid siege to her land, secured the release of their prisoners, and sent the defeated knights to surrender themselves to King Arthur. The siege was over, and the kingdom celebrated.
Blanchefleur and her people begged him to stay. But even after asking for her love as the prize for his victory, he could not remain. He promised to return after discovering what had happened to his mother, and once again, he rode away.
Here, just like in the handless maiden, we see the difference between rescue and relationship. He knows how to fight for a woman, but he does not know how to remain with one. He knows how to win love, but not yet how to live within it. When the battle ends and the relationship asks something of him, his attention returns to his own quest.
And what woman doesn’t know what it feels like to have a man work hard to win her love, only to retreat once he has it? Winning love and knowing how to be in a relationship are not the same thing. A man may be able to maintain the image at court, on the battlefield, or in the boardroom, but nothing brings us to consciousness quite like relationship. Relationship asks him to remove the armor, see the woman standing in front of him, listen to her, and remain emotionally present when there is no longer a battle to fight or a prize to be won.
A child’s relationship with a mother begins in dependence. An adult relationship requires mutuality. It asks him not only to be cared for, but to see and care for another person. That is harder, because relationships reveal what achievement can hide: our fears, our unmet needs, and the parts of us that are still unfinished.
Blanchefleur is asking him for something no battle has asked of him. She is asking him to stay.
Do you remember the anxious-avoidant attachment dynamic we saw in The Handless Maiden? Here we are seeing it from the avoidant side. The only relationship with a woman this boy knows is that of a mother and child. He knows how to receive a woman’s care, but not how to meet her as an adult partner or help carry the emotional life of the relationship. This is how many women come to feel like their husband’s mother: they become responsible for noticing what needs attention and holding the relationship together, while he remains in the role of the one being cared for.
We saw the same dynamic in The Handless Maiden when the king left his wife and child in the care of his mother. He had created an adult family, but handed responsibility for it back to the mother.
By now, a pattern is becoming clear: the boy is living in fight or flight. When he can fight, he fights. When a relationship asks him to stay, he flees. Blanchefleur is asking him for something no battle has asked of him—to remain. But he rides away in search of his mother, retreating from the role of partner to the role he knows: the son.
Continuing his journey, the youth rode all day without seeing another person. He prayed that God would guide him back to his mother. Then, as he reached a river too deep to cross, he saw a nobleman fishing from a boat and asked where he might find lodging.
The fisherman told him to ride through a nearby gorge and look for his home in the valley below. But when the young knight reached the top, he saw nothing but earth and sky. He was certain the fisherman had deceived him.
Then he caught sight of a tower rising from a hidden valley. As he rode toward it, a magnificent castle came into view.
Several squires came out to greet him. Two helped him remove his armor, another led away his horse, and a fourth brought him a scarlet mantle to wear. Then they led him into the castle and brought him before the lord of the castle, who was none other than the fisherman from the river. The man could not stand and had to be carried, yet he treated his guest with generosity and honor.
As they sat together that evening, a strange procession entered the hall. A squire carried a white spear with blood dripping from its tip. Two more carried golden candelabra. Then a maiden entered carrying a golden Grail covered in precious stones. Its light was so bright that the candles appeared to grow dim.
The procession continued into another room, and throughout the meal, the Grail passed before him again and again. Each time, questions rose within him. Why did the spear bleed? Whom did the Grail serve? What was wrong with his host?
But each time, he remembered Gornemant’s warning not to ask too many questions. He told himself he could ask one of the servants in the morning, and so he remained silent.
At the Grail Castle, neither fighting nor fleeing can heal what is in front of him. Faced with a wound that asks only for his presence and compassion, he freezes and says nothing.
The next morning, the youth awoke to find the castle silent and deserted. No servants came to help him. He dressed and put his armor back on by himself, then found his horse already saddled and waiting.
The drawbridge was down, so he mounted and rode across it. But before his horse had fully cleared the bridge, it began to rise beneath its feet. The horse leapt forward, narrowly avoiding a fall. When the youth looked back, the drawbridge was raised. He called toward the castle, but no one answered.
And this is where we are going to leave the story today. But before we do, let’s talk about the Grail Castle.
We already sense that something otherworldly is happening. The boy prays for God to lead him back to his mother. Instead, he meets the fisherman and is directed toward a castle he cannot initially see. He asks to be led back to his mother, but instead he is brought face-to-face with a wounded king.
In stories, the king often represents the part of us meant to govern our inner kingdom—the part that gives our lives direction, takes responsibility, and uses power wisely. A wounded king represents a wound at the center of that inner life. We may continue functioning and achieving, but something within us is unable to lead or move forward. The wounded king is not simply someone the boy encounters. He is an outward image of a wound the boy has not yet recognized within himself.
And notice what is missing from the Grail Castle: there is no queen beside the wounded king. The feminine is present—a maiden carries the Grail—but she is not seated beside the king as an equal partner. At Arthur’s court, the queen was humiliated while the king sat in sorrow. Here, the queen is absent altogether. Both courts show us a kingdom in which the masculine and feminine are no longer in relationship with one another.
The wounded king appears immediately after Blanchefleur. I don’t think that timing is accidental. Relationship has just shown us that the boy can win a woman’s love, but he does not yet know how to remain in relationship with her. Then the story gives us an image of a wounded masculine.
Jung believed that what remains unconscious within us is often first encountered through projection onto another person. Relationships make our inner condition visible. They expose fears, needs, and wounds that achievement can hide. Blanchefleur has begun to reveal a wound within the boy that he cannot defeat in battle.
The entire Grail Castle revolves around this same wound. The king cannot move freely, and the spear itself is bleeding. Traditionally, the spear became associated with the spear that pierced Christ’s side. Symbolically, it can also represent masculine action, will, and power. But here, the instrument of action is itself wounded and actively bleeding.
Then the Grail enters, carried by a woman. The Grail is a vessel, an ancient feminine symbol. Unlike the spear, it does not move outward or penetrate. It receives, contains, and nourishes. It can remind us of the womb, a bowl, or a vessel carrying sacred water.
The golden candelabra already fill the hall with light, but the light of the Grail outshines them. The hall was already illuminated, yet the Grail brings another kind of light. The boy has spent the entire story pursuing outward symbols of masculine power—armor, weapons, status, and conquest. Now the sacred appears before him in feminine form.
And the questions begin to rise within him. Why is the spear bleeding? Whom does the Grail serve? He knows that something is wrong.
At the beginning of the story, the boy asked questions freely, but most of them were about what he wanted. How could he become a knight? Where could he find Arthur? What could the king give him? But the questions rising now are different. For the first time, he is being moved to ask about something beyond himself.
He cannot respond to this wound with a sword, strength, or achievement. The moment asks for curiosity, compassion, and presence. But instead of trusting the question arising within him, he remembers Gornemant’s instruction not to ask too many questions or risk appearing foolish.
How many boys are taught some version of that same lesson? Don’t reveal what you don’t know. Don’t show discomfort. Swallow the feeling. Take it like a man. This is another way patriarchy wounds men: it teaches them to suppress what they feel and mistake emotional distance for strength.
Every story we explore here will hold many lessons. But at its heart, this is the story of a boy who has not yet learned to see beyond his own desires. Part of his journey is learning how to be in relationship with another person—and with the deepest parts of himself. And how do we begin doing that? We become curious. We ask questions.
Do you remember the compassion the Handless Maiden was searching for—the quality her father said was rare in the world? Compassion means more than simply noticing that another person is suffering. It means allowing ourselves to be affected by that suffering and feeling moved to respond. But before we can respond, we have to be willing to see. Often, that begins by asking a question.
And this does not apply only to the suffering of others. The Grail Castle can also be understood as the boy’s inner world. The wounded king represents a wound within him that he is not yet mature enough to recognize or tend.
I have quite a fondness for *Ted Lasso*. If you haven’t seen the show, let me give you a little background. In the first season, Ted is an American who has been hired to coach an English football team despite knowing almost nothing about the sport. Nearly everyone expects him to fail. The fans constantly call him a “wanker,” which is a British insult that means something like jerk or jackass. Nobody believes he has what it takes.
Side note: I would love to play the actual audio from this scene here, but I’m not entirely sure how the copyright rules work, so you’re going to have to settle for my retelling. I cannot recommend enough that you watch the scene on YouTube to get the full effect—or, better yet, watch the entire series if you haven’t already.
In one scene, Rupert—the ex-husband of Ted’s boss—is bullying and humiliating people, as he often does. He and Ted end up playing a game of darts. Rupert assumes Ted cannot really play and believes he has already won. With three extraordinarily difficult shots remaining, Ted begins one of the greatest monologues in the entire show:
“You know, Rupert, guys have underestimated me my entire life. And for years I never understood why. It used to really bother me, then one day, I was driving my little boy to school, and I saw a quote by Walt Whitman painted on the side of a wall: ‘Be curious, not judgmental.’ I like that.”
Ted throws his first dart and lands the first of the three shots he needs and then continues speaking:
“So I get back in my car, and I’m driving to work, and all of a sudden it hits me. All them fellas that used to belittle me—not a single one of them were curious. You know they thought they had everything all figured out, so they judged everything, and they judged everyone. And I realized that their underestimating me—who I was had nothing to do with it. Because if they were curious, they would have asked questions. You know? Questions like, ‘Have you played a lot of darts, Ted?’”
He throws the second dart and lands another seemingly impossible shot. Everyone in the bar erupts, and Ted finishes the monologue with:
“To which I would have answered, ‘Yes, sir. Every Sunday afternoon at a sports bar with my father, from age ten until I was sixteen, when he passed away.’”
Ted throws the final dart and wins the game.
That scene shows us what judgment does. Judgment assumes it already knows. Curiosity recognizes that there may be something we have not yet seen. Questions allow us to move beyond our assumptions and enter into a relationship—with another person and with ourselves.
The tragedy at the Grail Castle is not that the boy lacks the right answer. No one asks him to diagnose the king or solve the mystery. Healing requires only that he care enough to ask.
A question is the beginning of compassion. It says: I see that you are suffering. I know that I do not understand. And I am willing to learn more, to listen and to help where I can.
We see this everywhere. Democrats blame Republicans, and Republicans blame Democrats. Religions become so focused on where they differ that they forget to ask what they might share. Nations see only borders and enemies and forget the human beings living on either side. Men blame women, women blame men, and both spend far more time talking about each other than sitting down and asking each other questions.
How often do people on opposing sides sit down and genuinely ask each other questions? What have you experienced that led you to see the world this way? What are you afraid will happen? What matters to you that I may not understand?
Curiosity does not mean we have to agree. It means being willing to admit that we may not know the whole story. A divided kingdom cannot heal while everyone is busy judging and no one is willing to ask.
Long before Ted Lasso reminded us to be curious, the Tao Te Ching taught that knowing we do not know is wisdom, while not knowing and believing we do is a kind of sickness.
Jesus makes almost exactly the same point in the Gospel of John. After healing a man who was born blind, the religious leaders ask whether he thinks they are blind too. Jesus tells them that blindness itself is not the problem. The problem is that they insist, “We see.”
Both teachings remind us that the danger is not what we do not know. The danger is becoming so certain that we already know that we stop looking, listening, and asking questions. That is what curiosity requires: the humility to admit that there may be something we have not yet seen and the willingness to ask.
And spoiler alert: we will see this again in a few episodes when we take a deeper look at what it means to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Once we believe we can neatly divide the world into good people and bad people, right and wrong, men and women, us and them, we stop being curious about the people we have placed on the other side. And that is how the world falls out of balance.
But, as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself.
But the boy has learned to conceal what he does not know. He swallows the question rather than risk looking foolish. And because he does not ask, the wound remains unspoken and the king remains unhealed.
His feelings for Blanchefleur have opened new territory within him. But entering that territory will require him to remove his armor, see the suffering in front of him, and ask the questions that might lead to healing. In her own story, the Handless Maiden had to do the same: remove her silver hands, face the wounds she carried from childhood, and begin the work of healing them. The boy is not ready to do that yet.
The next morning, no one is there to help him. He puts his armor back on by himself and rides away, still carrying the question he was too afraid to ask.
And remember, after all this, the boy still does not know his own name. But that is about to change. Next time, he will finally discover who he is—and learn the consequences of his silence.
Before I leave you, I want to leave you with a few questions.
Think of a person or situation you have already judged. What story have you decided is true? What might you ask if you allowed for the possibility that you do not know the whole story?
Then turn inward.
What feeling have you been ignoring?
Where are you fighting, fleeing, or freezing instead of listening?
And what question keeps rising within you, waiting to be asked?
Until next time, my friends.
May you know thy soul.
It already knows the way.
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