Pentecost

 

Yesterday we began our preparation for the most mystical of feasts, Pentecost, also called Whitsunday. It is a kaleidoscopic holy day, and in the modern world often given short shrift. My Confirmation and later my Reception into the Episcopal Church occured on that day as well. It is the time of graduation and the lush beginning of summer. When I was growing up it was referred to in Catholic School as “The birthday of the church”. This is a cute name, and its principal texts come from the the gospel of Luke where that Evangelist tells the story of the Holy Spirit descending on the one hundred twenty disciples and the Virgin Mary and them going out to testify, gaining three thousand converts in one days. I’ve already talked about, the problems with this story, but my main problem is this is only a glimmer of what Pentecost means, and even after this article is done we will still have touched by a glimmer.

Pentecost is also called the end of Easter, but this too is a disservice. The Anglicans have continued what Roman Catholics have forgotten which is that Pentecost is not the leap into “Ordinary Time” but the beginning of the short and blessed season called Trinity.  Christmas, Good Friday and even Easter celebrate Christ on one level and in the dimension of earth. On those feasts, we are speaking of sacred and eternal matters, but speaking of them on this earth. Beginning with Ascension, really, we must shift gears and speak of God and our relationship to him in a more heavenly dimension. I want to say right here that one of the things I am sorry about is that while we have four Gospels, we only get one book of Acts. What if John had written his own account of the descending of the Holy Spirit and the story of the church? The readings for the extended vigil of Pentecost make it quite clear that Pentecost is about the event of the Spirit of God coming into the earth and the Spirit’s [ower to revivify, filling that which we thought had no power with great power, giving life to that which we believed to be dead and fulfilling the promises we thought long forgotten. In that sense Pentecost is not about one day, but a new era and an era which is far from over, and ever unfolding.

Pentecost is about the Holy Spirit, but what in the world are we talking about here? Having been given tantalizing glimpses of this being, the churches have done a poor job explaining or dealing with him, and maybe this is because the churches have not been terribly spiritual, let’s admit it.

As we saw in the recent US election, Christians, overall, showed little prophetic or compassionate presence. Most Christians have not been taught how to plug into the mind of Christ. Thus they often reflect the common mind of power, greed and war instead. The dualistic mind reads reality in simple binaries: good and bad, right and wrong, and thinks itself smart because it chooses one side. This is getting us nowhere. We need the mind of mystics now, to offer any kind of alternative, contemplative or non dual consciousness. We need practiced based religion that teaches us how to connect with the Infinite in ways that actually change us from our finite perspectives. We need to rediscover what Saint Francis called the marrow of the Gospel. It is time to rebuild from the bottom up.

Fr. Richard Rohr

This rediscovery of the mind of Christ, this reconnection to the Infinite must he a true product of our earnest human desire, however in the end it is the graceful work of the Holy Spirit, and this Divine and fiery reconnection of our fragile souls to God’s burning self is Pentecost. The moment of the one hundred twenty disciples in the Upper Room is not simply historical, but mythical and therefore, always present and always available.

In the Book of Acts, once and only once, Saint Paul refers to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Jesus. This is most gratifying. Trinitarians have had a difficulty with what heretics do not, the idea of modality. I don’t want to talk about the issues of the Trinity here, but Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit plainly as Jesus in another form, another dimension of Christ. I would add right now that when Jesus says, I and the Father are one in John, this seems to point to the same thing.

Perhaps one of the reasons the Holy Spirit is such a sticky person to deal with, ever made anonymous, symbolized by a bird, is because he is a door to heresy, and here I say that, though I have been using, as the modern translations of the Bible and as the catechisms use, the term “he”, I am the umpteeth millionth person to point out that the Holy Spirit was identified with Ruach, Breath, and with Sapientia, Sophia, of Chockmah, the ancient Latin, Greek and Hebrew names for Holy Wisdom. All of these folks, whether in Hebrew, Greek and Latin are counted as true and not metaphorical and all of these folk, to the consternation of orthodox Christianity, are ladies.  This means on some level, the Spirit of Jesus is transsexual, something that would send the Church of Rome and many other Christians into a rage, but which many saints and mystics, including Julian of Norwich knew well.

"It is a characteristic of God to overcome evil with good.

Jesus Christ therefore, who himself overcame evil with good, is our true Mother. We received our ‘Being’ from Him ­ and this is where His Maternity starts ­ And with it comes the gentle Protection and Guard of Love which will never ceases to surround us. 

Just as God is our Father, so God is also our Mother. 

- Saint Julian of Norwich

This points in someway to the promise of the Holy Spirit and the acknowledgement of the Holy Spirit being the return of the Shekinah to her people and to her temple, the return to acknowledging the long denied Mother of All. 

Because I have been speaking of Mother God, I must speak about the Mother OF God, Mary.  Mary is often the way Catholicism has made prayer to the feminine acceptable, by making it prayer to someone who flatly IS NOT GOD. Mary is not the Goddess. She is not God the Mother. She was never meant to be. She is the deified humanity that has become entwined with God by being, as Jesus said, his brother, his sister, his mother. There is no salvation without entering into this, becoming the Mother of God and bearing him in our lives, and Mary is first in this. If her symbols become entangled with those of God the Mother, if God the Mother is seen through her, it is because, she is experiencing the union with Great Mother we all are called to experience, but let us not be deceived, it is the Holy Spirit who is the Eternal Mother. That Mary is confused with the Eternal Mother is not blasphemous. It is apotheosis. It is the fate of the Beloved of God, not to be a follower of Jesus, but to become Jesus, not be godly, but one with God. This is the work of Pentecost.

Ascending

Catholic high school was the perfect place for would be atheists to laugh off the doctrine they were taught, dismissing mysteries and children’s tales, and by that logic, the Ascension is one of the silliest mysteries of all, a child’s story about a man flying off into space to get to heaven in a cloud.

Since I felt last Thursday approaching, I’ve known I wanted to write about the Ascension, the underrated day occurring forty days after Easter when we are told, Jesus, having risen from the dead, ascended into heaven and returned to the Father.  The story is in Mark and Luke, and Luke considers it an important enough event that he places it again in his book of Acts. This is really something because the gospels telling this story are named for two men who were NOT Apostles and who would not have witnessed it.

The Ascension is a strange event, a mystery which ought to be looked at soberly instead of taught in a pat way. You know it is a mystery because on the surface the story is ridiculous. Jesus, having resurrected for the last forty days, now goes to the top of Mount Olivet and from it, tells the Apostles to go into the world and make disciples. He promises various things about handling snakes and not getting ill from it, and then he….. ascends into heaven and is hidden by a cloud. I am reminded of Josh Koester in Catholic school commenting that space is so big Jesus would still be somewhere out there ascending and still not reached the end of the universe if, indeed, this is where heaven is supposed to be.

The cosmography of the ancient world was a spiritual one. Depending upon where you were or who you were places as diverse as Rome, Jerusalem and Delphi were the center of the world because they were the center of your world. Heaven was above you because heavenly things are above you and hell—the freezing one or the burning one—was beneath you because that is where the place of death and concealment is. But it is a mistake to think that in creating these psychological cosmographies, people were ignorant of the actual ones. India was and is and has been for thousands of years a scientific and philosophical leader and yet that did not cancel out their myths of Vishnu and the demons churning the world into being from a sea of milk, or stop them from finding Mount Meru was the center of the universe. The Babylonians were among the first astronomers, fully knowing the world was round and among the stars and yet they did not cease from drawing a cosmography where the world was flat, placed on pillars above the underworld and planted on the back of a giant tortoise.

One of the things we are now learning from Indian Brahmans  and Indians who practice religions predating Hinduism is that our first songs and prayers are pre-speech. This is to say talking is late in the human game. For the majority of our existence, while we have been fully intelligent actual human beings and not pre human, we had no speech. We understood the world in art and in song and then speech came later and when it did it came though tales and myth. Speech used to explain things in logical ways came last. Some may think that makes it better, and logic is a good thing, but what it also means is myth comes first. The rational cosmography of things is vital to our understanding of the universe, but the mythic is vital to understanding deeper things, if indeed you believe that deeper things exist.

So return to the story of the Ascension, where we are told that Jesus is taken up by a cloud into heaven. What is this meaning? We think—for no good reason—that the disciples were ignorant fisherman with no understanding of the world—but the cult of Jesus arose in Galilee, which was far more Greek than Judea to the south. These men, and we now know not only men and certainly no only poor men, followed Jesus, would have been exposed to the great Greek ideas as well as the great Jewish ones, and the two were not mutually exclusive. So we shouldn’t think they would spread or be hoodwinked by folktales.

We have become so used to the idea of the Ascension we have inserted it into all of the gospels though it is only in two of them. Matthew and John simply end with Jesus talking. Mark has his. Luke has his twice, but Luke is also going onto tell a longer story and Matthew and John are not interested in sequels. The Ascension creates an odd time frame

Easter: Jesus comes out of tomb

Weeks after Easter: Jesus makes some apparitions, popping in and out, able to walk through walls, but wholly solid and capable of eating

40 days later Jesus ascends into heaven

Where is Jesus during these forty days when he is popping in and out of houses and walking through walls, and what type of Jesus is this? We are left with a great deal of questions. But I wonder if the central message of the Ascension is contained in the first paragraph of this very essay, that it is the time when he returned to the Father. I wonder if in a mystery we should not simply leave it at that, if we should not say that all that these stories are attempts to explain something the Apostles didn’t seem able to explain.

John does not give us an Ascension, but a a Descension at the very beginning of his Gospel. He tells us the Word was God and with God and came down from him. John spends several chapters, replacing the Last Supper with a long dinner lesson, letting Jesus tell us that he is leaving, but not leaving us orphans, so that the Spirit may come. But in John’s Gospel when he summarizes the story of Jesus, he says:

He came unto his own, and his own received him not.

 But as many as received him, to them gave he power

to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:

 Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh,

nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,

 (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth…

 And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace….

No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son,

which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.

For John, who should have known, the Ascension and the aftermath of the Resurrection are not geographical matters, but spiritual ones. The Resurrection is an event we can unpack for several pages, but the Ascension, which comes after is the moment in which, somehow, a man who walked the earth as a seemingly private person like the rest of us, somehow returned to the heart of the Divine, and at the same time, somehow placed himself in our hearts and put God into our very body, breath and connective tissue. Somehow the return to heaven was the seating of Christ in the hearts of his people, and somehow heaven and the heart are made one.

That business is far more than a kid’s story about a man flying into space.

Remember the Titans: Discomfort in the House of God

The Fall of the Titans by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (1596–1598)

In most mythologies there is an awesome place where we are told that gods and monsters,  Olympians and Cyclopes, Israelites and Philistines, are not diametrically opposed, but all related. Gaia gives birth to the Titans and the Cyclopes. Noah is the ancestor of Israel and Egypt. The monstrous Ymir is the grandfather of Odin, and Tiamat the serpent is the mother of the Gods. This lack of pristine pedigree does not sit well with us. The family tree that links a god to a hydra is a little offensive. And are we the god or are we the hydra? We love dualism, but as we’ve been told, dualism is Zoroastrianism, and in the West, we never followed Zoroaster.

What if we came back to the place where we acknowledged our spiritual families as being wide and diverse as our actual blood families? What if we based the links we feel to others, not on like mindedness, but on the love we barely dare to speak and the need that defines our human condition? What if, after the last two thousand years of governing our various cults of religion, ethics and politics on exclusion, we began—not naively, but with honest discomfort—to acknowledge how little we know, how much we need each other, and how multifaceted are our many intersecting alliance of culture and belief?

Tonight, for the first time in a long time we had a great Wednesday night worship service. One tribute to faith of my fathers, or mothers, really, is that Wednesday night and Saturday night are special nights of worship and or ritual. But both my Saturdays and my Wednesdays had become pretty static, predictable, affairs to be gone through but not transformed by. Stagnancy creeps in this way. We don’t mean for it to. What I still love about the Wednesday and Sunday night first services is that they are very Catholic and still connect me to all the people who worship as I worshipped in the church that I was born into. Catholicism not as something agreed to cerebrally, but as the gift of a way one was born into. That is how most people knew religion until the Protestant reformation, and though some shun this, it has a great value, that no matter what my beliefs and how I adjust them, no matter how far I or other go, we are still part of this people in the same way that Albert Einstein, Freud and Baal Shem Tov can still, with no doubt, call themselves Jews.

But what was wonderful about the later services and which I had lost in the last few months, was that they were not only largely ecumenical, but even evangelical, drawing on all sorts of services and lessons from people all over the world, praying and worshipping, singing with all manner of people, some—no many—whose views I often find problematic to say the very least.  In my solitary work I am dealing in very specific ways with my personal deities and my own revelations. I am working my own private path, but even that is not truly private. The deity is invoked, and unlike Christianities insistence on the three being one, I allow the many faces of God to be just that, many—the Gods. The spirits are invoked, the ancestors as well as the descendants unborn and the I know not whats. Some people reading this are invoked, and all blessed. And that is in solitary work.

But on Wednesdays and Saturdays, I am putting myself in communion with I don’t know who as well, and also I am putting myself in communion with those I know all too well, eating holy bread and holy wine with those who are not as liberal as me, those who are not as ready for change as me, those who have a different view of change, not simply my crowd but the crowd that is opposed to me. In usual life I would tie myself to the pagan or pagan friendly, the queer, the leftists, the occult and forget all those who wounded me or simply frustrated me in the past whom I cannot stand beside for very long. In every day working, because I must, I turn away from the views of God I was brought up with as well as those who view God in that way. And yet, the older I get the more I must admit, not because of a reasoned out and cerebral belief, but because of those I am linked to and the words I was brought up with, I am on the continuum of many groups I don’t often have much to do with, still linked to my Catholicism, still even linked to my Evangelical teenage years. It is as tempting for witches as for evangelicals to pretend that they are in the chosen and important family with certain knowledge that no one else has, but the Saturday and midweek services take me to a place of sacred discomfort. On those nights I am united to people who do not agree with me at all, who would not love me, or understand me, who I do not love and who would not love those I love. I am uniting with people who sang these songs and prayed to this God but had no room for me.  Not by handholding or pretending to agreement, but merely by still breathing, I remain united with the places and the people I have walked away from.

The Horror of the Horror Film

Joan’s eerie voice is still in my head, the lit tree house for lack of a better word and the end of the film Hereditary.

You are Paimon, one of the eight kings of Hell. We have looked to the Northwest and called you in. We’ve corrected your first female body and give you now this healthy male host. We reject the Trinity and pray devoutly to you, great Paimon. Give us your knowledge of all secret things. Bring us honor, wealth, and good familiars. Bind all men to our will, as we have bound ourselves for now and ever to yours. Hail, Paimon!

As to horror movies, I’m a little divided. At the same time they talk of things I cannot believe in, they also speak of the deepest truths we know. Hereditary was a brilliant movie, and like all good movies it was not simply the surface content, but a story of intergenerational trauma, beautifully acted in which, after layer of layer of pain there is no redemption. I could not watch the whole movie, only the highlights. I have a hard time wth movies in general, but especially movies that are pretty chock full of despair and which, in the end, I can’t believe in. I do believe in redemption, and I do believe in real and actual horrors, but horror films are not things I can give a great deal of time to anymore.

One of my early film memories was of the second Omen movie. Let me explain that I love my mother dearly and she is not a total nut job, but she thought I just had to see it when I was nine because she loved scary movies and she thought I should too. You could even say her head was in the right place and she assumed I would know the truth from fiction, and I did. I remember the scene where Damian confronts his terrified cousin in the woods, but the more he cries out to him, the more terrified Mark is, and Damian, angry and having fully accepted his mantle as anti Christ, uses his power to give Mark and aneurysm. As the other boy screams, clutches his head and crumples over dead in the snow, Damian has crossed  line from which he cannot return. Amidst the screams and frights, as we see everyone close to Damian die, is a chilling study of a boy being left alone to become a monster, something a little too real in our present world. Damian is a much stronger version of Peter in Hereditary who is also left alone at the mercy with dark inner forces.

In the editor’s cut of the movie The Exorcist, the director talks of little details in the movie, children wrecking a car and children out of line as if to say that the girl we are going to meet later on is experiencing a very imminent possession, but the rest of the world is experiences a minor possession too. Something has shifted. Evil is real and evil is here. aSo I have a weird interest n those horror movies with all of their devil worship and rejection of the Trinity and yet there is a problem them for me. I cannot really be scared by them, not in any authentic way. And I can only be disturbed by the unrelenting sadness, not the demons, because the horror movie is a Christian construction. It is the methane of orthodox Christianity, and if I am a Christian, I am an heretical one at best, and so what they show me is a world I already lived in, but from a warped and medieval Christian view

I mean, a lot of people reject the Trinity. Unitarians for one, and though I find them a little useless, I don’t find them demonic.  I’m not saying anything new but maybe I’m explaining why the genre of horror strikes me as strange. Christians didn’t invent demons, not as we know them. That was begun by the Jews who, as they gradually separated their religion from the neighboring religions began to call not only other peoples’ gods, but other names for God Israelites had decided not to use, demons. This view was solidified by Christians in the middle ages who created books full of spirits to be commanded by magicians, spirits with names like Ashtoroth and Beelzebub, names which are corruptions of Canaanite names for their Gods or older Israelites names for God.

I grew up with the story of Elijah and his contest on Mount Carmel with the priests of Baal. Elijah calls on Adonai and the Baal priests call on… well, Baal. In the end Elijah wins and kills all the prophets. This scene is the quintessential victory for right thinking belief in the one God, but I am not the first person to ask: what is the difference between Adonai and Baal? Both had the exact same qualities and both had the exact same place and people of worship. Both names even mean the same thing: Lord. But one started with an A and the other a B. The religious war between Elijah and the Baal’s followers is the precursor to the long fight in the West about what names one calls God, what people the one who calls to is allied with and how those on the other side are wrong at best, deserving of death at worst, or maybe at worst, worshippers of demons.

Which is what the famous Malleus Mallificorum states. The Hammer of the Witches, a diseased nightmare of Catholic priests in the Middle Ages, stated that there were people out there praying to the demons made up by Christians and Jews, that there were people like our friend Joan in Hereditary who knew that Christianity and the God of Orthodox Christianity was true, but rejected the Trinity and worshiped devils instead. Because that is, in thr view of medieval Catholic Europe, the only alternative to Christianity. This is the ancestor of every horror movie from the seventies onward. Don’t forget, while for two movies you are treated to Damien with gradual truer intention killing all sorts of people including a couple of young teenage boys, in the end Jesus shows up and makes it all right by killing Damien. Yes, that shit happens.  The two priests in The Exorcist die and we get to see a bitch crawl backward up a flight of stairs, but Jesus wins. Paul Blatty, writer of The Exorcist, said that he wanted to prove Jesus to people by proving the Devil and writing something depraved. This is the nonsense wastewater of Orthodox Christianity.

One of my favorite shows was Penny Dreadful, or at least the first two seasons. How mysterious and strange it was, how full of horror and how interesting if they had come up with a new way of making horror, but in the end we were back with the Devil, devil worshippers and Jesus. There is no doubt that horror as we know it in the West is intimately linked with Christianity. I was going to make an exception for Stephen King because I don’t actually read him or watch movies based on his books, but I do remember beginning the Stand and his remark that it was a tale of “dark Christianity”, so there you go. I was going to make the film The Dybbuk the only Jewish horror film I’ve ever heard of, an exception to this rule, but then again, we’ve already talked about Judaism. Even American Horror Story—not particularly scary and not made by a professing Christian, but by an ethnic Catholic, falls into the devil trope. Even when made by people with only passing Christian beliefs, even when the characters in the movie are not especially Christian, the horror movies actually had an old trope: there is God, and there is the garden one should stay in ,and outside of that garden are other forces, and these be devils.

The premise to the classic horror movies—throw in Dracula and then remember that the whole Frankenstein story was not originally intended to be horror—is that there are people out there who light candles and pray to someone not affiliated with you and your idea of God, and they are in fact evil and praying to the Devil. One could dismiss this as silly except that witch burnings, long wars between Catholics and Protestants that tore apart Europe, the complete destruction of Catholic England, imperial wars that stamped out cultures including the Muslim ransacking of India and America’s right to destroy native peoples and enslave Africans and Asians came from this view of things. In truth, watching a teenage girl in bathed in fake blood and humiliated at her prom destroy herself and her enemies will always be terrifying  but only because in some small way it is an ensign of the real horror that comes from bad thinking and the persecution of so called enemies that has bathed the world in actual blood several times over.

Kriophoros

                        

In the last few days I’ve been getting ready for Beltane, that great Feast of the Lady, and on Sunday, there was the specifically Catholic ritual of the May Crowning, the time when the statue of the virgin is decked in a corona of flowers and processed into the place or worship. This is the time to honor the mystery of the Bride and the Mystical wedding in Catholic eyes. But I had gotten so busy with this I completely missed what the introit song to Sunday and the readings reminded me: this particular Sunday was good Shepherd Sunday and the beginning of the week of Easter where we look upon Christ as Good Shepherd. This happens every year. The first Sunday of May and all the weeks of May when the Virgin is revered will always coincide with part of Easter, and they usually run into Good Shepherd Sunday.  I didn’t want to miss the readings that focused on the aspect of the Divine as pastoralist and provider.  The shepherd is a potent and strange metaphor because the shepherd, especially in the ancient Levant, meant many things, as did the animal he herded. Of course, Jesus’ calling himself the Good Shepherd hearkens back to King David his ancestor who was the shepherd and psalmist who wrote, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” But before David there was Moses and then the Patriarchs who were shepherds, which his to say in the context of Israelite iconography if not reality, a shepherd was a king’s job. A shepherd was what a patriarch did. And while we are at it, they did not simply care for the sheep, they slaughtered the sheep. A shepherd was not only the butcher of the sheep, but he was the sacrificer of the sheep, for he was the first priest of this people. How can we mention the patriarchs and not remember Abraham who was called by God to sacrifice his own son?  In the end it is God himself who must stay Abraham’s hand, and a ram shows up to replace Isaac. But there are some who say in the original story God did not stay Abraham’s hand, and the first time we meet a shepherd it is Abel who both slays and then is slain. Jesus is the Lamb of God, and he also allies himself ultimately, with Abel and not David or Moses. He is the sheepgate through whom the sheep enter. He is the sustainer of the sheep. He becomes the chief sheep. He is not the slaughterer but the slaughtered. So, when we see the image of the sheep or ram over the shoulders of the shepherd, we must remember, it is not that one is the sacrificer and the other sacrificed, but that both are sacrifice, and both are divine.---

For a long time I have been obsessed witth image of Hermes Kriophoros. You have probably seen it too, a shepherd boy with a sheep over his shoulder, but this is not Jesus, and the sheep is a ram. The Kriophoros becomes the first icon of Jesus in Christianity because of a coincidence that made it easy for an often illegal religion to hide itself in common signs like fish and or the Shepherd Hermes. After all, Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd, and Hermes Kriophoros was the good shepherd of his people. The stories around the Kriophorus image differ, but most state that Hermes saved a town from plague by carrying a ram on his shoulders and walking around the town walls.

           

When I was growing up, often people who did not know very much about iconography wondered what it meant that Jesus was the shepherd and we were the sheep. Very often it boiled down to, “We’re not very smart and we should trust God who puts up with all of silly and sheepish mistakes. And this is fitting for mainstream Christianity a religion which relies on people not being smart, being sinful and bumbling and needing to be lead about by shepherds on earth who speak for one in heaven. It is not a grown up idea or a mysterious idea. The early Christians were both grown up and occult, and they knew that the image of the Good Shepherd was almost as disturbing as the crucifix and bore the same message. For in the image of the Kriophoros, shepherd and sheep are one.  The shepherd is the Divine Shepherd, the Great Priest, and he will be the Sacrifice, but if the shepherd and the sheep are one, and we know the sheep is the natural sacrifice, then does that not make us the Divide Ram as well, the initiate who must, in time, undergo their own immolation on the altar?