Sixth and Final Sunday of Extraordinary Time: Tisha B'av, Sunday of Suffering.

 

After the first prayer I went out into the unpleasant heat. I thought, I should have moved Tisha B'av to monday. Sunday is always for Mass as Saturday is always Shabbat. But I had already began this exercise and then, it wasas I  necessary to do this day, to end the Three Weeks of Mourning.There is much I have to say abotu Tisha Ba'aV and the Three Weeks and hte Nine Days even. They carry many lessons, but today on the Tenth of Av, as I have eaten and sit down to eat again, as I remember bathing and purifying after a time of mourning and sleeping in a real bed and not the floor, there is something to be said about the end of mourning. Today the Bridegroom has returned. Today the King is arisen from the world below. This is the return of Adonay or Adonis or Tammuz, the Shepherd King, and all returns are joyful, but strange. No return happens all at once and without pain. Rebirth is as discombobulating as birth itself.

Tisha Bav is the day of bright darkness when an old thing died. It marks when the rabbies began to create Judaism, twice, both times at the destruction of the Temple, The destruction of the second temple also commemorates when the ancestors of Christians had to reveiw their own theology and come to an ew understanding, so two faiths were born, But Tammuz the Shepherd did not disappear. One faith dcclared tiself as waiting for his coming ,the other as seeing it in the Lord and Shepherd Jesus.

But there were and are other faiths that still see this as the return of the King Spirit, the Shepherd Lord, and I am among them. There is not one Easter, but many. Paul declare that Christ, having died never dies again, but we celebrate it again and again every year, and Adonay the Shepherd must agai and again travel between the worlds and take us with him.

The Day after Tisha Bav is a slow return to joy in the new world after mourning. It is a suble shift from the time of grief to the time of living because we cannot remain in grief. Unlike Easter, which is almost so bright we cannot stand it, Tisha B'av in its stricly Jewish context thinks about returning to a life where there is no resurrection, or better to say where the loss is permanent. But if we look closer, both Easter and Tisha B'av look at the same thing in different ways. The resurrected Israel that comes up from the flames is weak and damaned and wounded and will never be the same, can never be addressed in the same way again. This is the way of the resurrected Christ, beneath the joyful hymns that steer us away from the distubring story. He can never be known in the same way again. He is forever wounded and so are we. After crucifixion this world is no longer his home. He is in Exile and those who chose to follow him are in Exile too.

On Fool Sunday

I don't mind calling it Fool Sunday or the Sunday where one focuses on the journey, which in Tarot is called the Fool's Journey, especially when I felt so much like a fool on Sundya, with everything going on, especially when I felt so weak and so fragile, not like the Great Magician at all, certainly not like I had any great answers. The Journey of the Fool is our long journey toward God, the long journey back to our original home, and it is filled with bumps and, yes, we are the Fool. We get it wrong. We lose our trainign. We lose our way. We don't understand the lessons we are being taught. We forget, quite easily, we are the sons and daugters of God. We forget our magic. If i do not talk about magic it is because it is not very different from the actual faith of any believer. Anyone telling you that you can follow the magic path liek a science, or you can follow it without faith is silly. You don't know where it goes. You open yourself to it. You ask humbly for the Lord of Lords and all around you to assist. Sometimes you demand. My phone went on the fritz at the end of a very horrible morning and I said to it, you know I thank you for going on the ftitz because you helpd me learn some things, but now, I wil you to work.  And it absolutely did not work by my touching it and willing it and there was no amount of wand wavign that would have worked on the phone, but a while later, a code flew into my head, and I typed it into the phone and everything was fine. That is magic in the world. Magic is needing busfare and lifting up a carpet to find the exact change. It so ordinary, and it is not that everyone is magician or we are all witches, but the magical view allows us to enter the magical world, which is to say, the world. So many of us now, are not part of the world, do not see it, wish to use. The magical world helps to us to enter this place that is our home, at the same time the magical and spiritual discipleship leads us on this road which is our journey back to our original home.

Because there isn't really any other place to type it I will say here that writing makes me less lonely, actually had a wondrous power of removing loneliness. People get marrie,d have children, all to not be lonely. But loneliness is the entreprise of this life. What our task is, especially the task of the monastic, is to transform loneliness into solitude. . Now we are in the period of the Three Weeks, the ancient time of mourning in the end of Tammuz which concludes on Tisha B'av. Yesterday wounded and stabbed me and left me angry with a God who would so quickly remove me from this happiness I was feeling into this state of fragility, but the state of fragility is the state of the whole world and the wounds are the wounds of Jesus. This suffering is the stripper that removes the vaneer of i'm alright, i'm alright, I'm aways good. I'm okay. It removes the bullshit of optimism and feigned health, of good spirits that have no time for mercy. These wounds are doors and windows to truth, to honesty. They are openings through which the suffering of others can enter. They are the doors of mercy.

Adonay Sunday

...Is not entirely like the Devoted Lover Sunday and it is the Sunday I chose for my marriage to the Divine One. Tammuz is Adonis, is Adonay, is in some ways Christ. He is, in his own way Krishna and perhaps the Kriophoros. He is Balder the beautiful, the slain one and originally, surely he was Osiris. He is the Lord. He is the King. He is the Shepherd King prefigured in David and the prophets, fulfilled, some would say, for Christians, in Jesus. 

To be wed to him is to be wed not simply to the King or the Good Shepherd but, alas, the the Lover who Goes Away. To be wed to him is to be the widow of the world. We have become accustomed to Greek Gods, but the Norse have made a comeback, when I firsr read Norse myth I was surprised by the idea that the Gods die, that Balder is slain, but then, why shouldn't gods die? Or rather, why should we alone die? Greece made Gods who could not die, but also were not holy, and the ones who did taste death were relegated to eastern side stories, like Adonis, the very one whose name means Lord, who is Lord of the Above and Lord of the Below. The Greek stories ignore this, calling the Lord of the Underworld Hades, confusing the place with his proper name which they rarely use: Aidoneus.

Aidoneus King of the Underworld seizes, while still in life, Persephone, a more bearable tale for Greeks who hated Gods who died and hated males who were not powerful. But it cannot be a coincidence, this story of Persephone seizing Adonis to be her lover in the below lands part of the year.. Surely Aidoneus and Adonis are the same. Surely, in some wise, Persephone and Demeter are the same as well.

The mystery of Tammuz is related to the mystery of Babalon. As the month began I wondered how would I celebrate Tammus and then life taught me. A lover of mine was gone, seemed like he might have been more than gone. I began to lament him and then suddenly learned he was alive and well and there were only complications. The love we made the next day was the mystery of Tammuz. Nor was he here to stay but going away again. That is the mystery of the one who is coming and going, who passes and we lament and then he returns again. 

Later that same day, As an Ashtoroth offering, I had the very different experience of sex with a total stranger where I was not myself and he was not my lover. We were offerings to each other. This was sex without any end except the pleasure happening and sex without ego, the organ and the mouth. This is the offering of Babalon. Tammuz and Babalon are not husband and wife, or even lovers necessarily, but they are a pair and I do not think one is without the other. The sex is them is sacramental, two sides of the alchemical wedding.

But why in the world Tammuz Sunday? And again, how is it different from say, something generally devoted to the alchymical wedding, or the marriage of Robin and Marion, or Radhakrishna Sunday? And maybe it isn't terribly different, but is a difference in emphasis.

In Aramaic calendars including the Hebrew one which we use, this moon is the moon of Tammuz, and this is because of the ancient festival of Tammuz which was celebrated well into the eleventh century AD. Tammuz, Adonis, Damuzi.... Adonay. Christ has died Christ had risen, Christ will come again. According to popular belief Tammuz was mourned three days, but curiously in Christianity such lamentation was moved into spring with Easter which was never a full three days and in Judaism there may be a simlar thing, for they have and we celebrate, not three days, but Three Weeks, of fasting and mourning which begin today and culminate, like Easter, outside of the month of Tammuz, on the ninth day of Av. We are told in the Old Testament that the women of Gilead would annually go into the hils to weep for Jepthah's daughter, and this may also be a retelling, or erasure of the Tammuz story.

Tisha B'av, which is soon upon us gives a strange insight which Christian mourning often does not. In Christianity, like Yom Kippur, there is mourning for sin and longing for repentance, but the Three Weels of Tisha Bav, taking place at the height of summer mourn, the destruction of the temple--twice, the sin of the Golden Calf, the departure of Shekinah and generally every bad thing that ever happened to Israel. It is a curious insight, that at the height of summer, when we are told to celebrate and be happy, there is not only room for, but a necessity for, mourning, for crying out to God. Tammuz and his glorious birth from the tree, his glorious body, wondrous marriage, beauty, lordship of the above and the below, are intimately died to compassion, sorrow, and the need to acknowledge that which mourns in all of us. As we enter into the Three Weeks, may we not be afraid... of our fears, and our sorrow and our weakness. May we acknowledge in our search for strength our weakness and seek comfort in each other. In out courageous choice to be joyful, may we ignore our sorrow, and we may we earnest work and pray for the union of that which is had been broken, the union with is the restoration of Shekinah and return and kingdship of Adonay the Great Shepherd of our souls.

On the Esbat of Midsummer

 We may have to wait for the Moon tonight, or we might miss it completely. The Esbats are always tricky. I ought obe writing this in then otebook and i'll probably go bac kt there soon. I ought ot be sittign at an alater, taking up what ever it wants to tell me. My gos is the altar. My God is the Craft. Over and above all ,that is my deity, the worship, the work, I needed to write in this journal just to know I needed to sit down and be still. All that needs to be done is done, all that needed to be told is told, All that can be explored at this moment is explored. Let the body be a teacher. All of my thoughts were no thoughts, half formed worries, mad twitches on the mind. This writing is, I think, my Kodacrhome.

Tonight I was going down the road of self pity, thinking of how I had no one to love and care for me, like a child or like a lover, and how in many ways I never did. But already today I had decided that maybe everything that was happening to me was pointing me in the direction of becoming a God Spouse, I think it still is. I was in great ecstasies today, and it came to me in the midst of evening Mass. Al others are dull to me. I suspect there is something within me that resists being cared for.

This is a sexless time, not just a "loveless time", something that sounds so Christian or so religious and moral, but also a time without passion, without lust. My own is fading. It is where I can barely remember how sex works and the pleasure I received is becoming a distant memory. In our magic, let us work for that as well, as well as the return of the King. But during this time I see so much of what i have forgotten, what has slipped behind. How to call on the forces beyond and become a part of them, how to actually, as the openinng lines in initation say, "leave behind the pleasant realms of men." Often I feel in a state of learning, an infant state, but one should not feel this wall all the time.

Right now I am thinking of the Great Year and how it aligns with the Liturgical Year of the Church. For a reason unknown, the Church Year is compacted into a space which is less than six months, a space which doesn't even take up half the year. But it looks like it is reflected in the Great Year, and how do we celebrate that: if we celebrate it.

Second Sunday in Extraordinary Time, First Sunday in Summer: Alban Heflin: The Light Upon The Waves

 I'm in a palce that can only be solved by writing. I am not i na dteachign palce or an explaining palce, but a palce where i muast write down everything that has been going on.Today is so much, the beginning of the second week of Extraordinary Time and Father's Day as well, I find out--and this makes me feel all sorts of guilt for not knowing it--that it is the Soltice. I get my ass up to see a beautiful sunrise but there is just no sleep this day, not until so much sleep in the afternoon when I wake up nearly at nine, not till I spent until almsot eleven feeling groggy and feeling frigtenend and epressed about the unemployment money coming to an end, about the possiblity of never workign agian, enver find good work again, being poor, all the little worries. When I am fianlly able to sit down and do the last meditation, the oen that brings on the magic, I think too mch, think what am I longing for when I say I'm longing for peace? What am i doing here, what do I want, how can I get out of my own mind and into the magic, jhow can I get ot what must be. My thoughs my worries, all the diretions I am growing in, but that I think I am going in, are filling my head. I  can;t get away from myself.

I am in love with Mass. Maybe I ought to stop. It doesn't pyschologically seem to help anything when I do one. I say they're good, but they aren't much. Maybe i'm growing away from them. Maybe i need to let myself grow in the direction my Self is growing.  Maybe I do violence to myself by going back to things. Maybe i need to go back to them to learn how much violence I do.

I wish I could alwyas be visiting people, always be getting away from my mind. I think what a silly thing that mind is, how prone to worry it is, how prone to concentrating on the walls in front of it.

I get afraid at Alban Heflin, the beginning of the shortening of days. Days have gotten longer and longer and now they grow toward winter, which is a bit of a lie because summer cannot begin until this time, the hottest days are still to come, a luxurious stretch of summer is before us much the same way that winter will not come, not the terrors of winter monts until AFTEr the solstice. The soltice is misleading. Thinking of this as the last day that I will have unemployment insurance I become afraid of an insecure future.  I become, flally, afraid. I am afraid that not only will I not find work, but that I will fail to even look with any wisdom or actual skill and desire.

I am no a new path. I am trying to honor it. I am amazed by it. It is clear to me that I am becoming a druid, have been doing so for a while. I am growing up from witchcraft into this, which is to say, for me this is an evolution, not for all. Some may go the other way. This is who I am and that is exceiting. I want to tell so many people, but who to tell. And how to celebrate it. I feel like my celebrations are so lacking, so undone.  I hardly know what I am doing. i put so much pressure on myself, but as I settle down to sleep at eleven or so I realize, I am the little child. I am the ultimate little child just beginning, and you are midwife, mother, high priest, teacher. It is time to decrease, to decease, to turn over. To trust.

Homecoming

Lead me from the unreal to the real;

Lead me from darkness to light;

Lead me from death to immortality

– Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

This first week of Extraordinary time which began with the Sunday of the Devoted Heart, and the placing of Hanuman's portrait above the altar should have been called Homecoming week. All this week I have been coming back to songs and ways of praying and checking unhealthy or unexplored or underexplored ways of thinking. We are playing, and praying and striving, striving with more sobriety than ever before, in the big and expansive lands of Hindu and Buddhist practice with all that these entail. 

It makes Judaism feel small and tribal. It more than points out the errors of Christianity. These religions that are not so much about one God as one way of looking at God, the unity of people as the declaration that there is only one people. We can foster both of those paths into something meaningful, spiritual and real and many have, but they are greatly damaged and as long as they depend on institutions to uphold them, will remain greatly damaging. I remember years ago, walking into the Tibetan shop I didn't get to visit this time around when I went back to Evanston. The shopkeeper asked me: You Buddhist?" I said, "Hindu." She said, "Same thing, same thing." Let us not even pause that she did not for a moment look at my skin color and think I must not be what she was. She insisted that as a Hindu I was the same thing as a Buddhist. Years later I told someone whose experience of those religions had been as a very white person on a college campus what the woman said and she was nearly offended. In the West we love differences and we cling to them. She could not understand a part of the world where this was not true, where faithflowed together, where, in fact, there was no word for Hindu or Buddhist, there was just the ways in which you did a thing.

In this time when we need more than ever to be saved from the actual sin of self destruction and self hatred, when we truly are in peril of going mad, it is strange that we still cling to religions run by institutions and stuck in the bad myth of chosenness. Buddhism is the first of what we call "world religions" because it is easy to join if not easy to do. Salvation, transformation, love, awakening were of the essense. There was no time for rituals, bloodlettings, testings, classes, approvals of priests or ministers of any type, assurances of belief in a particular story, being sure of ones allegiances. Though Judaism would never learn that lesson, its successors would at least, learn it in part, but now is the time to learn it fully.

The paganism which emerged as the interesting plaything of middle class white people in the 1960's and '70s had been going through a change, or rather changing back to itself as it is joined by serious writers, thinkers and anthropologists, as, abandoning its first myths its finds its place beside Voudou, Hoodoo, Druidism, shamanism and other magical or animistic practices and philosophies. Recently there is a coming to terms with what one thought was the pure creation of Gerald Gardner in the 1950's being the latest branch of a long esoteric tradition including a highly spiritualized Christianity and Judaism. Often this is called the Western Mystery Tradition, but now, whatever you call it, it is opening up and incorporating the East, What Saint Paul spoke of, no male no female, no Gentile no Jew, at least seemes to be happening though he would gouge his eyes out if he could see how it is happening. And the truth it, it has always been happening, though called gnosticism, witchcraft, heresy, though shut down as soon as it was seen by powerful men of religion. Now that the men of religion no longer have the power to do that, for the first time in seventeen centuries it can begin happening again. Could it be that now we have left the Christian Era, we could, possibly, become Christlike and enter our own spiritual renaissance, a true homecoming?. 

Mary Magdalene: Again

 

I imagine nothing gets me back here so much as Mary Magdalene. In the short season of Pentecost each week thereis a feast fo the Blessed Virgin and in Young Tradition have been added equal feast to Saint Anne and to Mary Magdalene. The Church had room for only one female figure but we make room for the three as Gods and Goddess forms show up in triple form. Today is the last Magdalene Feast where she is Lady of the Precious Blood, the pourer of wine and the offerer of the Chalice. She is the Eucharistic minster bearing Christ to the world, an integral part of the Eucharist. She is also the Grail Maid, Kundry. Last week, as the Lady of the Jade Skirt and the Lady of Rains, she was  Magdalene who possesses the Sacred Heart of Jesus and loves him passionately and so teaches us to do the same. Her life is entangled in Christ so that ours might be as well.

TRINITY SUNDAY

Sometimes the world feels very small. Like right now when I am talking to a friend in Australia and returning messages from readers in England. I am listening to BBC4 and suddenly hear a singer who is married to a friend of someone I grew up with, whose band I know is in Chicago. Sometimes you experience yourself as part of a great community, and sometimes, if you give yourself to it, that sense is sacred.

The Divine as community, as multiplicitous is a high concept in many religions, the Divine experiencing the I in you and you in me, its own modality, its several personalities resolving in one nature is not new at all, but in Christianity it is known as the Trinity.

                             

This is the second Sunday of the small season of Pentecost.  The story of Jesus finished as he has ascended into heaven, the Church reveres three ways in which we experience the ascended God who is still with us. Pentecost is our continual renewal and vivification by the Spirit of God and next week is our continual feeding and communion with Him through Body and Blood, but this Sunday concentrates on the high relationship of the trinity which makes relationship with us possible. This is the celebration of the high multiplicity of the Divine

MARY MAGDALENE LADY OF THE HOLY CHURCH

 

Of course it would be Mary Magdalene who calls me back from retirement. She is the third feast in the week of Pentecost. We began with a day from Pope Francis, Mary Mother of Church. Two days later I added the Feast of Toci, Saint Anne as Grandmother of the World and Heart of the Earth, the Wise Old Woman we are all in need of. It seemed right that Friday we would conclude this trinity with Mary Magdalene, the Bride herself. If Mary is Mother of Church, Mary can never be the Church. If she is mother of the Groom, she can never be his Bride. This is Mary Magdalene. Anne is seen in Toci and the Grandmothers of myth, Mary in the virgins and virgin mothers. The Magdalene is Babalon and Aphrodite herself, the love and desire principal. The very Holy Spirit we celebrate this week made it so that a virgin could in the flesh bring forth a child, Jesus. Joseph as husband and protector. 

When I say the Holy Church, I mean the Secret Church, for the two are one and the same.

The image of the Holy Family is doubled in Jesus, Mary and their child, but in a reversal. They are spiritual man and wife, and the holy child they bear is the Church. Or rather we become the Magdalene in our life with the Diving Groom. The Church and the Groom in the sacred wedding produce the Child of the Spirit, the Child in the Spirit. Jesus is the Second Adam, but he is the First Fruits. What he and the Beloved produce are the next fruits, The Holy Child, the union of Chalice and Blade, is both Christ and the child born from the union with Christ. This is the mystery, or one of them.

A Possible Goodbye

 Things like this always go out with a whimper, and a whimper is actually an ignorant word for a transformation. My thoughts, the business going through my head and in my life, no longer fit on this page and must move to other places. So, this looks like it may be the end of Sickle and Axe of Young Tradition. There have been other times when I thought it was over or almost over, but it kept going, but in the last few months it definitely seems as if Young Tradition and the path I am on had moved beyond this page. 203 articles in over two years is not bad

So, until we meet again, so long and goodnight....

And love.

Passion Wednesday: The Blinding Brightness

 In Andrew Rissik’s play, Dionysus, Cadmus is the old King of Thebes, reawakened to the wonder of the gods, and to the union of heaven and earth, and Pentheus is the king who, confronted with the wonder of Dionysus and the new order of hope and joy, wishes to quash this and reassert the status quo. When the women who are worshipping Dionysus call the Princess Agave out to join them she says that she cannot, and she prays: “Let the one who pities our tears receive us at the last with beauty and gentleness and purge us of all fear.”

In those last few weeks, when we were at the store, my mother would suddenly offer to pay for groceries. She would rush in and pay for my pizza when I went in to buy dinner. She had rarely offered to pay for a damn thing, but in those last exhausted weeks she would. what did she knowand what was she trying to say? What would she have been had she lived. It seems there were so many wasted years, so many could have beens. The lament of the Passion is over the quick dead end of a life I have to stop trying to understand. How one Thursday while in the back of my mind I knew that our routine, such as it was could nto last forever, I was loading up groceries into my apartment while my mother held the door open and kissing he on the cheek goodbye. And the next Thursday I was at a funeral home planning her cremation. The head whirs at first thinking of this, and then gives up whirring and sinks to a tired numbness only scarely resemlbing contemplation.

In those last weeks or months of my mother's life I was always worried. She was always sleeping, always distant, always not doing the simplest things I asked, like getting a new phone so i could immediately reach her without calling the landline. Now, more than ever, when I called she did not pick up and I was subjected to my father's long dementia ridden conversations and would have to almost force him to get off his ass and find Mom or wake he up. Accurate thinking about this makes me feel like in the end, sickness or not, they gave me unnencessary stress and both ended up where they belong and two my life is easier now. My mother is gone, but she had been leaving all my life. When my mother died it was an extended lack of conscious lack of life planning, lack of saying goodbye nap that turned into a coma that ended in a very disatisfying death.

I remember hearing about Sister Wendy Beckets death, one of the things that made me consider Christianity and devotion deeply again. A friend came to her and she was radiant. Her friend asked her if she was excited to meet Jesus and her face beamed as she declared, "Oh, yes" that quality of joyfully openly going from this life to the next is always before me.

In the week of the Passion death is always before us along with the choice of how we enter into it. We are not accidentally mortal, but very mortal, My mother hated the idea of death. She dreaded it and so had no life insurance and no funeral plan, no plan whatever, caused me a great deal of trouble. She feared death and so didnt get up and go to a hospital. She feared death and it came for her anyway. This Passion week, we look steadily at our lives and at all around us. We will all leave this world, but will we lieave it gracefully, and we will go joyfually to ah ome for us that is already prepared. 

Omce again I am listening to te Andrew Rissik plasys. I am on the final and first one, Dionysus where the God coems to Thebes and is opposed by King Pentheus.  I imagien Jeruslame under segie by Jesus and those who followed him, children and old people singign in the streets, prhophesying. I aimgien that except for one siingy fig tree,the rest of the fruit ame to life and fountains rean with wine, that little chuldren ang Lauda and the old wer cured of their wounds. A drwosy warmh settled over the city. The good smells of the flowrs filled everthing, but the evil people nd the people dedicted to being dull could nto see thesethings, or did not like what hye saw.

In the midst of this beauty, as children walk by siging Lauda, Mary of Bethany begisn to weep. Her sister Martha says, but you do beat all, weeping at such happy things What's the matter now?"

And Mary turns to Martha and says, ecaue it cannot last. "

And Martha is filled with the shadow as well. 

 “Godlike we came and joyous, out of the womb, not grief bound and jealous, but open, and full of song. Not to pale men do we belong, but to a realm of angelic bliss! To the blinding brightness, will we return at last!”

Passion Tuesday

 Christianity is an historical religion. Most religions are not and the fact that it is historical doesn't make it necessarily better than other faiths. What it does mean is that the basis of it is in very real and recorable history and very real people who gave their lives testifying that what they had witnessed was true? Does this mean we are required to believe in it? No. Does this even mean that there is only one truth all of these people testified to, only one way of seeing it? Not at all. One only has to see that in the various tellings and the various forms of belief, heretical, orthodox and unorthodox that have come from it. What it does mean is that all who live in Christianity are engaged no only in our personal believes, but in grappling with the tradition of these very first witnesses.

In the Passiontide we do not pretend we are back in the last week of Jesus's life, or spectators at his cross. This is the last week of his life, and by the mystery of this witness, everything we are going in our common life is the journey to Jerusalem. But the mystery of this wintess we are not only spectators but becoming Christs.

Palm Sunday and the First Days of the Passion

COMMUNION ANTIPHON           Mt 26: 42
Pater, si non potest hic calix transire, nisi bibam illum, fiat voluntas tua.
Father, if this chalice cannot pass without my drinking it,
your will be done.'

There is much to do, and yet, if I was called to have sex, I would get up and have it. Last night, for my consecration I wrapped me thighs around the naked body of a man I've been longing to have sex with for years. His mouth tasted me lazily and he thumbed my nipples as he sucked me slowly. In the three am darkness I fucked his mouth and the bed creaked. Later I spilled my seed with a grunt. Sex does not make you feel more loved. I already feel loved. It does not make you feel more wanted. You can feel wanted by showing your sexy pics online, by dressing up in pretty clothes. Sex makes you feel pourous, liquid, touched. You are fragile and real again, weak in strength and strong in your vulnerability. It is the perfect consecration to Babalon, and long after it is over you feel the force which is no private force and also no communal force running through you. The descent of the Holy Spirit happens in company. Sexual pleasure happens between two people. To put on the red robes is to state frankly that you have touched and been touched.

This is Palm Week. Holy Week. This is the week of many readings, many services, much preparation, the week when much could go wrong, the week that must find its meaning in the silences between spaces.Friday was the Feast of the Annunciation, the rememberance of the Jesus's Conception. The ancient mind believed people died and were born or conceived on the same date, and so Annunciation happens here, in Lent, often as not near the end of it and sometimes it has been on Good Friday itself. Last night after the drama of the passion, I had sex and was consecrated to Babalon. These two passions are one.

In this week there is so much to do spiritually, so much to do in acts of cookery as well as responsibility, that over and over I must remember I am not the high priest of this show. I am not the chief orchestrator of this Great Work, nor am I the Great Work. I am not now, nor have I ever been, the ultimate Master.

There are other things scheduled to happen, to be meditated over, but it is sex that seems to keep happening and presenting itself, and sex that must be served.

When my mother was alive she used to say she didn't feel like Christmas, or lament every season coming because it didn't feel like it should, which i suppose is a lot like saying didn't feel like it once did. But you must accept things as they are, not as they are supposed to be, and fall into the rhythm of what is not what you wished was.. This is the secret of magic.

There are times when I forget that I am a witch, and that what we are doing here is magic, or do not say it or think what goes on this page is so broad that ti can be printed or shone anywhere, but the act of sacred prostituion, the initatiory rites of Babalon bring back home exactly what I am and what this page is. This page is the liturgy of celebrating union with the lovers who come to me, of remembering the pink candles and strong mouth of Scott and th entangling of bodies, the ejection of seed. This raw sex is the opposite of the sexiness of the society we live in, or the repression of our churches and the heart of what I do, and I practice it in this Holy Week.

And somehow, this story of the red priestess, the offered and experienced sexuality is linked with the passion of the lord who will be crucified before the week is out. One Passion goes to another. The lady in red is the Mary anointing the lord, the descent into sexual pleasure and Inanna's trip to the underworld, frightful as it is, mirrors Christ leaving the city gates to make his own underworld trip. Sex and sensuality are taken from one story completely, but maybe no it must be brought back.

ENTRANCE ANTIPHON          Cf. Ps 27 (26): 12
Ne tradideris me, Domine, in animas presequentium me; quoniam insurrexerunt in me testes iniqui, et mentita est iniquitas sibi.
Do not leave me to the will of my foes, O Lord,
for false witnesses rise up against me
and they breathe out violence.

It is already Tuesday. My glasses are so fiflthy I can barely see this key borad. I am fgiving up al ittle on spring cleaningbecause we had to bring so much int othe apartment today that psring cleaning looks like it may not matter. I spent a large part of the day removign thigns rom my aprents, house, wondering what money left to them ought to be mine, wondering feeling the strange melancholy of digging through what's left of your mother and father's lives before the house things are put up for auction and the house sold. Giving things away, coming home and digging through the past.

Today we went to the restaurant Betsy and I used to go to. This was the restuarant of mourning and delicious food and rejoicing and this makes sense. Mourning changes, but it does not flee without a trace. This day in Jerusalem, we are at the strange palce of half morning. I am thinking, now you could shower and do all the things that lead to bed, or you could go to bed and then get up and do those htings later. There is no wrong way to do these things. Except when we rush and drive ourselves mad. Well, yes, there is a wrong way to do it.

So many fine things I got my mother that she never wore, that I take back to myself to repurpose in the temple and in the temple garments. This is a sad ending to the story, the mother I hoped to spend more time with and grow old with gone, and my father doddering away. The story ended in many ways as I would not have had it, but also me having to end many scenarious, untell certain stories. The time of the passion is all about stories, and all about ones that end in confoundment.We cannot change the ending of the story. We have to find redemption some other way.

Passiontide This Year

 There is noTh finishing this, but there is a beginning. We are at Passiontide again, the last two weeks of Lent. Again the altar is draped in red and the holy images covered over. I have been ill for the last few days. I took too too much upon myself.Now is the time of treating my body gently, not pressing myself and it's well into the night when a wise person should be in bed. Love is here, and so is the Passion of the Christ though the shape of it has changed. Monday morning I sat down to listen to the first reading and it was the story of Susanna and the Elders. The moment I know what it is, this is also the moment that I remember how long it is. Settling down to the length of this reading I settle down into the different feel of these two weeks that lead to Easter, or rather to the Triduum. Passiontide is and always had been, a time of storytelling and through storytelling, of initiation.

 

Laetare Sunday

 

ENTRANCE ANTIPHON          Cf. Is 66: 10-11
Laetare, Ierusalem, et conventum facite, omnes qui diligitis eam; gaudete cum laetitia, qui in tristitia fuistis, ut exsultetis, et satiemini ab uberibus consolationis vestrae.
Rejoice, Jerusalem, and all who love her.
Be joyful, all who were in mourning;
exult and be satisfied at her consoling breast.

This is the third year I've done an article on Laetare Sunday though, usually, I call it Mothering Sunday or Mother Sunday. As this year, it always takes place around the first approach of spring and around the Feast of Saint Patrick. Mothering Sunday used to be, in England, the Sunday where people returned to thier mother church or attended mass at their cathedral, and since I have returned to Christianity in my magical and heretical way, I have attempted to recreate this return to the Mother in my own way, but never quite successfully.

  

Another reason I don't call this Mothering Sunday is because this is the first one where my life is defined by not having a mother anymore.  Having no mother church to return to and no mother to call up or do something special for, Mothering Sunday seems to have lost all meaning. But as I read the antiphon for this Sunday I realized that this wasn't quite true.

The inspiration for Mothering Sunday comes from the very Laetere verse of the introit Jerusalem is called to rejoice on this Sunday (Laetare) along with all who love her. Rather than ignoring the death of my mother, rather than all of us ignoring our many losses, we are also addressed and encouraged to rejoice and, very graphically, be consoled at Her breast. 

The Wikipedia article states that when Mothering Sunday was reinistituted it was to remember not only mother churches and mothers, but Mary the Mother of Jesus and Mother Nature. Now we can grow those images remembering God the Mother, the Great Mother, the Inner Mother, or mothering instincts. By a whole other accident, Mothering Sunday is also called Rose Sunday and the rose colors of the Lady are worn on this day. In the midst of Lent we remember Mother in all of her aspects and not only in the selfish way of wanting to be mothered,

The first weeks of Lent are dark, and then the last three weeks are rose and red. Beginning next Sunday is Passiontide. We cannot enter into either Passiontide or Christmas without becoming Mary, without possessing the heart and passion of the Virgin Mother. Motherhood is made true when allow ourselves to be mothersd despite bad mothering and fear to trust or be weak. Motherhood is made complete in the way in which we become mother. This Laetare Sunday my prayer is make room and room and more room for the Mother in this spiritual life, and in this holy house.  

Quadragesima and Reminiscere: The First Two Sundays of Lent

This is apparently the first time I've been back to this page sense Ash Wednesday and I leanr much to my sheer idocy, that I clearly forgot to write anything for the first Sunday of Lent called Invocabit, or Quadregesima. There is no point in trying to go back and remember what I forgot. We jsut need to think about a few things. I look so forward to Lent and then I'm in it and it's like: so what? The first readying is of the templtaito in the desert, which we celebrate befor on a Sunday of the Epipjany and this Sunday we celebrate hte Trsnfiguration as we did a few Sundays ago,. But between  the Sundays what is the week, and even on the Sunday's exactly what are we doing? We're fasting, true enough, and were wearign drabber clothes and no jewelry, but what are we doing? We're on the road to Jerusalem, true enough. But what is that? what does that mean?

 I actually think that in the same way Holy Thursday is a celebration of the next two days ahead, that the weeks of Lent ate an unfolding celebration of Holy Week. This sounds extraordinary, but one msut thing that Holy Week is happening all the time. It is a mistake to say Jesus suffered mroe than anyone else when he went to the Cross. His trial was for a night and a day, excruciating but many of his saints went through much more. The suffering is not contest and confining Jesus's srory to a week or a night and a day actually misses the point.The suffering of Christ is the suffering of the whole world. The Passion of the Christ is the passion of the whole world. Holy Week is every day we live the life of Jesus and offer what we do to the way of the Cross.

At the beginning of the Gospels, Jesus is asked why he and his disciples do not fast. In the Gospel of Luke it is placed right after Jesus has gone to the house of Levi the Publican. He replies:

“Can you make the guests of the bridegroom fast while He is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.” 

Luke 5.34, 35

The fasting of Jesus is different from the fasting of John or even from the fasting of Judaism. He says the time of celebration is here, but in Lent our fasting and the discplines we choose to exercise tell a truth that we stay away from much of the year: in some form the Bridegroom is NOT here. In some way the Kingdom of God is NOT present. Our fasting is not only prayer and penitence, but the admission of a loss.  In many ways our lives in Lent are no different from our lives in Christmas and Easter. There we are meant to look deeper into things, explore the joy of life, come into the gratitude and thanksgiving of seein the presence of God even when such a presence seems to be undetectable. There is something restful in the fast of Lent, something that says, no, he is not here.  You cannot seek him here. No, this is not the Kingdom. No, the Bridegroom has departed.. Yes, we await his arrival.

I am tmepted to say this week has been rough. I am not sure it has been rougher than any other week. Here there is no ndeed to detil the bleak half despairs and utter weariensse I felt by Wednesday or go on about the large amount of work on Monday or the doubt on Sunday that I would ever have formal work again. The weeks take a toll and as they come to an end you hope that next week will be different, that the rest you seek at the week's end will carry into the next set of days,

And it is in this Lenten country that we continue. It's here, where we forget to do th things we longed to do and remember what we would like to forget, and are still aggravated by the little griefs that we let God bless this time of living without and sanctify all the many things we have to live with that we wish we did not

Ash Wednesday and the Beginning of Lent

 

So I learned where Ash Wednesday comes from, or better to say why Lent is the only season that begins on a Wednesday.  When the decision to make Lent universally forty days through all the church was made a very, very long time ago, this did not include Sundays because Sundays were not fast days. There were six weeks, six times seven was forty two, forty subtract the six Sundays was thirty six and they could not add for days after Easter, so they added four before the First Sunday. Thus Ash Wednesday, the first of the fasting days.

Nowadays most of us in the West, and I would be surprised if most Orthodox people did it now either--do not truly fast for forty days. Some things are given up, meat is abstained from on all the Fridays of Lent and on Ash Wednesday. Nor do I have the desire or really the will to employ a forty day fast. For me Lent links me to an older time, and perhaps to a deeper practice. Thinking of all the various churches which called themselves the Catholic Church and all the various faces of Jesus represented in them, I am reminded there is no one way to walk this walk, to live in this tradition or to practice this season. Father John F Baldovin states in his series about Lent that Catholics do it better than any season and one of the reasons is because there is actually something to do. When I think of not fasting on a Friday or Wednesday, when I think of not abstaining from a thing or not getting up for prayers, not refraining from meat on Friday I think of all the ways I am missing out on feeling this season, and all for no particularly good reason. 

Those moments when we have forsaken, for a time, doing a thing one way, push us to doing it another way, which is to me what Lent is also about. In his book on Holy Week, Marcus J Borg notes that the word for believe used in the Gospel of Mark actually means to go beyond your own mind. The practices of ascetism, the practice of practicing the faith, are those of going beyond the limits of your own mind, entering into a place you had not been before. Coming into solitude you embrace and transform loneliness, coming into the space of prayer to silence the chattering nonsense in your head and give way to the silence of God. Coming into faith you learn to trust beyond the normal suspicions in which we live. The truth is we don't change, but we need to. And only when we change can the world change and only by this change can the God we so often call out for, enter.

Transfiguration Sunday

 

Yesterday was the last Sunday of Epiphany. Today is the last day. We had the same readings and tonight the gold star and the red banner, the last remnants of Epiphany will be taken down. Tomorrow we will have the seasonless space of Shrove Tuesday and then descend into Lent. The more popular modern celebration of the Transfiguration is August 6th, there, six days after Lammas, taen out of liturgical time and placed in the middle of Ordinary Time, it is hard to see it's meaning. Here it is the final Epiphany of Christ as Son of God and Son of Man before he turns south on the road for Jerusalem.

It is maturation of Christ. At the Epihany of the Magi he is, of course, a baby or a toddler. At the Baptsims, he coems ot start his journey. At the wedding in Cana he is the reluctant miracle worker. At Panem Vitam and Ergo Sundays he gives the Bread of Life and knows himself as the Bread of Heaven. Here he is acknowledged by the Old Testament and acclaimed by God the Father. The Discplies look on amazed and uncomprehehdning, and we are uncomprehending with them. The gospel is a riddle. How silly of us to think we've solved it. 

I have to stop a moment and read up on the Transfiguration. I am surprised to read that no one knows the mountain. I had always assumed it was Mount Carmel, but this is a case of putting something into the reading that is not there, something Christians have been wont to do for centuries. Tradition has it as Mount Tabor. I think, what is transfiguration. Jesus is transfigured, but no, revealed, to be what he is. He is seen as he truly is, for one moment, not simply illuminated, but revealed, He is not transformed, or if he s, he is transformed into what he was all along. as the waters in the Jordan are transformed at his baptism, as the water to wine and the bread and fish to much bread, as we are, transfigured into all that we are.

It is only trasnfigured, only experiencing himself as the Son of God and Son of Man that he turns toward Jerusalem. When eh goes he does not go blindly. When he walks into his destiny and into his trial he does it fully, and so shall we

Fifth Sunday of Epiphany: Panen Vitam

The bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”

Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never  hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst."

Jn 6. 33-36

The last five weeks have taken us on several different Epiphanies of the One Great Epiphany. Christ is the Epiphany of God in this world and in our human lives. Epiphany if the Meeting of God in his flesh and in our flesh, one reason why the week focusing on the Temptation in the Desert is a week in Epiphnany, but not an Epiphany. We see have seen Christ as Infant, Christ as Initiate in Baptism, Christ as Wedding Guest and now Christ as Teacher and Provider. Christ as Bread and Sustenance.

The Jesus of a few weeks ago was reluctant to work a miracle. He was reluctant to go into his work almost. This Jesus feeds the five thousand and then declares that a miracle is not simply sometign amazing, but something to be seen into. It is a lesson. A parable worked in wonder. This is the Jesus who not onyl makes wine but declares that if we eat his flesh and drink his blood we will be united to him and he wil lbe in us. This is something more than a teacher. This is promising more than a kingdom. This is more than service before God. Jesus is speaking of union, and in the most mindbending of ways.

Jesus is in fact speaking more like Dionysus than like Jeremiah. He is, in this speech , doing a new and intentionally different thing. John says the Jews grappled to conmprehend it and rejected it and well they might, but he leaves out the fact that Christians react the same. Jesus, here, loses many disciples, not only he loses many causal followers, uth e loses dsicipels. Pehrpahs he gained some as well. There is already a nascent church within these Gospels.

This is a birth of the Church. The Church isn't born just once or in the same way in every Gospel. Here arather than before hte Transfiguration, Peter declares Jesus the Christ and says for them all, to whom would we go. You have the words of eternal life. These are the people bound to Jesus as more than teachers, as very God and very bread and meat and drink.

I am finishing up the Gospel of Mark and as I read it I see that Jesus is always with disciples They are always traveling in tow. The number is not told. It is not simply the twelve. Children are with them. Families are with them. And I think part of this is because the the Gospel does not tell a past story, but a present story, a story that leaves time, and so when we ready about Jesus and the unnumbered follwoers traveling with him to Jerusalem we can number ourselves in that crowd. As he sets out we are told that the dsciples followed in fear and those most afraid were furthest behind. Still, they followed. Pane Vitam Sunday invites us into this family of Jesus that follows, sometimes close, sometiems far, sometimes hanging back a few days, far more than an insstitution or an organization, beyond small congregations or denominations or even orthodoxy or heterodoxy. Jesus says, those who are not against me are for me. The only test is that we be for him, and that we be for each other, that we be living in love. He does not ask that we not be afraid, only that fear not define us.

Fourth Epiphany: Ergo Sunday

 

Accepit ergo Jesus panes: et cum gratias egisset, distribuit discumbentibus: similiter et ex piscibus quantum volebant.

Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.

Jn 6.11

When I came to occult I thought it would be something like Wicca, celebrating some recently made up Wheel of the Year, but in the last not quite twenty years it is had become much more medieval, much more Christian: if esoterically so. In these last years the occult has become the through link between now and the ancient times and the through link for us is Catholicism. 

So, much to my surprise, here I am reviving Epiphany, doing what I can with old feast days that even the modern churches have wiped like intricate drawnigs in the sand. These next two Sundays as we approach the end of Epiphany mirror the last two Sundays of Lent. Where Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday repeat the same service, Ergo Sunday and Panis Vitae Sunday have their chief readings as the first and second part of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Saint John. The entirety of the sixth chapter is read on both weekends, but the emphasis is on the first and second part at each narthex.

The feeding of the five thousand is one of the stories that is in every Gospel and John, who does not use his Holy Thursday narrative to tell the story of the Eucharist places his bread of life discourse here, using Jesus's miraculous feeding of the crowd as the springboard to speak of the nature of Jesus and the nature of God's providence. Even though he does not reference Jesus as the Passover Lamb or tell this story at Passover, he remarks that "It was near Passover" something no other Gospel does. While Mark tells us that the disciples were afraid when they were in the storm and Jesus walked across the water to them because" they did not yet understand the meaning of the loaves and fishes", it is in John that this story is sandwiched inside of the Bread of Life Discourse."

What have we learned so far? Just two things or maybe three? That God is able to provide. We live in a model of Victorian (white people) almost Republican charity. It is careful charity, a little bit of giving. We don't want to get carried away, and we have told ourselves God subscribes to this cheap economy. The rich stay rich by handing onto their things. But Jesus is more than rich. He is infinite and so he feeds the people not just enough, but until they want no more, people who probably wanted a lot. He feeds from the most generous impulse and if we take Jesus seriously as an acutal man, he does so not thinking of the consequences, not thinking that this riotous display of power will cause them to "come after him to make him king." 

I am currently reading a set of stories where one of the features is that in a group of boys one is very poor and resentful. He clings to his pride and resentfulness about working long hours and having sleepless nights over a job to get the things his rich friends can simply snap their fingers and attain. Christianity as we live in it has that proud poor boy strain in it. You hear it when people say, "I wouldn't pray to God for that..." or "I almost prayed." Jesus is, as the hymn goes, "A Spendthrift Lover." but we won't let him love us. The Disciples are not expecting this uprush of protection and providence and truly, neither are we.

The high point of this week's reading and the beginning for next week's is when Jesus and the disciples, as discreetly as possible, flee the crowd that would make him king. The twelve get in a boat and sail across the lake, but Jesus remains by himself and takes the short cut of walking across the water. One wonders how often he's done this before. The Gospels are not novels. They give little insight to the motives of Jesus, and John's Jesus is scarcely human, having done everything on purpose, having no reservations and knowing how everything will turn out even when none of those things seems possible. 

The Gospels tell us the disciples did not understand the meaning of the loaves and fishes, but the people do, or at least they see something, for they do the math of one boat returned and Jesus not being it. They know how he got across that water. Having crossed the sea and rejoined the disciples he is found by all of those who received the loaves and fishes and are excited by him. The crowds have been earnestly following this man or miracles. This is the lead in to next week;s Gospel, this is the lead in to the plea to look deeper and look beyond.

, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27 Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.”

Who is Jesus? This is Jesus. A king? The King. A second Moses? A Second Chance at God. What does it mean to make him King, to be fed by him? Christ is about to tell us.

Third Epiphany, Sunday of the Wedding at Cana

Whenever the Sabbath comes to an end it gives way to Sunday, and the stresses of the upcoming week. The Joy of the Day of rest often turns into a wrestlessness, and irritation, anger even fear at what's to come. Sometimes what's to come doesn't seem very far off. We greet the day that is ended, but are being pulled back into the mess of the world beyond. What is more, that mess seems all the more calling having come out of the place of rest.

The narthex service was full of joy, but the last two and the aftermath of the evening had an anxiety to them. When I went to do important paperwork which I thought I would get through quickly, I was stuck in a morass of nonsense, angered by how essential things were made difficult by a swollen systenm that offers help but reluctantly. The anger and anxiety was ramped up in me and the joy of the narthex that night began to fade. I could barely believe there would be joy in the morning.

I want to add to this the desperate desire to give up sometimes, have a lighter plate with one parent recently deceased and the other hospitalized and griping about wanting to go home. I want, I want, I want. I want shit to slow down and get a fuck of a lot easier. This last president was egregious but I have no signs that things will be better under a new one. The world seemed so mad and misguided before it was as if wonderful things might slip through the cracks. Now I am a little afraid of business as usual.I am, of course, not alone in my frustration, Across town, a close friend whose life looks the very picture of perfection is living in a house with an ever complaining elderly mother, furnaces broken, washer and dryer broken, car stolen, children stuggling through depression, and little time to breathe. Another friend is in the midst of legal battles with a soon to be ex wife, and a loss of focus in life while yet another is stuggling with being a single mother, dealing with the father of her child, and her employment stresses. And these are the ones who are standing. My troubles are barely exceptional.

And yet this is the Sunday on which I celebrate the second and third initiation into 1734, keep it up, don't give it up, recommit to it, and in recommiting to it, recommit to Him, for the celebration of the Wedding at Cana is the celebration of the mystery of the mystical marriage, my union to the Christ in this world, the thing called the Mystical Marriage, the Alchymical Wedding. Together, the Wedding at Cana and the Miracle of the Feeding the Five Thousand, water to wine and mutliplied loaves, are the epiphany of the Eucharist. That at the very beginning of this joint mystery I am at such a state, irritated, discombulated, a little troubled, should not be surprising.

The celebration of the Epiphanies has fallen out of favor because looking too deeply into a thing has fallen out of favor. The Wedding at Cana is, simply put, a story in the Gospel of John which is synoptically placed after the tempation and the gathering of he disciples and presumably before the rest of the ministry. But within John it is a story that actually REPLACES the Temptation as well as the opening stories about Jesus's first healings and the gathering of his disciples. They are invited to a weddning and Jesus's mother is there and the details are rather short except that wine runs out and Mary has Jesus make new wine. Jesus, in fact, does not want to. The new wine is better than the old, and the party goes on.

Within the story Jesus is one of the crowd and out of the way. Metaphorically, he is the Bridegroom. In the other gospels there is a parable of the bridegroom and bride. And John uses this imagery in Revelation. Here, John just tells the story of a wedding and Jesus transforms water used for purification into drinkable wine. There is no final lesson offered, just a list of characters, possibly interchangable, that we are given to make us contemplate

Jesus

His Mother

The Disciples.

The Unseen Bride

The Unseen Groom

The Caterer Who is Amazed

For me this is a night of asking, am I continuing on with this, am I joining myself to the Lord? There are many ways to pray, to worship, to believe, but the mystical marriage is the highest where we say, I am his and he is mine. After a while there is really no choice. Asking becomes a formality, and yet we keep it from being a formality. We come back to this again and again. Despite all the immense bullshit, we say, Lord to whom else can we go. For you have the words of everlasting life."  

It is helpful to remember that this is a miracle of transformation, of leaving one thing to become another, of the power of the Wedded Jesus to do just that. It matters to remember that weddings were festivals and marriages were not romances. I do this thing grabbing joy from irritation, fear and frustration and it helps to remember that in all times, but especially in ancient times marriages were not the end of a happy story and the typing up of all lose ends, but the beginning of a united life in a difficult world and a union which tied not only to people, but a community together. The wedding at Cana and many weddings would have taken place in the midst of trouble and mourning. The celebration would not have been because everything was taken care, but inspite of the trouble around and the trouble ahead.

I had initially said that for me this is a night of asking, but perhaps it is better to say this is a night in which I begin asking.

Second Sunday of Epiphany: Low Sunday

 

We arrive at another Low Sunday. Of course the mightiest Low Sunday--and probably the least low, is Quasimodo Sunday, the Sunday after Easter. But this is the Sunday after the Theophany, the second Sunday of Epiphany. There are no specific readings though once it was reserved to celebrate the Wedding at Cana. We wait to observe this next week. This is the Sunday when the gospel reading is a rather bland one about Jesus collecting his first diciples, but which is reserved to remember no particular Epiphany, but the Meeting of Christ and Devil. The Spirit has driven him not into ministry, but into the desert where he dwells with the wild animals and is finally met by the Devil. 

I began to write about the Temptations of Jesus when suddenly I realized I didn't really know the story. I wasn't a great fan of it and had never really understood it. I went to listen to Matthew's account. After forty days the Devil says to Jesus, prove you are the Son of God by turning these stones to bread. Jesus refuses to use his magic on the stones quoting Scripture. The Devil does not feed him, but takes him to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and tells him to throw himself off to prove who he is. Again Jesus does not. Lastly the Devil says worship me and you have this whole world. Again, Jesus refuses, this time telling the Devil to take a hike and we are left wondering just what the fuck this story is trying to teach.

Of course one thing that comes to mind is that there would be no need for Jesus to prove anything to an actual person called the Devil. Jesus is being tempted by the Devil in Himself always nagging with these strange questions of who are you, what can you do? And Jesus is reluctant to do anything. A close reading might wonder if Jesus was simply afraid, if he ceased to rise to the occasion. After all, in Job, God rises to the Devil;s bait. The Devil is the tester and there is an idea that his tests are appropriate. Jesus refuses them, and this has put in my mind a riddle. What if the story is missed? It is popular in many Christian circles to declare based on this and a few other passages in Scripture that the earth belongs to the Devil, that it's kingdoms are his and he is the ruler of everything going on? But when the fuck did that happen? The Psalms and many prophets roundly declare just hte opposite. The earth is the Lord's and all of its fullness, all of its kingdoms belong to him. Isaiah goes further declaring It is I the Lord who creates woe and even in Job, the Devil does nothing without the consent of God.

It is in reading this story on a surface level that we miss a contentious point. In The Mist of Avalon, Talieson says, "Doubts and Devil both belong to God and in the end both serve him." The Devil is not God's enemy, or rather not his opposite. The Devil cannot escape his old job no matter what Christian and later Jewish spins are given to him, God and the Devil are One. The tempter and the tempted are One. The lesson in the desert is not running from Satan, but incorporating him. The way we respond to ourselves, our desires and the world hinge around this lesson. We are repeatedly told that Jesus, filled with the Spirit was led by the Spirit into the wilderness for the very purposes of meeting the Devil. The Spirit of God and the Devil are in collusion to teach the Christ. The Devil is to Jesus what Baba Yaga or Mother Hulda is to the girl who needs initiation in the fairy tale.

The Gospel of Mark foregoes this story of the three temptations and simply says the Spirit led Jesus into the desert where he was tempted and among the wild beasts. He is the only one who leaves out any specific mention of the Devil, but points out the old territory of those figures from Azazel to the Bucca to Pan who are called the Devil. Jesus is in the country of the wild beasts, surrounded by them, and this country is going to become his, for Jesus is a man of sorrows who has no place to lay his head and will even suffer death outside the city. In Mark, the dying and rising Jesus, the sorrowful one becomes Orpheus among the wild beast, singing his son of transformation. 

Having been baptized in water, God leads Jesus to the desert that he might be baptized into darkness. and self revelation. The Second Sunday of Epiphany is not one that celebrates a particular Theophany, but it is one of necessary initiation, for until Jesus and the Jesus in us contront and incorporate the Devil within, there can be no true acceptance of or working in the blessing: This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased."

Theophany

 The Most Holy Theophany rolls around again and it is my third year in 1734, or what is now Young Tradition and became the Alchemical Rite  When I go under the waters, this will be the third year of growth, the third time I have agreed to re enter this path, or to stay on it. When I was twenty five i made the decision to pursue the Craft it was honestly pretty damn frutiless up until a few years ago when I renounced organised religion and too the Three Degrees. Since I have taken the Three Degrees several times over, always coming back to the Craft, always making myself a sort of baby again, always rehoning my direction while not completely giving up what I knew before.

The first time I came to 1734 and decided to formally give myself to it on the Theophany, I had been dealing with them, learning about it, thriving in a community of the small minded and been cut off by them and was feeling pretty hurt. I really had to think about if I care about this path and decided that I did, the group I had belonged to did not matter. The path was worth pursuing.  Last year it seemed we were almost up to some good work and I was forgiving the piccadillos of certain people when again, for thinking, I was cut off in a nasty way and again, really had to think about if I needed this shit.

At each step Young Tradition went through a different phase. This page was created because of my first exile and maintained because of my second. As I enter a third year, embracing more than ever my old Christian heritage, but in a mystical and Craftly way, I am aware that what survives is something newer and strongr. I may have been cut off from small minded and nasty people ,but I wasn't cut off off from this path. I couldn't be, because they did not give me the path. And because I was slowly forming what I found and what I received into something new, something that was my own. This year, this third year, it is what I am giving myself to again.

The Sisters of Charity are an interesting group of Catholic sisters, because of the way they were established, they do not take perpetual vows like traditional nuns. They must recommit every year, and I think that's so important. It's not enough to come once, or as Jung said, we must continue to always be initiated, and so here I am again, renouncing whatever all the initiations meant, and to a certain extent, renouncing a lot of old and useless knowledge, understanding that things will ahve to reshape and reform, and coming to my Baptism again.

But what does it mean?

The night is drawing on. Too much thing has led me to ten o clock and I still have not taken the bath or the baptism. What it means, what it means is that I commit to this way of life again. I commit to follow this path of wisdom. I commit to follow my lord into it, to bring the good news to annouce and live in the kingdom of God. It also means, to an extent that I agree to I know not what. I agree to walk this way of love and I begin, once again, to study, to become a catechumen again, to become not a high priest or a great expert but an initiate. I agree to become... new.