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.