The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

The 24th of June is the Nativity of Saint John. Only he and the Virgin Mary, aside from Jesus, have Solemn Nativities. This alone testifies to his important in the Churches from the very beginning. Praise to the saint who was forerunner and twin to the Lord, who brought to us the sacred rite of baptism which replaced blood and circumcision. Saint Paul later attempted to eclipse him saying that he brought baptism of the Spirit, but others said they gave the baptism of John and those who still remember John remember this is the only baptism there ever was, for John the Baptist did indeed baptize with water and the Spirit. It was under his ministrations that Jesus himself was baptized. Still words fail where poetry, the foundation of all language, does not.



on the birth of wild things

Today in the sauce thick heat you gave birth,
though
you were ancient past bearing, a
withered land
with no water, all rocks and stones
and you were cousin of the Virgin
twice virgined over, three times as old
you brought into this earth the prophet
all covered in moss
all wild eyed and full of locust
and honey
and his lungs screamed prepare the way
and his foot thumped out to herald
resurrection
and out of the protection of that
which once was
barren, all covered in vines and
tendrils he came
the Greenest of Men, who carried
his own head in his hands
and in his mouth, the sword of
his own destruction
and when you see him at the Jordan
then he is our destruction
when you see him calling you into
the water
then he is your induction to the
little death
the fire death and the water death
and the death of all that held you
and when he comes, calling,
behold the Lamb
then you know he is the Wild Thing
and you are the Wild Thing
and what he brings in his camel
hair coat
is the end of all stale safety

ii.

in the place where noes turn into yeses
i love you
in the place where they become the caresses
of miracle
i love you
in the hill country--get thee up
where he is born--with a high voice
kicking and screaming
proclaiming, dreaming
where was born that ancient thing
where from the mother whirlwind is
born the woodland King,
the desert king
the wooded king
this is the way he comes to world
after whirring away in a chariot of flame
and in the fire of this wholly joyous
desire
i declare
i love you
at the river jordan
where he pours
new saving for a newer lord
i love you wildly
i love you with his roaring voice
and his crazy fire
i adore you
i implore you
i... am in awe of you
i love you


strophe

deep inside i know you will always return to me...

in the blankets and sheets between
night and morning
where timelessness floats we stripped
and your body, with all its black hairs
was on top of me and beside me and all
over
how do you know?
and what can you say?



the sweetest release is the admission of love


iii

from the wall the mossy head of John the Baptist
half pan and three fourths devil leers down at me and
says, you ought to know by now there is no safety in love
i was born when Herod chopped off my head
that was the death of a wild thing
and with tendrils like rings and roots like
claws my body went down and down, twisting through the earth
and i picked my head up and laughed
you better laugh too
when Salome's axe comes for you
and this is the kiss of wild things
a fire on your face
and this is the love of wild things
a burning embrace
and this is the baptism of wild things
wind and fire
and this is the birth of wild things
and you are the wild thing whenever you let
my arms, like corded wood seize you
and dunk you and dunk you
until drunk with the jordan you gasp and reel
and start over again, laughing with beginning
this is repentance
this is all it ever was

First Sunday in Extraordinary Time: Sunday of the Devoted Heart

Following Sacred Heart, last Sunday and all of last week was dedicated to the mystery of the devoted heart, the heart that carries the Beloved One inside of it. Beloved one is such a special title. Sometimes God and the word God fall so short,and saying things like The Divine and the Supreme are not enough. The Beloved is met not by worshipper or child or even partner, but by Lover, and often is Lover. Beloved and Lover is the first relationship in which the devotee and the object of Devotion may exchange places, and the representation for this which seemed most appropriate to use was Sri Hanuman, bearing in his heart Rama and Sita.

Beavi and the Healing Solstice

Firstly, I’ve already written here several times in the last week and certainly hadn’t planned to do so today. I think in the last week I’ve written more articles than I wrote in all of June last year, and to think, when the year mark for this page was coming, I believed I was done with it. I don’t really know that anyone actually reads it, and that’s sort of OK. Part of my devotion and my Work was to keep an ongoing journal to make sense of my practice for all who needed it or would come after me. AFW had kept their page so brilliantly, I felt duty bound to keep mine and not have a Craft that was un thought out or unexplained or unexplored, and so that obligates me to do certain things, like write a shit ton of articles when so many special days happen so thick and so fast. Another problem with this time of year is that these days are all what you would call “moveable feasts” in the old Catholic sense, that is Solstices and Holy Days do not necessarily take place on the same date so they don’t always come in the same order. They just happen around each other, so I cannot say that Extraordinary Time exactly begins with Body and Blood Sunday, and I cannot say it exactly begins with today, which is Solstice, which is what we are discussing.

           

As I was getting up to clean and coming to the laptop to write this, I thought, this is the time of the Golden Lantern and the Golden Castle. For anyone who has followed this page, you will note here a change. So much of my iconography I took from AFW, but when it became my own it had to fit my reality. It had to change. And even my own iconography had to change as it settled into itself. The Golden Castle, which stands in the northeast at Candlemas makes little sense ot me there. It seems that at the beginning of spring it is the Stone Castle for me, and it is only now that I have begun using the Golden Lantern again, so now I know its time for the Golden Castle, and for Golden Lady, Beavi.

There is a half done sculpture of a woman in a flame colored dress. I began making her today and didn’t even think about this being the Solstice. Somehow this unfinished woman has something to say to me. I went to bed with teeth unbrushed and dirty dishes in the sink. I am getting up at five thirty in the morning to grey light and the name Beavi is on my lips. She is the Finnish Goddess of the Sun the Sami offer butter and white animals to in the winter. She is the mother of the shamans who prefigure Santa Claus and she and they bring the gifts of sanity and healing in the darkness of winter. But the thing we have always known is summer, with its great heat, and its drying grass carries its own need for sanity, and this is a time for Beavi more than ever. Perhaps the reason the Solstice is not revered like other holy days is because we want to pretend that this is the time when life is the happiest and all we need is the beach and water even while so many of us cannot easily get to the water and the heat of the sun drives us indoors.

But for those of us who can make it to the sand and the water and the healing of summer it is good to remember this healing is not an entirely secular one, That is why I am not going to call Solstice Litha. That always bothered me. I don’t know what the hell a Litha is anyway. To me this time is Sol or Beavi and I remember the Woman fo the Sun and ask for her blessing. We need it so badly. Look upon us in our madness, in our sadness, in our poverty, in the wealthy we do not yet understand or appreciate, in our need to change. Shed the light of your grace and sanity upon us, o lady.

The summer has always been a strange time of transition. I went from years of school to years of teaching in school, so summer has always been the time of rest and no work, but that’s also made it a time of watching money or watching there be no money. I’m so used to the poverty that even when I’m not impoverished I have a hard time believing it. Summer was the time of desire, when I wanted to travel but usually couldn’t, when I wanted to get to he beach, but couldn’t find a way, when I wanted to be cool, but could not get out of the heat. It was the time when I failed a load of high school courses and spent the entirety of summer school, an experience that was strangely joyful at the same time it was a bit of a punishment. It’s always been a liminal and bittersweet time, and it is a time of memory. Summer is the time of some of my keenest joys an also the sharpest sadness. It was the heat of July that I first spent a series of days dedicating myself to the Craft, took a bath, donned a black robe and turned by back on normal life. It was the first time I wen to Michigan City and came into contact with the sadnesses and poverty of so many people and began writing my cycle of poems dedicated to an old lover now in prison, who had become my lover, yes, in a summer time.  It is not that I remember friends who, far from living it up, are homeless, or in jail, depressed, afraid,, bedeviled by madness, truly in need of Beavi.

Extraordinary Time

At the beginning of this week, I went on the long trip to the water to make my offerings and usher in Extraordinary Time, the end of the Christian time and the beginning of the witch’s season. On the water I sat there and admitted that I was scared, that I was niggled by little worries and could not relax into the joy that the water brings. And the clear water and the sand and pebbles did bring joy. The water spoke of eternity. I traced the sigils on the sand of the Workings I had done, and watched the waves take them back. I ran along the water looking for the gift the waves had for me, and took up a double pronged wand that was as dark as the straight bleached one the water gave me the year before. I don’t know how to do this new magic, but I don’t have to know. Soon I will be taught, if I can shut the silly parts of myself up long enough to listen.

The old way and everything that occurred last year is a model, but only a model for what is about to come. Now we are doing a new thing. Part of me is the Fool Card. I strive to be the spiritual traveler who expects good things, but the other part of me is often dizzied by fears. I see monsters where they are not. Sometimes I see them where they were before. I haven’t quite come out of the war zone. There is still a little trauma. This time around I have a working camera that can take the image of the Red Ram and remind me Khnum is the master of formations, the Lord and Master of Arts. Before they called the goat Devil or Baphomet or Bucca even, he was Khnum and he still is.

Extraordinary Time. It was the word I coined because the liturgical year ends in churches and when they settle down to doing the same thing over and over it is called Ordinary Time. Recently I’ve learned that another word for the long form Latin Mass is Extraordinary Mass. That is to say, the regular mass I grew up with in English is ordinary, but the much longer, more ornate mass in Latin, which all Catholic churches used before 1963, the one where congregants are usually dressed, the women veiled, where the chanted service takes far longer than anything we know now, is called the Extraordinary form. The extraordinary form is the old form and the form taking its time, the form that is always in celebration, that rather than moving into the speed of modernity, goes deeper into what was lost. What is more, this is the form that more and more Catholics are reverting too. I will not. That is the way to characterize Extraordinary Time. It demands beauty. It demands depth of dedication and worship. It goes back and back and seeks to retrieve what was lost. It seeks to maintain beauty and wonder in devotion.

But then, at this very moment we are in truth, in an extraordinary time. Things are quite really nailbiting. We don’t know how to make sense of what’s going on and there is the feeling that this is because there is, in fact, no sense. The old Christian woman in her rocking chair knowingly saying “God has a plan,” seems to be about wishful thinking. But then that was always true.  As we proceed into Extraordinary Time, I do not understand the rhythm and don’t quite get the language. It reminds me, in fact, of the first time I went to an Extraordinary Mass (and didn’t stay). Where I thought I would get it, thought it would be just like regular church, but in another language, and did not know the entire form was different, that there were no opening hymns, that psalms were where opening prayers would be. I didn’t even know they were psalms because they were in Latin. There were only a few things I could catch onto, and in the end it was best to let those go too. I think this may be the first rule of Extraordinary Time as well.

Union: The Feast of the Sacred Heart

As the liturgical year wraps up and the churches go into what they called Ordinary Time, the witch goes into Extraordinary Time. But as Ordinary Time comes and the season of Easter ends, we come to Trinity and Pentecost, the season overlapping Easter and the Ordinary. We have seen Ascension, followed by Pentecost or Whitsunday and then followed by Trinity and next Corpus Christi, and finally, at the very in of Trinity Time, and at the dawning of Extraordinary, we arrive at the Feast of the the Sacred Heart. It is only now that I am beginning to see that these separate holidays are not desperate attempts to keep liturgy going, but an ongoing celebration of the relationship between the devotee and the Lord, between the lover and the Beloved.

Ascension was where Jesus, the single, fleshly, incarnated God, living in a particular time and place and a particular body left this world. Jesus who came from God returns to God and in seeing this we remember that we have come from God and will return to him as well.  Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit is the new relationship the lovers have with the Beloved when he is gone in the flesh and present in all of them through his powerful Spirit. Trinity tells us about the relation of God to God and celebrates the great multiplicity of the Divine, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Corpus Christi reflects this on earth, God present as Bread, Wine and People, The people offer bread and wine and all they have, their flesh and spirits, and in return God offers God. The communion is not only the people with each other, but the above with the below. This feast of bread and wine is really a reiteration of Pentecost, for it is a spiritual feast. Christ *becomes among us in the most common of things. There is no Eucharist and no real presence in the bread and wine without Pentecost. The Catholic preoccupation with the bread and wine being the actual skin, meat and blood of Jesus fails to understand that no one’s flesh and blood is very helpful if we eat it unless it is spiritual. And such flesh and blood serves us no good as devotees unless we are spiritual as well.

The entire mystery of the Holy Grail revolves around this. The chalice and dish which cannot properly be seen but which is the grace of God, which gives all good things and is the abundance of God, which is born by the veiled Grail Maid, the lady of wisdom who is Sapientia, who is Mary Magdalene, who is the Blessed Virgin, the High Priestess, the right minded soul. The Grail Story tells us that Body and Blood and Pentecost are the same as is Ascension where Jesus breaths the Spirit upon his people and then departs in the flesh.

So now we come to Sacred Heart, which is the celebration of the burning heart of Jesus and his endless love for the world. The original patron of this day was Saint Lutgarde of Aywieres who asked for insight and wisdom from Jesus and was given it, but found it not enough and so asked for the heart of Jesus. Jesus replied that he in turn wished to have her heart. He placed his heart in her and placed her heart inside of his own. Here is the conclusion of all these feasts. It is not enough to worship, but to be devoted and not enough to be devoted but to be in love, that is to exist in love. It is not enough to merely wish to look upon God, but to enter into God, not to think of God, but to love God, and not to love God, but to love with the very heart of the Beloved. What we first saw at Ascension is complete. The riddle is now explained. Jesus breathes upon his disciples and departs, but the Breath is the Spirit, but the gift of the Spirit is not only breath. The gift is total, it is all of Him, Body and Blood. And such a gift is not complete until our Body and Blood is the Body and Blood of the Beloved. As Jung says in the Red Book, it is not enough to be Christian, one must become Christ. We not only look at the sea, but are like fish in the sea and not only like fish in the sea, but the drops of water in the sea, the Spirit, the Body, the Blood, the Holy Heart not only  being that in which we live and move and have our being, but our very being. This much is celebrated in Corpus Christi where we learn the Beloved is everywhere and concludes in Sacred Heart where we love the Beloved everywhere because that endless sea is his heart, and his heart is our heart and words and explanations must not fall into silence while love is all that remains.

Last two images: Sri Hanuman bearing the Sri Ram and Sita in his sacred heart.

*becomes: this was originally a typo, but it seemed right because in Eucharist Christ does not simply come, he becomes. This specific statement applies to all housles and communions where, in any name the Holy God is called, which is why he is often called The Holy Child.

To See the Divine in a Grain of Wheat: Corpus Christi and the Vision of God

Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ--Corpus Christi, the last Sunday in a long series of Sundays that tail Easter in the small season called Trinity, or Pentecost. The Church of Rome has stopped making it a season altogether and calls this Ordinary Time. It is as if, having gone through the long Lent and the longer Easter, the Church ties on a few more celebrations to keep the whole business going. Much like Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi is not a Sunday about the life of Jesus, but rather a feast created in the Middle Ages to celebrate a doctrine of the Church, namely the Hidden Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

So why in the world are we talking about Corpus Christi on a page devoted to the Craft? Well, for one because I grew up with it, still celebrate it, and one important work of the Craft is to look deeper into the things you do rather than turn away from them. The next reason is because we all practice a Chalice and Bread, Cakes and Ale ritual, and this is mine. The fact that I use the ritual of Eucharist at the heart of my Craft had a definite effect on my worship and Workings. The last reason we are talking about Corpus Christi is because this is the last Sunday in which Young Tradition and I walk beside the Church for some time. While a Craft or Druidic year spreads out across the solar or lunar year, a Church year is top heavy. It begins in December and wraps up with Corpus Christi sometime in June. Like a pair of pants that doesn’t quite fit a big belly—I experienced this recently—it leaves a large part of June, July, August, September, October and November out of it.

Corpus Christi is wrapped in mystery and even contradiction. Without going into the history, which can easily be Wikied, the central event was a priest in a small Italian town, who had ceased to believe in his priesthood raising the Eucharistic Host during Mass and regaining his faith when it bled in his hand. The Church calls this a miracle one is not required to believe, but invited to. I love the idea of being invited into belief rather than being cajoled. The priest losing his faith was not asking a simple theological question. He was not simply wondering if God was in the bread and wine, but if was in him and in his people, if God was with us at all? This is the central question of Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi is, of course, Latin for Body of Christ. The church, the gathering of people offering themselves up in a service, lifting up bread and wine and their own hearts, is called the Body of Christ. That priest was not only asking if the bread was sacred, but if the people he stood with were as well. He wanted to know if God was present. For him, the miracle answered yes.  To me Corpus Christi is especially potent because this is the very question we are asking everyday. Is what we are doing true? Or is it in vain? Are we in a sacred work, or are we just fooling ourselves. Corpus Christi says, your circle is the sacred circle. Your workings are not private and vain. God is present in them.

Thomas Aquinas wrote the Corpus Christi hymn with these verses among others:

Adoro te devote, latens deitas,

Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas;

Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit,

Quia te contemplans totum deficit.

I devoutly adore you, hidden deity,

Who are truly hidden beneath these appearances.

My whole heart submits to You,

And in contemplating You, it surrenders itself completely.

The first reading for Corpus Christi is Moses reminding the people of how God guided them through the desert for forty years, and the parallels between the burning desert and this life are not lost. As God was a pillar of cloud by day a pillar of fire by night, as he was carried in the Ark among the people and placed in the Tabernacle in their midst, so he is now with us. But we are not the Israelites. We are something different, no longer surrounding the Tabernacle, but become the Tabernacle. We are the column of fire, the pillar of Cloud, the Ark of the Covenant, and in Corpus Christi God does not simply travel in the midst of the people, but in the midst of each person. Such terrible intimacy is at the heart of Corpus Christi and at the heart of all altar Working. Learning to see God in a bit of Bread, may we have eyes to see the Holy in the most unlikely of places.

Trinity Sunday.... Deus Est Non?

This article will start out seeming Christian, but end in great heresy. Trinity Sunday has come again. It is not like Easter Sunday or Ascension or  Pentecost either. It is a Sunday specifically created to celebrate or really to teach the doctrine by which the Catholic churches explain God, Three consubstantial persons where God the Father is not the Son or the Holy Ghost and the Son is not the Father or the Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost… , we are not entirely sure who is he is, but he is not the Father or the Son. But all of them are God because they are consubstantial.

Having heard the development of the doctrine of the Trinity explained, I find it troublesome. It knows too much, and it knows too much about things Jesus never said. It states too much never stated by God even if you own that the God of Scripture is largely a Middle Eastern  creation, and there are too many Christians who have not believed it, considered it, or known about it. Jesus, the only part of this trinity we’ve ever hung out with, says the Father and him are one. He does not use fancy Greek and philosophical terms to say “of one substances.” He says, when you have seen me, you have seen the Father, which would denote they are indeed the same. In the Book of Acts, as discussed in the Pentecost article, Luke refers to the Holy Spirit as The Spirit of Jesus, insinuating once again that the unity is not trinity, but, well… unity.

A few years ago I was intrigued to learn about the doctrine of modalism. It is preached by certain restoration churches including some Pentecostals and early Mormons,  namely that the Christian God exist not in three distinct people, but three distinct modes. It may even be that some early Christians believed this. It is, as the Mormon Paul Toscano says in one interview, that God the Father is Jesus, that God could not send his son to die. This would be a wretched idea, but that God took the burden on himself, becoming the Son. To me this actually squares with Scripture as well as good parenting and takes care of one deeply thorny problem with the Christian story of salvation.

Another problem with the Trinity is the definition of God as “is not”. Deus Est Non is unfitting and untrue to the nature of God. When Moses asks for God’s name, he is told God’s nature: I AM. Deus Est. God IS, and if we speak of God we must always speak of what the Divine is, not what He is not. The Christian interpretation of God, any interpretation of God should ever be open. The first Christians were not philosophers;. they were mystics experiencing the fullness of God, and this is a difficult thing. How do you explain fullness without it sound confusing? They did not seem to be confused at all. But centuries later their spiritual descendants were. They were also at a deficit never having made it to India where people had and would deal with the multiplicity of God’s faces standing as a unity. In India, where Visnhu, Shiva and Brahma would come to be seen as three facets of God as well as each God, but where Vishnu and Lakshmi, Shiva and Parvati, Brahma and Saraswati would also be God in male/female couples, but where every imaginable incarnation of those couples, Radha and Krishna, Sita and Ram, etc, etc, would not only be individuals and sometimes mortal or animal individuals, but all and each be God and part of each other… in such dizzying wonder, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost would not have been an issue. In fact, they would have been too simple.

And I think they are too simple, this nameless Father we mistakenly identify as the God of the Old Testament, this sexless Spirit we think of as a bird, and Jesus of Nazareth who is the earthly face of an eternal Son. This trinity is not too tall of an order, but to simple of one.

Three is the number of multiplicity. It is not the limit of it, but the sign of it. Maiden, Mother, Crone, the Three Faces of Hecate, Osiris, Isis Horus. In this I believe Trinity Sunday and the acknowledgement of the Triune perfection is beautiful and necessary, but only when we realize it does not define the limits of God, but rather stand as a sign for the limitless of the Divine.

I am always reminded that, whenever you cross yourself in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, you actually mark your body four times, sometimes even five, a strange symbol that, though you speak three names, some names can never be spoken.