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.