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.