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.