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.

Adonay Sunday

...Is not entirely like the Devoted Lover Sunday and it is the Sunday I chose for my marriage to the Divine One. Tammuz is Adonis, is Adonay, is in some ways Christ. He is, in his own way Krishna and perhaps the Kriophoros. He is Balder the beautiful, the slain one and originally, surely he was Osiris. He is the Lord. He is the King. He is the Shepherd King prefigured in David and the prophets, fulfilled, some would say, for Christians, in Jesus. 

To be wed to him is to be wed not simply to the King or the Good Shepherd but, alas, the the Lover who Goes Away. To be wed to him is to be the widow of the world. We have become accustomed to Greek Gods, but the Norse have made a comeback, when I firsr read Norse myth I was surprised by the idea that the Gods die, that Balder is slain, but then, why shouldn't gods die? Or rather, why should we alone die? Greece made Gods who could not die, but also were not holy, and the ones who did taste death were relegated to eastern side stories, like Adonis, the very one whose name means Lord, who is Lord of the Above and Lord of the Below. The Greek stories ignore this, calling the Lord of the Underworld Hades, confusing the place with his proper name which they rarely use: Aidoneus.

Aidoneus King of the Underworld seizes, while still in life, Persephone, a more bearable tale for Greeks who hated Gods who died and hated males who were not powerful. But it cannot be a coincidence, this story of Persephone seizing Adonis to be her lover in the below lands part of the year.. Surely Aidoneus and Adonis are the same. Surely, in some wise, Persephone and Demeter are the same as well.

The mystery of Tammuz is related to the mystery of Babalon. As the month began I wondered how would I celebrate Tammus and then life taught me. A lover of mine was gone, seemed like he might have been more than gone. I began to lament him and then suddenly learned he was alive and well and there were only complications. The love we made the next day was the mystery of Tammuz. Nor was he here to stay but going away again. That is the mystery of the one who is coming and going, who passes and we lament and then he returns again. 

Later that same day, As an Ashtoroth offering, I had the very different experience of sex with a total stranger where I was not myself and he was not my lover. We were offerings to each other. This was sex without any end except the pleasure happening and sex without ego, the organ and the mouth. This is the offering of Babalon. Tammuz and Babalon are not husband and wife, or even lovers necessarily, but they are a pair and I do not think one is without the other. The sex is them is sacramental, two sides of the alchemical wedding.

But why in the world Tammuz Sunday? And again, how is it different from say, something generally devoted to the alchymical wedding, or the marriage of Robin and Marion, or Radhakrishna Sunday? And maybe it isn't terribly different, but is a difference in emphasis.

In Aramaic calendars including the Hebrew one which we use, this moon is the moon of Tammuz, and this is because of the ancient festival of Tammuz which was celebrated well into the eleventh century AD. Tammuz, Adonis, Damuzi.... Adonay. Christ has died Christ had risen, Christ will come again. According to popular belief Tammuz was mourned three days, but curiously in Christianity such lamentation was moved into spring with Easter which was never a full three days and in Judaism there may be a simlar thing, for they have and we celebrate, not three days, but Three Weeks, of fasting and mourning which begin today and culminate, like Easter, outside of the month of Tammuz, on the ninth day of Av. We are told in the Old Testament that the women of Gilead would annually go into the hils to weep for Jepthah's daughter, and this may also be a retelling, or erasure of the Tammuz story.

Tisha B'av, which is soon upon us gives a strange insight which Christian mourning often does not. In Christianity, like Yom Kippur, there is mourning for sin and longing for repentance, but the Three Weels of Tisha Bav, taking place at the height of summer mourn, the destruction of the temple--twice, the sin of the Golden Calf, the departure of Shekinah and generally every bad thing that ever happened to Israel. It is a curious insight, that at the height of summer, when we are told to celebrate and be happy, there is not only room for, but a necessity for, mourning, for crying out to God. Tammuz and his glorious birth from the tree, his glorious body, wondrous marriage, beauty, lordship of the above and the below, are intimately died to compassion, sorrow, and the need to acknowledge that which mourns in all of us. As we enter into the Three Weeks, may we not be afraid... of our fears, and our sorrow and our weakness. May we acknowledge in our search for strength our weakness and seek comfort in each other. In out courageous choice to be joyful, may we ignore our sorrow, and we may we earnest work and pray for the union of that which is had been broken, the union with is the restoration of Shekinah and return and kingdship of Adonay the Great Shepherd of our souls.

On the Esbat of Midsummer

 We may have to wait for the Moon tonight, or we might miss it completely. The Esbats are always tricky. I ought obe writing this in then otebook and i'll probably go bac kt there soon. I ought ot be sittign at an alater, taking up what ever it wants to tell me. My gos is the altar. My God is the Craft. Over and above all ,that is my deity, the worship, the work, I needed to write in this journal just to know I needed to sit down and be still. All that needs to be done is done, all that needed to be told is told, All that can be explored at this moment is explored. Let the body be a teacher. All of my thoughts were no thoughts, half formed worries, mad twitches on the mind. This writing is, I think, my Kodacrhome.

Tonight I was going down the road of self pity, thinking of how I had no one to love and care for me, like a child or like a lover, and how in many ways I never did. But already today I had decided that maybe everything that was happening to me was pointing me in the direction of becoming a God Spouse, I think it still is. I was in great ecstasies today, and it came to me in the midst of evening Mass. Al others are dull to me. I suspect there is something within me that resists being cared for.

This is a sexless time, not just a "loveless time", something that sounds so Christian or so religious and moral, but also a time without passion, without lust. My own is fading. It is where I can barely remember how sex works and the pleasure I received is becoming a distant memory. In our magic, let us work for that as well, as well as the return of the King. But during this time I see so much of what i have forgotten, what has slipped behind. How to call on the forces beyond and become a part of them, how to actually, as the openinng lines in initation say, "leave behind the pleasant realms of men." Often I feel in a state of learning, an infant state, but one should not feel this wall all the time.

Right now I am thinking of the Great Year and how it aligns with the Liturgical Year of the Church. For a reason unknown, the Church Year is compacted into a space which is less than six months, a space which doesn't even take up half the year. But it looks like it is reflected in the Great Year, and how do we celebrate that: if we celebrate it.

Second Sunday in Extraordinary Time, First Sunday in Summer: Alban Heflin: The Light Upon The Waves

 I'm in a palce that can only be solved by writing. I am not i na dteachign palce or an explaining palce, but a palce where i muast write down everything that has been going on.Today is so much, the beginning of the second week of Extraordinary Time and Father's Day as well, I find out--and this makes me feel all sorts of guilt for not knowing it--that it is the Soltice. I get my ass up to see a beautiful sunrise but there is just no sleep this day, not until so much sleep in the afternoon when I wake up nearly at nine, not till I spent until almsot eleven feeling groggy and feeling frigtenend and epressed about the unemployment money coming to an end, about the possiblity of never workign agian, enver find good work again, being poor, all the little worries. When I am fianlly able to sit down and do the last meditation, the oen that brings on the magic, I think too mch, think what am I longing for when I say I'm longing for peace? What am i doing here, what do I want, how can I get out of my own mind and into the magic, jhow can I get ot what must be. My thoughs my worries, all the diretions I am growing in, but that I think I am going in, are filling my head. I  can;t get away from myself.

I am in love with Mass. Maybe I ought to stop. It doesn't pyschologically seem to help anything when I do one. I say they're good, but they aren't much. Maybe i'm growing away from them. Maybe i need to let myself grow in the direction my Self is growing.  Maybe I do violence to myself by going back to things. Maybe i need to go back to them to learn how much violence I do.

I wish I could alwyas be visiting people, always be getting away from my mind. I think what a silly thing that mind is, how prone to worry it is, how prone to concentrating on the walls in front of it.

I get afraid at Alban Heflin, the beginning of the shortening of days. Days have gotten longer and longer and now they grow toward winter, which is a bit of a lie because summer cannot begin until this time, the hottest days are still to come, a luxurious stretch of summer is before us much the same way that winter will not come, not the terrors of winter monts until AFTEr the solstice. The soltice is misleading. Thinking of this as the last day that I will have unemployment insurance I become afraid of an insecure future.  I become, flally, afraid. I am afraid that not only will I not find work, but that I will fail to even look with any wisdom or actual skill and desire.

I am no a new path. I am trying to honor it. I am amazed by it. It is clear to me that I am becoming a druid, have been doing so for a while. I am growing up from witchcraft into this, which is to say, for me this is an evolution, not for all. Some may go the other way. This is who I am and that is exceiting. I want to tell so many people, but who to tell. And how to celebrate it. I feel like my celebrations are so lacking, so undone.  I hardly know what I am doing. i put so much pressure on myself, but as I settle down to sleep at eleven or so I realize, I am the little child. I am the ultimate little child just beginning, and you are midwife, mother, high priest, teacher. It is time to decrease, to decease, to turn over. To trust.

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.