Continental Patrons

I learned the other day that Benedict is the patron saint of Europe. I’ve known that Our Lady of Guadalupe is the patron saint of the Americas. So I began to wonder, who’s in charge of the other continents? It would be nice to have just a handful of saints to pray to, on behalf of the entire world.

My search, at least so far, has been frustrating. I’ve been able to find a patron for Asia Minor, but not for all of Asia. Australia falls under the patronage of Mary, whom you would think would be busy enough dealing with the Americas. Meanwhile, I couldn’t find a patron for Antarctica at all. Don’t you think penguins and explorers need saintly patronage, too?

So, the following list only works if A) you clump all of Asia in with Asia Minor, and B) you clump Antarctica in with Oceania. With those caveats in mind, here’s my decidedly unofficial list of continental patron saints:

• Africa: Charles Lwanga
• Asia: John the Evangelist
• Australia: Mary
• The Americas: Our Lady of Guadalupe
• Europe: Benedict
• Oceania (and Antarctica): Peter Chanel

The obvious next question would be: who is the patron saint of the oceans? I would vote for Our Lady, Star of the Sea. But that would mean that Mary is really overworked in this department, don’t you think?

July 24, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Five Websites Every Progressive Catholic Needs to Know

Wheezinggirl emailed me to make sure I knew about the FutureChurch website (which I did, but thanks anyway). It made me think that readers of this blog might enjoy a handy set of must-have links for progressive and dissident Catholics:

• Call to Action
• Dignity
• FutureChurch
• Pax Christi
• Voice of the Faithful

Plus here’s a bonus link, to the webpage of my favorite dissident Catholic author (and his must-read book):

• Philip S. Kaufman OSB — author of Why You Can Disagree and Remain a Faithful Catholic

Happy surfing!

July 23, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Spelling the Perfect Sound

The other night my friend Phil and I were shooting the breeze about nothing much in particular, and the topic of how iTunes is revolutionizing the music biz came up (Phil’s son is a guitarist in a band called Blue of Noon). Phil made a comment that fascinated me: "You know," he said, "the sales of high end audiophile equipment is declining. People just aren’t worried about high fidelity any more." I snorted in response, "Yeah, well, the audiophile market has been overblown for quite some time now. A carefully chosen $3000 system sounds just as good as a $30,000 system, even though audiophiles are too obstinate to admit it."

The conversation meandered on to other topics, but it left me thinking about the rise and fall of the true audiophile: the person who would gladly take out a second mortgage on their house to buy the "perfect" sound system. More than once, I encountered audiophiles who, like overeager 12-year-olds, simply had to show off their expensive toys to me — with a great flourish I’d be invited to sit in the audiophile’s own chair (carefully positioned in the one spot in the room where the sound is, er, most perfect) and then, after explaining in intricate detail why their particular five-figure sound system is The Absolute Best On The Planet, my friend would cue up an album notorious for its sonic complexity (like Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Center of the Earth or the Gyuto Monks’ Tibetan Tantric Choir), and then… I’d listen.

Whenever this happened, I always bumped up against the same problem: I never heard a system that sounded any better than my medium-priced Sony CD player, JVC receiver, and Bose speakers. All of which cost roughly 10% of what my audiophile friends paid for their "perfect" systems.

When I would express my inability to detect a difference in sonic splendour, invariably my friend would smile condescendingly and lament how sad life must be for me, to suffer the curse of having plebeian ears.

• • •

Sad as it might be for my audiophile friends, science pretty much takes my side. Test after double blind test fails to demonstrate any ability, both among audiophiles or us plebeians, to detect with any consistency a difference in sound between average high quality stereo components and the super-expensive, ultra-high end audio equipment. If you think this is a bold statement, then check out some of the links from the Wikipedia article on audiophiles, and you’ll find all sorts of entertaining reading. Part of what makes it all so much fun: the audiophiles simply argue against the evidence (my favorite counter argument: "a listener needs a relaxing environment, in which over time he’ll be able to detect the true superiority of audiophile sound." Yeah, right. Incidentally, I use the pronoun "he" because most audiophiles are men, women being far too sensible to engage in such egotistical play). We human beings are so precious: we’ll believe whatever we want to believe, and come up with all sorts of arguments to bolster our position, no matter how much it flies in the face of common sense.

But back to Phil’s comment about declining sales of audiophile equipment. Here’s an online article that bears out his observation. I personally find it hard to believe that the advent of downloadable music is alone responsible for the decline of the audiophile market. I suspect that this decline originated with a younger generation that has grown up with the ordinary sonic splendor of digital technology and therefore does not need to believe in a mythical "pure sound" delivered only by über-expensive equipment. In other words, the myth of the audiophile experience has been subverted not only by measurable science (i.e., the double blind test), but also by the digital availability of beautiful sound delivered through (relatively) inexpensive equipment. The advent of the MP3 is simply an amplification of a process that began a quarter century ago with the debut of the compact disc. Of course, some audiophiles insist that their subjective ability to discern minute differences in sound still justifies the heroically large amounts of money that they will invest in stereo equipment, which they can then brag about to anyone who will listen (mostly, just others in their vanishing community).

• • •

This morning, an interesting thought occurred to me: based on my experience of the contemporary magical community, many of its members and spokespersons seem to function in ways that parallel the dynamics of the audiophile community. Just as audiophiles seek the perfect sound, so too do magicians seek the perfect experience (of magic). Like audiophiles, true believers in magic will go to herioc lengths in their quest for this perfect experience.

Like audiophiles, magicians (ceremonial, Wiccan, druidic, or otherwise — I’ve encountered the phenomenon I’m describing here in a variety of settings) claim a higher than ordinary sensory (or extrasensory) ability — the ability to perceive and direct the flow of magical energy or of controllable spiritual entities. Non-magicians who do not share in this perception/experience of magical "reality" are dismissed, either contemptuously or with seeming compassion, as "lacking" in psychic ability. Meanwhile, those magicians who have (or claim to have) the psychic skill necessary to cut the magical muster, engage in the pursuit of arcane knowledge, esoteric spellcraft, hidden ritual, and ancient ceremonial as a means to sharpen, hone, or simply celebrate their unique knowledge/skill. How do they do this? By studying under a demanding teacher or teachers, and/or by pursuing a series of intiations in a magical tradition. Such studies typically take years to complete, are highly demanding in terms of time and effort, require loyalty, perseverance (and often, obedience) and confer upon the student a "lineage" or magical pedigree. These challenging curricula, often linked to famous magical celebrities (like Aleister Crowley or Israel Regardie or Victor Anderson) are, in this analogy, the equivalent to the high-priced audiophile equipment: not only is such a training program expensive (and therefore elitist), but its value is only "discernable" to those with the "rare ability" to perceive its worth. Of course, here the "expense" is measured not in dollars, but in terms of time, effort, and commitment to the pursuit of the esoteric studies within a particular initiatory lineage.

So… if you have the goods (the magical raw aptitude), you need to buy the expensive equipment (the elitist training by the "right" teacher), in order to achieve the desired perfect experience (magical mastery). Once having achieved such mastery, you have unlimited bragging rights (i.e., you get to write dense and largely unreadable books in the tradition of Aleister Crowley or R.J. Stewart). On the other hand, if you look at this entire house of cards and decide it’s more about ego than anything else, well… clearly you are a plebeian and you have zero magical ability whatsoever. Of course, the fact that empirical science cannot demonstrate any independently verifiable and measurable evidence that magical energy exists at all (let alone has an impact on peoples’ lives) is simply evidence of science’s failings, and should not at all be taken to suggest that the emperors of magic are, in fact, naked.

What a fun world we live in!

• • •

Some of my readers will find this post supremely annoying, and simply further evidence that I went off my rocker when I decided to trade in druidism for catholicism. A few others might have an "ah ha!" moment similar to the one I myself enjoyed this morning. Granted, most of you who read these words will no doubt find them boring, either because you have no knowledge of or interest in the audiophile community, or else no knowledge of or interest in the magical community. If you belong to this last group, be thankful!

As for me, I am left with one question. When will the world of magic have its own equivalent to digital music: in other words, a phenomenon that gives the average person enough of a splendid experience of the spiritual realm — without the egotism or posturing that goes with most arcane magical studies — that he or she will see through magic’s claims to be the best or only experience of spiritual power? Of course, given  how marginalized the magical communities are even in today’s postmodern world, perhaps that phenomenon has already arrived. Perhaps it is devotional mysticism. Perhaps it is science. Perhaps it is good old fashioned psychotherapy.

I think any of the three will do, as alternatives to magic for the average person. I for one would glady opt for any of these — the spiritual splendor of union with divine love; or a reasonable, constructive engagement with the natural world, or just plain and simple emotional health and well-being — over the grandiose but largely-hollow promises of the magical elite. But what do I know? I’m just a plebeian, after all.

July 23, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Beauty

Wheezinggirl writes in a recent comment, "I see much beauty in the Christian mystical tradition."

Indeed. Much of what drives me to continue exploring Christian mysticism is its emphasis on beauty.

The three great branches of theology: dogmatic theology, moral theology, and ascetical (mystical) theology, correspond to the three Platonic ways of knowing: truth, goodness, and beauty, respectively. More recently, Ken Wilber speaks of these three forms as "the big three," corresponding to his integral map of consciousness: truth corresponds to what is out there in an objective/empirical sense, goodness corresponds to the truths that govern social interaction and collective consciousness, while beauty corresponds to the riches of truth "in here," concerning the limitless depth of subjective/spiritual consciousness.

Dogmatic theology as the arbiter of truth has been under attack by western science for some time now. Indeed, while fundamentalists (of any religious persuasion) still cling to the idea that the dogma of their faith is the one and only absolute truth, most moderate to liberal Christians would now accept that dogmatic theology really only concerns religious truth, leaving the core reality-dogmas of our day under the arbitration of the scientific community. Meanwhile, moral theology has come under attack from a variety of sources, but most especially from feminism and postmodernism, two movements that have deconstructed the patriarchalism, legalism, and objectivism that have shaped and limited classical Christian morality.

So in a world where Christianity’s claims to contribute to both the true and the good have been compromised, what about beauty? I think this is where the faith remains the most relevant to today’s world. Not only are the writings of the mystics splendid in their literary artistry, but their directives for experiencing the Divine Presence through lectio divina (meditative reading of scripture), contemplative prayer, meditation, and the liturgy invite us to encounter not only beauty, but glory and wonder as well.

It’s a shame that mysticism is so marginalized within Christianity. It’s as if untold millions of people are sitting on a vast, limitless treasure that promises to transform their lives with indescribable beauty and joy, but since no one has bothered to tell them about it, the treasure goes unnoticed.

July 21, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Beauty

Wheezinggirl writes in a recent comment, “I see much beauty in the Christian mystical tradition.”

Indeed. Much of what drives me to continue exploring Christian mysticism is its emphasis on beauty.

The three great branches of theology: dogmatic theology, moral theology, and ascetical (mystical) theology, correspond to the three Platonic ways of knowing: truth, goodness, and beauty, respectively. More recently, Ken Wilber speaks of these three forms as “the big three,” corresponding to his integral map of consciousness: truth corresponds to what is out there in an objective/empirical sense, goodness corresponds to the truths that govern social interaction and collective consciousness, while beauty corresponds to the riches of truth “in here,” concerning the limitless depth of subjective/spiritual consciousness.

Dogmatic theology as the arbiter of truth has been under attack by western science for some time now. Indeed, while fundamentalists (of any religious persuasion) still cling to the idea that the dogma of their faith is the one and only absolute truth, most moderate to liberal Christians would now accept that dogmatic theology really only concerns religious truth, leaving the core reality-dogmas of our day under the arbitration of the scientific community. Meanwhile, moral theology has come under attack from a variety of sources, but most especially from feminism and postmodernism, two movements that have deconstructed the patriarchalism, legalism, and objectivism that have shaped and limited classical Christian morality.

So in a world where Christianity’s claims to contribute to both the true and the good have been compromised, what about beauty? I think this is where the faith remains the most relevant to today’s world. Not only are the writings of the mystics splendid in their literary artistry, but their directives for experiencing the Divine Presence through lectio divina (meditative reading of scripture), contemplative prayer, meditation, and the liturgy invite us to encounter not only beauty, but glory and wonder as well.

It’s a shame that mysticism is so marginalized within Christianity. It’s as if untold millions of people are sitting on a vast, limitless treasure that promises to transform their lives with indescribable beauty and joy, but since no one has bothered to tell them about it, the treasure goes unnoticed.

July 21, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

The Alabaster Box

More thoughts about Christianity and Neopaganism and their differing approaches to the spirituality of nature:

I think the argument can be made that magic is an effort to control nature. Using spiritual means to achieve physical results… changing consciousness in order to change reality… finding a spiritual solution to your problem, etc. etc. However you want to define magic, it seems that it so often boils down to an effort (whether through ritual, spellcraft, energy work, or just “being” in the flow) to shape what is (i.e., nature) in accordance with the will (or Will-with-a-capital-W, depending on your philosophy of magic). In its most benign form, magic is the effort to align the will/Will with nature, which gets into the murky waters of obeying nature. Meanwhile, Lon Duquette might argue that magic is an effort to control nature, but only the nature of the self: such magic-as-self-mastery is perhaps the form of magic with the most ethical/moral potential.

Kenneth Leech, the author such wonderful books as Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality and True Prayer: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality, once suggested to me that magic flourishes whenever a community loses touch with the sacramental. Sacraments: outward signs of inward graces. Rather than using ritual or spiritual energies to control nature, sacraments are about using elements of nature (water, wine, bread, oil, etc.) to celebrate grace. Grace, after all, simply cannot be controlled. But through the sacraments we can at least point to it and say, “here it is.”

Even sexuality is involved: If you believe that marriage is a sacrament, then lovemaking becomes a means of grace. No matter what the dualistic conservatives may think.

•••

In my post from yesterday I complained about Christianity’s troubled relationship with nature over the years. Reflecting on this, it occurs to me that Jesus himself may be the key to re-visioning Christianity’s relationship with creation. Think about it…

• His ministry begins with 40 days in the desert (sounds like a vision quest to me!);
• He makes a name for himself as a very earthy, body-positive healer;
• Again and again, various vignettes in the New Testament depict him as particularly kind toward women and willing to flout convention in order to relate to women in positive ways;
• At one point he performs a healing by creating a poultice using saliva mixed with dirt;
• In terms of setting, the Gospels dance through nature: Jesus lives by the sea, he preaches on the mountain, he prays in the garden, he retreats to the desert… this was no effete urban snob! Jesus was a man of the earth;
• Consider this amazing passage from Luke (7:37-8): "And behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment." Jesus clearly appears to be someone very comfortable with sensual pleasure. Even if we assume that Jesus was somehow above getting "turned on" by the frank sensuality of this woman’s actions, we cannot but think he must have been very comfortable with physical pleasure in order to calmly receive such attention, in a social setting no less;
• After his resurrection, Jesus is depicting as eating real food. His resurrection is not some sort of spiritualized appearance of a phantom, it’s a real event involving a real occurrence… in the natural world;
• Finally, even the miracles — feeding the multitudes, calming the storm, walking on water — can be interpreted as evidence of Jesus as a nature-positive figure. After all, these stories suggest a deep cooperation with nature on his part, presaging the “harmony with nature” that is the object of so many 21st-century spiritual seekers, Neopagan or otherwise.

While these few examples of how Jesus is depicted in the New Testament in relation to nature do not necessarily add up to a comprehensive nature-positive theology, I think they do go a long way toward undermining Christianity’s traditional ambivalence toward nature. In our day, given how badly the human community has compromised our collective relationship with the environment, I think whatever we can use to begin to re-vision Christianity’s relationship with nature will be a Good Thing. And it’s encouraging to think that a revitalized nature-friendly Christianity actually begins at the top.

July 20, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

The Roaring Inside of Us

In her 1978 book Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, poet Susan Griffin explores the connecting points between feminism and ecology. Over the years that followed, ecofeminism emerged as its own political and spiritual perspective, arguing that the way a society treats women is often deeply rooted in the way it treats nature (and vice versa). Granted, 18 of the 28 years since the book’s publication a Republican has lived in the White House and today our society seems even less inclined to connect the dots than ever. Which is probably why if anything the message of ecofeminism is more urgent than ever.

The other day I was pondering how Christian mysticism’s greatest and most enduring weakness has been its ambivalence toward both nature and the feminine. This is not news; it was that very weakness that led me to give up on Anglicanism in the mid 1990s and wander into the Neopagan fairyland for seven years. The fact that I’ve grown disillusioned with Neopaganism’s ability to seriously address the concerns of ecofeminism does not mean that I have abandoned those concerns. I’m just a bit more desperate today than I was a decade ago: back then, I saw Neopaganism as a beacon of hope. Now I see it as a movement that has become compromised by its own internal lack of ethical focus, which means those of us who care about both mystical spirituality and ecofeminism are not going to find much help from that movement.

I think the argument can be made that different religious traditions, over the ages, have adopted differing strategies for dealing with the question of how "external" nature relates to "internal" spirit. Here are a few of those strategies…

• To be spiritual means to flee from nature
• To be spiritual means to struggle with nature
• To be spiritual means to master and control nature
• To be spiritual means to celebrate nature
• To be spiritual means to seek harmony with nature
• To be spiritual means to obey nature

Broadly speaking, I think we can say that Christianity has historically functioned primarily within the first three strategies; while Neopaganism tends to function more within the last three. While it is tempting to see this as evidence of Christianity’s failing and Neopaganism’s moral superiority, I think it stems mainly from the relative age of the two faiths. In other words, if we could truly resurrect paleopaganism, we would be shocked at how much the pagans of antiquity fled from, struggled with, or sought to master nature. Christianity was born into a milieu that was anti-nature, anti-woman, anti-body. And for two thousand years these perspectives have dogged the faith.

Fast-forward to the twentieth century. Along comes Neopaganism, a love child of European romanticism and its encounter with indigenous shamanic traditions from the world over. Both of these antecedents have made it possible for Neopaganism to be, at least in theory, a faith of celebration, harmony, and perhaps even obedience to nature (which I think has its ethical problems, but that’s another post for another day). But Neopaganism lacks a truly sacrificial or contemplative center, which is why less than fifty years on it is ethically diffuse — far more dominated by spellcraft or commerce ("Here, buy a crystal or a silver pentacle! Never mind the cost this has to the earth") than by the kind of transformational mysticism that characterized paleopagans like Plotinus or Proclus (and that live on today not in the writings of Silver Ravenwolf or Dorothy Morrison, but rather in the Trappists and the Jesuits).

So Christianity has a mystical tradition, even though it is ignored by the Protestant mainstream and attacked by conservatives, both Catholic and evangelical. But at least it is there. Meanwhile, Christianity’s failure to seriously engage with the concerns of romanticism, environmentalism, or the encounter with shamanism has meant that as a tradition it has been incapable of responding to the crying need for a new ethic of human-environmental relatedness. Neopaganism at least pays lip service to such a new ethic, but again I think inherent problems within Neopaganism are preventing it as a tradition from truly engaging with the spiritual crisis we are facing as a species in an environment under duress of our own making.

The question I am left with: as the inheritors of a 2000 year old mystical tradition that speaks of profound inner beauty, how do we now unleash the roaring inside all of us,  so that we who contemplate in the tradition of Julian of Norwich or John of the Cross can integrate the profound mysteries of our faith with the emerging need to express that faith in ways that honor and harmonize with nature, rather than flee from or struggle with her?

July 19, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

More About Magic…

My friend Liadan writes to me: 

I’ve read your article ("Do You Believe in Magic?"), but I don’t think it really says why you don’t believe magic is "necessary."

She goes on to describe two instances where she used magic and found it "very useful," describing two dire situations — one involving her mother’s experience of a serious illness, the other concerning a threatening natural disaster — both of which ended happily after a spell was cast. She concludes,

If magic is unnecessary, what else could have been done?  Prayer didn’t work here.  And I am Christian. I don’t think I did anything wrong, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do.  I prayed in advance for advice if God didn’t want me to do this.

Once again, I go back to what Lon Duquette says: "I can only change one thing with magick — myself." Liadan, I am so happy that you experienced two wonderful miracles, first with your mother’s healing and the second with the averted firestorm. I hope and trust that you will understand that I have no desire to criticize you or attack your experience, even while in all honesty I can only say this: that I believe the spells had no influence on the force which manifested those miracles.

 You admit that you "prayed in advance for advice" and yet you claim that "prayer didn’t work here." Says who? How can we know that the miracles are not the result of the prayers, rather than the magic? Of course, I could just as easily play the skeptic and say, why should we believe that either prayer or magic  has any influence on the physical world? After all, somebody else in the same situation as yours may have said prayers and cast spells, only to experience the loss of their loved one or the natural disaster. Why does your prayer/magic work while theirs didn’t? Is God capricious? Or, perhaps, is there a deeper force at work here, a force that no human effort (magical or otherwise) can control or even influence?

Does prayer only "work" if the results are exactly what we expect or demand? That’s a mighty small God, who is merely a puppet whose strings we pull to manifest our desires. What happens when God answers our prayers, only not as fast as we would like (which is what appears to have happened in both your scenarios)? Or, more difficult still, what happens when God’s answer to our prayers may not be what we had hoped? Some people pray — or do their magic — and the disaster happens anyways. Christianity teaches that this is an opportunity to trust in the sovereign goodness of God that extends far beyond our own finite hopes and desires. But magical philosophies seem to say that if a spell doesn’t "work," then the person who cast it did something wrong. Frankly, I think that’s a terrible worldview. That means if your mother had died — or your house had gone up in flames — it would have been all your fault, since you didn’t do the magic right.

I’m sorry, but I can’t worship a God (or Goddess) who is so petty.

It’s a plain fact of reality: with all the prayers and all the spells in the world, we don’t always get what we want. So either we have to trust that the Divine has everything under control (which is what I understand mysticism to advocate), or we have to keep trying to learn a better or more effective spell, which is what magical systems seem to be saying.

 To me, when I can approach impending loss or disaster from a place of trust, I find that prayer is more than sufficient. I can say to God, "Hey, this is what I REALLY want…." But once I speak my mind in my prayer, then I can release my wanting into a deeper trusting. And in that depth of trust, sometimes a miracle happens, and sometimes it doesn’t. I know I can’t control the outcome.

Magic, by contrast, seems to be a continual effort to attempt to control what we just can’t control. It’s a direct violation of the serenity prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. 

I believe that when we live according to the principles of this prayer, we do not have to rely on magic to make things happen. Instead, we can relax into the serenity (trust) that allows us to face those things which are too big for us to control; and we can find empowerment to take on those things which are within our ability to influence; with a deep wisdom to help us discern the distinctions between those two spheres. All of this creates a deep psychic space where true freedom and real love can flourish.

And in that space, I maintain, magic — at least of the cast-a-spell variety — is unnecessary. 

Once again, please know that I am so happy for you that miracles happened in your life. As a person who seeks to live by faith, I take great comfort in knowing that the miracles I’ve experienced come from a source that is far, far bigger than I am.

July 17, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Do You Believe In Magic?

N.B.: This post is a follow up to last night’s entry, The Sinner’s Prayer. If you haven’t read that one, you might want to go back and check it out first.

What’s fascinating about magic is the subtle interplay between three ingredients: the will/heart of the magician, the form of the magic/spell that is performed, and the changes (or lack thereof) that occur in either the physical or spiritual environment.

In all fairness to evangelicals, I suspect few if any really believe that reciting the Sinner’s Prayer actually "changes" God. Theologically speaking, evangelical Christianity would assert that God has freely offered salvation to all people because it is in God’s pleasure to do so. Reciting the Sinner’s Prayer, therefore, amounts to saying "Yes" to this grand offer.

What the Sinner’s Prayer changes, therefore, is not so much God, but the sinner. Yes, it opens up the doors of heaven (at least, as evangelicals see it). But ontologically speaking, the doors of heaven were already opened — that happened with the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. So, from the viewpoint of orthodox evangelical theology, it’s more correct to say that the Sinner’s Prayer opens up one’s heart to the ability to walk through those always-open doors.

Frankly, approaching evangelical theology from this perspective makes it far more less objectionable, to my mind. I’m still catholic enough to insist that salvation is more of a communal than individual event, but I’ll save that for another day.

Now, compare all this to this wonderful little saying found at the website of Lon Milo DuQuette, who is a leading Thelemitte magician (and a truly lovely and funny man): "I can change only one thing with Magick — myself."

So I still think the Sinner’s Prayer functions like a spell, but like DuQuette’s magic, it’s a spell that only changes one thing: the person who’s working the juju. God, the universe, everything else remains as before.

• • •

Lon DuQuette can get away with his rather bold statement because he is an acknowledged authority of ceremonial magic, i.e. magic-with-a-k. If just about anyone else asserted that their magical ability only enabled them to change themselves, they would be dismissed as weak, inefffectual magicians. But for someone of DuQuette’s stature to make this statement, is to shine a light on all of the pompous and overblown language that characterizes so much of the ceremonial, neopagan, and Wiccan communities: that despite all of magic(k)’s grandiose claims to change things, at the end of the day the only "thing" magic really changes is one’s self, or perhaps one’s consciousness. Now, just as the change of heart that the Sinner’s Prayer signifies is believed by evangelicals to "change everything" in the sense that it facilitates a new life in Christ (i.e., being born again), so too the practitioners of magic will insist that the self-change or consciousness-change that magic effects literally changes the world — often tied into metaphysical beliefs such as that the self is one with the world, or creates the world, or the world is merely a projection of the self, and so forth. For simplicity’s sake, I’d like to distinguish between two understandings of magic: "primitive" and "high" (these are arbitrary terms I’m using, and may or may not correlate with other usages of these terms in the world of magic/magick).

• Primitive magic is the idea that casting a spell effects real, observable, and perhaps even measurable changes in the physical environment: I cast this spell, and a gorgeous someone falls in love with me, something s/he never would have done if I hadn’t cast the spell.
• By contrast, high magic is the idea that casting a spell effects real, observable, and perhaps even measurable changes only in the self/consciousness of the magician, which might have subsequent impact upon the environment: I cast this spell, and I become more self-confident around members of the opposite sex, and that enables me to make friends and eventually experience a romance with someone special — something I never would have done if I hadn’t cast the spell.

Now, apply this to the Sinner’s Prayer:

• A primitive magic approach to the Sinner’s Prayer would hold that reciting the prayer (with the correct heart intention, of course) literally gets God to stop condemning the soul to hell, and instead save the soul, as evidenced by Christ’s and the Holy Spirit’s presence in that person’s life.
• A high magic approach to the Sinner’s Prayer would maintain that God is not changed by the reciting of the prayer, but the sinner is; this change results in the sinner opening his or her heart to the presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit, thereby accepting God’s freely given gift that had been offered, but left unopened, as it were, until the moment the sinner recited the prayer.

So, where am I going with all this? I’d like to contrast both primitive and high magic with mysticism.

• • •

Mysticism is sacramental, rather than magical, in nature. As I see it, both sacramental theology and magical theory celebrate the presence of wonders in the world. But whereas magic places the emphasis on the actions of the mortal self, sacramental theology keeps the focus on the mighty acts of God. Sacramental theology makes no sense in those forms of Wicca, neopaganism, or ceremonial magic where there is no belief in a transcendent God distinct from the universe (or the self). But to those who do acknowledge such a transcendent reality, the difference between sacramental mysticism and magic might be seen this way (again, using the Sinner’s Prayer as my example):

• Primitive magic: I recite the Sinner’s Prayer (with the correct heart intention, of course) to get God to save me.
• High magic: I recite the Sinner’s Prayer to open my heart to Christ’s/the Holy Spirit’s presence and to accept God’s freely given gift of salvation.
• Sacramental mysticism: God loves me. Whatever I do (or don’t do) in response to that love simply pales in comparison.

It’s a fine line indeed that separates mysticism from magic. Most mystics would still insist that, no matter how insignificent our response may be in relation to Divine Love, a response is necessary nevertheless, to complete the circle as it were. The gift of the Eucharist is not complete until the wafer and wine are consumed. The proper response to mysticism is not total, infantile passivity! So in this way, mysticism dances with high magic. But even if it’s fuzzy logic that disinguishes the mystical from the (high) magical, nevertheless both approaches to the spiritual world have their distinct centers of gravity. Mystical spirituality endeavors to keep its center firmly focussed on the love and action of God, while acknowledging that in this physical world of ours, some sort of response is necessary, and that response will look like a magical act, even though it is an action taken in the cascading light of a love over which we mortals have absolutely no control.

This helps to explain infant baptism: many evangelicals reject infant baptism because they think you gotta understand it and assent to it in order for it to have meaning (i.e., in order for the magic to work). But in sacramental terms, since the focus is on God’s love rather than on human response, baptising infants makes perfect sense. After all, God loves babies just as much as God loves adults! 

Now, to finish this post I’ll answer the question found in its title: do I believe in magic? Well of course! But that’s like asking me if I believe in loving my self. Well, I think it’s a good thing to love one’s self, even if Christian theology has often been rather unhelpful in this regard. But I also believe that self-love is only possible in a world where love radiates out from a higher source. Christian theology has historically been so hard on self-love because it tries to get people to unhinge egotism and hold the self in the higher light of Divine Love. And so it is with mysticism and magic. If magic can be compared to the art of self-love, then mysticism celebrates the love of the wholly other, transcendent God, whom we nonetheless can experience immanently since the wholly transcendent God is also wholly present. To immerse our lives in the mystical light renders magic both possible but also unnecessary.

July 17, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Deification on the Web

Last night I wrote about an article on contemporary writings on deification published in the scholarly journal New Blackfriars. I said if you’re interested in mysticism, you ought to be interested in deification. Well, it occurred to me that some folks might want to know a bit more about this obscure theological topic, so I did some poking around online, and found these resources:

• Our True Final Hope: The Theosis / Divinization / Deification Web Page by Jon Zuck
• Theosis at Wikipedia
• Reclaiming Deification in the Latin West by Matthew Tsakanikas

I’ve only had a chance to skim over these articles, so read at your own risk. But they look pretty good.

July 17, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Deification on the Web

Last night I wrote about an article on contemporary writings on deification published in the scholarly journal New Blackfriars. I said if you’re interested in mysticism, you ought to be interested in deification. Well, it occurred to me that some folks might want to know a bit more about this obscure theological topic, so I did some poking around online, and found these resources:

• Our True Final Hope: The Theosis / Divinization / Deification Web Page by Jon Zuck 
• Theosis at Wikipedia 
• Reclaiming Deification in the Latin West by Matthew Tsakanikas

I’ve only had a chance to skim over these articles, so read at your own risk. But they look pretty good.

July 17, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

New Blackfriars on Deification

I was doing some research on the Jesuit author George Maloney today and I found something fun: a periodical called New Blackfriars, which is a scholarly journal published by the English Dominicans. If you go to the Blackwell Synergy website, you can download PDFs from the January 2006 issue — sort of a “free sample” online. The articles that are there for the plucking include such tasty topics as:

• “The Last Catholic King (James II)”
• “Mechthild of Magdeburg: Women Philosophers and the Visionary Tradition”
• “Are There Any Catholic Theologians? “
• “What Do We Mean by ‘God’?”
• “What is Infallibility For?”
• “The Consummation of the Christian Promise: Recent Studies on Deification”

That last article is the one with the Maloney reference, which enticed me to the site. I downloaded it and read it this evening. It’s a splendid survey of recent theological writing in the English language either directly on the subject of deification, or dealing with closely related theological topics. The article considers both scholarly as well as more “popular” works (I use the word popular in a relative sense — none of the material included here is going to be picked up by the Rick Warren crowd anytime soon). If you’re interested in the subject of deification (and I’m assuming that most readers of this blog are probably interested in Christian mysticism; if you’re interested in Christian mysticism then you ought to be interested in deification, whether you know it or not), this article is a great overview of some of the more exciting recent writing that’s available on the topic. Best of all, the article itself is free for the downloading; you can save it to your hard drive as a PDF file, or if you just want to read it you can see it in HTML by clicking here.

July 16, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

A Phone Call From An Old Friend

I got a phone call from an old friend yesterday. Although I’ve known her for over twenty years, like so often seems to happen it was a friendship that had grown a bit dormant — living 600 miles apart and each with our own families, we  just fell out of touch, even via email. I hadn’t heard from her (or reached out to her) in probably about four years. Which means that the last time we had any contact, I was still a Pagan, and had not yet begun my journey back to Christianity.

But she emailed me recently, and said she wanted to talk. We bounced around a few emails trying to nail down a suitable time, and yesterday we finally had a chance to connect. We chatted each other up about our spouses, our kids, the frustrations and sorrows of caring for aging parents, and the obligatory clucking about how bad the current administration is.

And then came the inevitable. "So, I wanted to talk to you about your decision to become a Catholic."

We had a good conversation. I think she wanted a bit of reassurance that I hadn’t turned into a neo-fascist, and like all good friends was concerned about my happiness. I think the natural course of the conversation answered all her questions. Eventually the focus shifted away from me and our chat opened out into a very nice conversation about her church (she’s a Unitarian) and about the challenge and necessity of practicing religious tolerance in a world where such a virtue often seems in too short a supply.

I teased her a little when she first brought up Catholicism. I said, "Boy, I’ve learned one way to get old friends to reach out. Just change your religion, and publicize it through your blog!" We laughed, and I hope she didn’t feel like it was a barb at her. But it’s true: I continue to get a trickle of emails and phone calls from old friends and acquaintances with whom I’ve fallen out of touch. They’ve either read my blog, my conversion story on Beliefnet, or finally got the memo through the grapevine. And then they get in touch.

Of all these old friends who get in touch, it is naturally the Pagan ones who have the most emotionally complex reaction to my spiritual wandering — after all, far more people leave Catholicism to become Pagans, than the other way around! Some Pagans sadly seem to take it personally, and need to criticize either me or Catholicism, and I’ve had more than one old friendship take on a distinctively chilly tone when the conversation didn’t go the way my friend seemed to want it to (I make no apologies for becoming a Catholic; nor do I refuse to be anything other than happy with my decision, even while I remain willing to speak up about the ways in which I disagree with the church).  The worst was when one Pagan-author friend started to play therapist with me, trying to uncover what my subconscious problems were that resulted in me becoming a Catholic. When I pointed out that I was in therapy throughout my entire conversion process and that I really didn’t appreciate friends trying to therapize me or the assumption that embracing Catholicism had to be dysfunctional, she ended the conversation in a huff. Thankfully, though, most of my renewed-old-friends, like the one who called yesterday, just want to check in and make sure I’m still me. Those conversations typically go beautifully and I feel refreshed by them.

I guess there are a few lessons here. One is to try to do a better job at nurturing old friendships. Another is to really work on loving people right where they are, remembering that for some people my shift in religious fidelity may be threatening or puzzling. While it is not my job to take care of other people’s discomfort with my religious choices, neither does it make sense to respond to other people’s concerns with anything other than compassion, optimism, and gentle good humor. Ironically, the ethics of polyamory actually helped me out here. Polyamory works best when lovers continually reassure one another, particularly when new lovers are brought into the network of relationships. The point is as beautiful as it is simple: keep telling those you love that you love them, that even when things change you still love them, and that just because you’ve begun to love someone new that doesn’t mean you’ve stopped loving your pre-existing lover(s).

Now, my situation is different of course, primarily because my "new lover" isn’t a person but a faith tradition, and furthermore, when I became a Catholic I actually did change my relationship with Paganism. I am no longer Pagan-identified. But unlike so many former Pagans who renounce or disavow Paganism, I have chosen to remain Pagan-friendly. I really don’t have any criticisms of Paganism that I hadn’t already held for quite some time while I was still Pagan-identified, and if anything, my relationship with Paganism is better than ever, since I have enough distance now to allow me to appreciate what is beautiful about Paganism without feeling conflicted over its flaws. All of this, of course, allows me to reassure any and all of my Pagan friends (at least, those who will listen) that I am still their friend, I am not going to try to convert them, and that I have only good wishes for Pagans and their community — even though I am now Catholic.

Keep telling those you love you love them, and keep reassuring them even when things change. It’s a beautiful thing.

July 16, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

The Sinner’s Prayer

If you’ve had any contact with American evangelical Christianity at all, you’ve probably encountered the so-called "Four Spiritual Laws." It comes from a tract written fifty years ago by the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ; these days you can even find it online. All derived from an evangelical reading of the Bible, the laws can be summarized like this:

1. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
2. Humanity has sinned and is separated from God, and therefore we cannot know and experience God’s love and plan.
3. Jesus Christ is the only remedy for our sin.
4. We must accept Jesus as our personal savior in order to receive, know, and experience God’s love and plan.

Both the tract and online versions of the Four Spiritual Laws culminate with a prayer that a person is asked to pray in order to accept Christ as savior and thereby be born again. This prayer, and other prayers like it, have come to be known as the "Sinner’s Prayer." It appears in all sorts of tracts, as well as in books, Christian rock CDs, websites, and anywhere else where somebody is trying to squeeze two thousand years of theology into a simple formula.

Here’s a version of the Sinner’s Prayer found at Wikipedia:

Father, I know that I have broken your laws and my sins have separated me from you. I am truly sorry, and now I want to turn away from my past sinful life toward you. Please forgive me, and help me avoid sinning again. I believe that your son, Jesus Christ died for my sins, was resurrected from the dead, is alive, and hears my prayer. I invite Jesus to become the Lord of my life, to rule and reign in my heart from this day forward. Please send your Holy Spirit to help me obey You, and to do Your will for the rest of my life. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.

Readers who have closely followed my disillusionment with Neopaganism and my subsequent return to Christianity will recognize that a chief source of my alienation from the Pagan community had to do with the prominence of spellcraft. A spell, of course, is a ritual enactment by which one focusses and directs magical power. Magical power, as an old friend of mine once put it, is "the force we use to get God (or Goddess, or Nature…take your pick) to do something that He/She/It otherwise might not or will not do."

Now I have always been uncomfortable with the Four Spiritual Laws and the Sinner’s Prayer, not only because my natural theological orientation is much more catholic than evangelical, but also because I think it is misguided to try to shrink the entire thrust of Christian spirituality into such a, well, manageable synopsis. Frankly, I don’t think the glory of Divine grace can be so easily summarized, let alone acted upon. Because, at the end of the day, the Four Spiritual Laws and the Sinner’s Prayer pay lipservice to Divine action, but ultimately keep the spotlight focussed on what we humans do, to "receive" (read: manifest) God’s grace.

And this leads into the insight I had this morning. I’m reading a manuscript of a forthcoming evangelical book, and the author offers his own critique of the Sinner’s Prayer, seeing it as a  human effort to try to control the uncontrollable reality of Divine Grace. And as I read what this author had to say, it hit me — hard, right between the eyes — as to why, ultimately, I’m uncomfortable with this prayer and the theology that lies beneath it.

It’s because it’s a spell.

Never mind that Christianity professes to be a non-magical or even anti-magical religion. Institutions and communities can behave just like individuals: paying lip service to a particular value or viewpoint while acting in contradictory ways. No matter how much evangelical Christians may insist that their religion has nothing to do with magic, when they recite their Sinner’s Prayer as a means of triggering God’s salvation, they are casting a spell. Maybe it’s even the ultimate spell.

Before reciting the Sinner’s Prayer, they were headed for hell.  After reciting it, they’re bound for heaven. The Sinner’s Prayer "spell" worked the "magic" of getting God to permit the sinner in question to spend eternity in heaven. Without that "spell," it would have been hell for the poor soul. Granted, evangelicals will insist that it is not the words of the prayer itself that "work the magic," but rather the condition of the heart of the person doing the praying. But any Wiccan priestess will likewise tell you that a spell is useless without the focussed intent of the person casting the spell.

Evangelicals who read this may howl in protest, in fact, I’d be surprised if they didn’t. But an old saying asserts that if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like one, it is one. And so it is with the Sinner’s Prayer. It functions like a spell, it persuades Divine action like a spell, and therefore it "creates results" like a spell. It is a spell; a Christian spell.

Okay, so obviously I still don’t care for spellcraft, and Christians who indulge in the practice are to my mind just as spiritually misguided as any teenager who reads Silver Ravenwolf and then sets about using candles and chanting to get herself a boyfriend. Meanwhile, I think the theology that underlies the entire evangelical view of salvation as a private/individual experience engineered by the process of "accepting Christ as one’s personal savior" is suspect. So, I disavow this Christian spell both because I disavow spellcraft in any form and because I disavow any Christian theology that tends toward facilitating a Christian practice of spellcasting — in other words, that sees God as a resource to be manipulated for personal gain (even if the "personal gain" is nothing more than eternity in heaven).

 To end this on a more positive note, what then do I affirm in place of the spellishness of the Sinner’s Prayer? Not hard to answer: I affirm the radical, prodigal overflow of God’s grace, and the utter impossibility that we mortals can do anything to change or shape that flow. I affirm the splendid love that flows out of mystical spirituality that is based on mutual self-giving, and is wholly unconcerned with the power dynamics that underlie the will to magic. And I affirm that sacramental spirituality beautifully expresses such a flow of divine grace in a way that magical spirituality (whether Christian or otherwise) can never come close to touching.

Here’s to the amazing, freely-given miracle of God’s lavish, loving grace! No Sinner’s Prayer required. 

July 14, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Les Alyscamps: The “Pagan and Christian Cemetery”

Near the Rhône River in the south of France, in the city of Arles can be found a Roman necropolis called Les Alyscamps, the name itself a corruption of the Latin  Elisii Campi ("Elysian Fields"). Although I’ve never been there, I understand it is a beautiful place, as evidenced by the fact that both Gauguin and Van Gogh painted there. According to the early-twentieth-century historian of Christian folklore John W. Taylor, a wonderful legend grew up around this particular cemetary to facilitate the cultural transition from Roman Paganism to Christianity that occurred in the region in the third century. Arles was settled by Greek mariners in the sixth century BCE, and so Les Alyscamps had probably been a Pagan burial site for the better part of a millennium by the time Christianity arrived on the scene. The first Bishop of the region was named Trophimus, and as he  gathered a community of Christians around him, one practical question that emerged was, where should the members of the young church bury their dead? Many would have loved ones and family members interred at Les Alyscamps, but as Christians their hope was to be buried in ground that was disctinctively sanctified to their faith, not to the Pagan gods. According to folklore, Trophimus walked to the graveyard one summer evening, lost in thought as he mulled over this question that struck at the core of the faith (any anthropologist can tell you how in nearly every culture funeral customs lie close to the heart of religious and cultic practices). As he walked along the gorgeous tree-lined avenues of the necropolis, legend holds that Trophimus saw a light shining in the darknesss — and Christ himself appeared to the bishop. As Taylor puts it,

Kneeling among the tombs, as if identifying Himself with those whose bodies were resting underneath the soil, the Saviour was seen by St. Trophimus to raise His hands and to solemnly bless the Pagan burial-place. Henceforth no doubt was felt as to the reality of this heavenly consecration. On the spot where our Savior knelt St. Trophimus erected an altar… Whether this is the record of an actual vision or the poetical way in which [Trophimus] described to [his church] the light which God had given him, there can be no doubt of the result. Christian tombs lie side by side with Pagan, and  tradition tells us that so eager were many Christians for burial here that — something like the body of Elaine, which was sent down the river to the court of King Arthur in the Arthurian legends — bodies of saints from distant countries came floating down the Rhone in funeral barges, seeking for reception in the holy ground which Christ had consecrated.

Taylor himself calls Les Alycamps the "Pagan and Christian cemetery."

What I find so powerful and beautiful about this legend of inter-religious hospitality is that Christ knelt to give the Pagan dead his blessing. It’s kind of like when the president of the United States salutes the military: a practice instituted by Ronald Reagan, and technically a violation of military protocol, for as the civilian commander-in-chief the president is to be saluted, but need not salute in return. While I’m not much of a stickler for armed services protocol, this practice always annoyed me (truth be told, because just about anything Reagan did I found annoying). But now, thanks to this wonderful French legend, I must grudgingly look at the Reagan salute in a new light. Christian theology would hold that Christ need not kneel before anyone — not even the 1st Person of the Trinity, since he is "one with the Father before all worlds, God from God, light from light, true God from true God." Christ need kneel before no created thing, and yet Bishop Trophimus sees the Son of God kneeling to give a Pagan cemetary his blessing.

Wow.

If we are willing to put any credence in this tradition at all, an obvious question emerges: why should Christ only bless this particular piece of ground? Why not bless any and all Pagan cemetaries? And perhaps — just perhaps — this could be seen as a precedent for how Christ would have Christians relate to Pagan faith and practice, in many other areas of life as well: not with fear or hostility, but rather with a gracious and humble blessing?

It’s worth contemplating. 

Thanks to Wikipedia and John W. Taylor’s charming if not entirely reliable history of western Christian folklore, The Coming of the Saints, for the source material for this post. 

July 13, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Benedict of Nursia

Today is the feast day of Benedict of Nursia in both the Catholic and Anglican liturgies. Benedict who lived in the late fifth and early sixth centuries (i.e. 1500 years ago) is regarded as a father of western monasticism. While we know very little about his life, we do know that he was educated in Rome, abandoned urban life to live as a hermit in a cave some 40 miles or so from Rome (at that time, quite a distance). Eventuallly a community grew up around the hermit, and so he organized these followers into twelve communities — the rudimentary beginnings of the Benedictine order. Eventually he withdrew to Monte Cassino, eighty miles south of Rome, where he established a monastery on the site of a temple to Apollo. That monastery, incidentally, remains active today, even though the abbey was severely damaged in World War II.

Even though I think it’s a bit disingenuous to give Benedict all the credit for western monasticism (after all, Brigid’s monastery in Kildare was said to have been founded about the year 470, a decade before Benedict was born), he is clearly a major figure in the tradition, simply because of the Rule of Saint Benedict, which remains the gold standard of monastic rules. Many branches of the western monastic tree can be traced back to Benedict: the Cistercians arose out of a reform of Benedictine monasticism that began in the year 1098, while the Trappists are a 17th century reform of the Cistercian order. Of course, the Trappists are very dear to me, not only because one of my favorite authors, Thomas Merton, was a Trappist, but also because of how my spiritual life has been and continues to be nurtured at the Trappist monastery not far from where I live. So even as a layman living a married life, I find that Saint Benedict reaches across the centuries and touches my ongoing journey of prayer and contemplation. For this I am thankful.

In our day, Benedictine spirituality is more accessible to laypersons than ever before, thanks not only to oblate programs (where laypersons can adopt a rule of life in relation to a particular monastic community, while living an ordinary life) but also to books written specifically for the laity, book which unpack the treasures of the Benedictine way for our time. Here are a few such titles:

• Norvene Vest, Preferring Christ: A Devotional Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict
• Columba Stewart, Prayer and Community: The Benedictine Tradition
• Esther De Waal, Living with Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality
• Eric Dean, Saint Benedict for the Laity
• David Robinson, The Family Cloister: Benedictine Wisdom for the Home

Thanks to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church and Wikipedia for information on Benedict.

July 11, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Adolescent and Adult Faith

The following quotation comes from a newspaper clipping that I got from a friend who got it from a friend who got it from a friend… the best I could find out is that the article originally appeared in the Catholic Times of Montreal. The author, Daniel Cere, is writing about a recent appearance by Franciscan author/speaker Richard Rohr at a local Jesuit spirituality center.

"In his presentation, Rohr paints a sharp contrast between two forms or stages of faith.  One form he characterizes as an ‘adolescent’ faith, which is dominated by the intellect, will, dogmatism and moralism. This type of Catholicism demands certainty, manipulation and control and produces paranoid, fearful personalities.

"The other type of Catholicism generates an ‘adult’ faith, which highlights inclusion, relationality, equality, mysticism, the authority of inner experience and a willingness to let go. This form revels in fluidity, paradox and mystery." 

Three comments in response to this. First, these distinctions are hardly unique to Catholicism. Any faith tradition, from Anglicanism to Zen, can have its structure-dominated adolescents or its mystically flexible adults. Second, I think it’s important to note that it is not so much a line as a continuum that separates the two forms, meaning that anybody can flow back and forth between adolescent and adult expressions of faith, depending on the context, circumstances, sense of comfort and safety, and other factors that shape the faith experience at any given moment in time. And finally, I think it is critical that if one’s personal faith style tends toward the "adult" expression, to strive to express compassion rather than judgment toward those whose faith is more "adolescent" in character. And vice versa.

July 10, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Do It Every Day

Perhaps the single most important piece of advice I ever got about writing came to me by accident. It was 10 or 11 years ago, and I was working as the tradebook manager for the Georgia State University Bookstore in downtown Atlanta. The tradebook department in a college bookstore is basically the general book (as opposed to textbook) section. My duties included selling books in the back of the room whenever an author or other dignitary spoke on campus. This particular night, the popular novelist E. Lynn Harris was on campus, and so I sold books for his booksigning. Sitting not ten feet away from him, I heard  him give this advice to a woman who came to see him, who mentioned that she was an aspiring author:

"Let me give you the same advice that Alice Walker once gave to me, before I ever got published. Write something every day. Something — even if it’s just a sentence or two!"

Although it wasn’t offered to me, I made a mental note anyway, being just as much an aspiring author as the woman to whom the advice was given. Ten books later, it remains not only the most helpful advice I ever received, but also the advice that I most frequently give out myself.

 Write something every day. If you’ve got time to brush your teeth or comb your hair, you’ve got time to put down a sentence or two. Of course, more is better, but it’s the same principle that fuels a successful meditation practice. Five minutes of meditation each day is better than a half hour sitting time once or twice a week. The reasoning behind this is obvious enough: the daily regimen creates a habit. Five minutes of daily meditation, faithfully practiced, eventually will yield a natural desire to sit for longer and longer periods of time. So it is with the writing. Get that daily sentence or two written, and eventually the impulse to write will extend far beyond the daily paragraph.

Hmmm. There are many ways in which a discipline of writing echoes a discipline of meditation. This little secret for how to create such disciplines is merely one such echo. 

July 9, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off

Ineffability

One of the salient characteristics of true mysticism is its ineffability. In other words, part of what puts the “mystic” into “mysticism” is the impossibility to truly capture the mystical experience, mystical perception, or mystical truth, within the impoverished limitations of language. Mysticism is, by definition, trans-lingual, just as it also trans-rational and trans-logical.

Why, then, have mystics down the ages sought to capture their experience in writing? From the desert fathers and Pseudo-Dionysius down to present-day contemplatives like Matta El Meskeen (who died last month at the age of 86), the heart of western mysticism has been the quest to wrap finite, human language around the infinite experience of encounter between the Divine and the mortal.

But if it’s impossible, then why does every generation yield new mystics, new contemplatives, new writers who embark on this impossible quest? I think the answer lies encoded in the very nature of the human spirit, particularly the creative or artistic impuse. It has been said (sorry, I can’t recall or locate the source) that an artist creates a new work of art because s/he was dissatisfied with their previous work. I think this is true for the mystic as well. No one has ever captured the mystical experience in words, obviously enough. But it does seem that a few geniuses (Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Plotinus) have scaled at least partway up the mountain. But as luminous and beautiful as every work of mystical genius may be, it’s always incomplete, partial, ultimately dissatisfying — not only to the writer, but to the student as well. So a mystic writes about the mystical life because he or she is not only dissatisfied with his or her own ability to recount the ineffable, but also dissatisfied with the incomplete nature of the tradition as a whole.
Entering the life of a spiritual writer is like being shown a mountain and then told, “No one has ever made it to the top, or at least has never  been able to talk about it if they have. And most are convinced that you either can’t get to the summit, or if you can, it’s impossible to share it with anyone else. In other words, by all earthy and human standards, if you set out on this quest you will most certainly fail. But here’s your equipment. You’re welcome to try.”

Why does the climber scale the mountain? Because it’s there. Why does the mystic immerse his or her life into the unspeakable mysteries of God, and then try, ever unsuccessfully, to describe that immersion to others? Because it’s there…

July 8, 2006 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off