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(<-- this guy does, too)
I could hardly believe my eyes as I sat in the official WiHW La-Z-Boy, sippin' my Sunday morning coffee and listening to the same Duke Ellington CD I've put on every morning this week (Blues in Orbit)...
it was the New York Times...an article about religion (a sure bet for me)...but it said: OK, there's this pastor of an evangelical mega-church. Gregory A. Boyd. And he's preaching stuff like this: "I am sorry to tell you that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ."
Oh, it gets worse. He drove away about 1ooo church members (a fifth of his congregation) when he could remain silent no longer about the idolatry rampant in the species of Christianity that not only obsesses itself with patriotism, but with "homosexuality, abortion" and the freakish notion that Christians in American are some kind of persecuted, endangered minority (though Pastor Boyd now has me seeing how this could be true--depending on how one defines "Christian").
He even said (can't you get excommunicated for this???): "America wasn't founded as a theocracy. America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn't bloody and barbaric. That's why our Constitution wisely put in separation of church and state."
In case you're thinking that this is one of those Kalibhakta pranks...here's the story.
Regular readers of this blog probably know that I'm a recovering Pentecostal who has been led by the Dark Mother Kali, of all deities, back to an appreciation and even a love for Christianity. Early in our relationship, Kali told me point-blank to climb off my religious pedestal and stop looking down on members of the faith I fled for many of the same reasons Pastor Boyd has bravely chosen to stay and fight.
Once I gave in [dramatically, as my friend Sophia would predict :) ]-- in Spain, in tears, on my knees in a cathedral before a statue of the Sorrowful Mary, Esperanza)...once I gave in, Kali immediately sent me a staggering surfeit of spiritual literature, all by Christians: Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Julian of Norwich (whom I'd read and even written about, but had never grokked in fulness), Simone Weil, Richard Rolle, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the incomparable Gabrielle Bossis, whose He and I is my favorite book ever about the spiritual path. [She probably wouldn't appreciate my saying this, but it's an HGA book par excellence.]
Kali even led me, Trickster that She Is, to...yes...I know it's frightening...the Bible. The para-biblical stuff you'd expect me to read, yes: the Nag Hammadi texts, the Pseudepigrapha (Enoch, in particular)...but also the plain, old, Hellman's mayo, canonical Bible. Biiiiiiible. Say it with me, children: Biiiiiiiiiiiiible. The book that, whether we admit it or not, inspires fear and loathing in liberals, pinkos, pagans, peaceniks, eggheads, crunchies, Greens, and lavenders. And one day, yea, as I perus'd this lately disdain'd tome, reading my least favorite of all its authors, "Paul" [he didn't write all they say he wrote], I came across verses that verily I remember'd from my sojourn amongst the brethren and cistern. Turn with me to the book of Second Corinthians, eleventh chapter and the thirteenth verse:
13: For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ.
14: And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.
15: Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.
Now, oddly enough, when I was a Christian they told me these verses referred to cults, New Agers, Hare Krishnas, the Antichrist, and Charles Manson. But--plainly as blood on white linen--they refer to "Christians" with lowly motives. And yea, when I read them a few months ago, seeing them afresh, I had the same, chilling thought Pastor Boyd might have had: this has happened. this is the church now. And this was the one time in my life I felt assured: I have read true Prophecy in the Bible. Thus, the "remnant," as we used to call that little band of true Christians that would survive in the end times, might be identified by its outrage at the faux amis who have found Caesar a more congenial master than Christ.
Grigorss said to me not long ago, "You are not someone who gets all sentimental about the past" ... speaking in this--way--that almost sounded like he meant that I was like, all cold an' shit. I knew what he meant (I think)...my whole life I've felt the urge to keep moving, keep growing, keep testing or criticizing myself and finding what doesn't work and then change it or drop it.
Laura even, in my big initiation with her, gave me a Sanskrit name related to this topic, based on something that a spiritual teacher of mine once said to the effect that, no matter how much of God we receive, there's always more and always more and always more and more...
so I keep moving on. (It's odd, then, that I'm a Taurus with very definite Taurean tendencies: I keep the same friends forever if we're truly close [me and Grigorss met in 1979--!!]; I hate to move; I can eat the same thing every day and really like it; I goof off every chance I get; I still have my first-grade yearbook and report cards and keep and genuinely treasure odd things like a rock Sophia gave me and a lamp I fell in love with when I was 3 [that post will come later...])
But there's a difference between treasuring something and wanting to stay in or return to the time it represents. Today I got an invitation to a Lammas ritual, and it brought me sweet and blessed memories of my time as a witch--the surprising, exhilarating rituals, the messages the Divine Mother would send me in dreams, in stars, in spiders...I thought back with love to my sister witches, women with whom I danced and drummed and unraveled mysteries of who we were and was there really a God, and could She be the same One, somehow, as the One depicted in the Old Testament? (We thought not.)
I don't want to go back, though, and it's possible that, were I to meet some of my co-pagans today, that we just wouldn't have much to talk about. Some of the basic ways in which we saw the world don't compute for me any more and, after a little while, the past stalls for me as conversational motor. When you're as enamored of evolution as I am, you end up being an ex-everything: ex-christian, ex-atheist, ex-buddhist, ex-witch, ex-Wilsonian agnostic metaprogrammer.
Sometimes I wonder, in love as I am with Kali and feeling in Her the first image of God that makes deep, intuitive and intellectual sense to me--is this, too, destined to end? And--Laura assures me that this thing, this fling with Her won't end...but always adds, "unless you want it to."
Well, I don't! I'd like to think I've evolved to the point that I can claim a stable spiritual identity, can stop searching outwardly and can turn the search inward, from evolution to involution...towards the dark moon. And so, on this Tuesday of the dark moon, a day especially sacred to Kali, I sit here listening to mid-1960s trash rock and writing this magic spell to bind my soul to my Dark Mother, to implore Her to take me into caverns and catacombs of Her fractal unfolding...but never away from Her. I know Kali is just another image representing undifferentiated Sat-Chit-Ananda, and that "undifferentiated Sat-Chit-Ananda" is just a set of sounds signifying unimaginable infinite Consciousness...etc., etc. ... but She's my true love. I love Her even more than my own spiritual growth.
This is a pseudo-post, on a pseudo-blog...you are having an unreal experience...
as am I...
or I feel that way--
having seemingly abandoned my online scribal avocation...but dammit, buying a house is a lot of damn work. In addition to work-work, which is underway again with a vengeance, after my idyllick June of irresposibility. And I'm finding ways to add chaos to the chaos, for that is my Way.
For example, I'm DJing on the local alternative radio station again, which, though time-consuming, is just pure bliss. I played "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies the other day, which most of the listeners (it's a pretty young crowd) will be too young to remember, and annouced it as "the national anthem of my generation." Just being there at the board, putting together an unexpected, nearly-random yet still sonically logical progression of tunes--is so wonderful. And those big old speakers blasting out "you're trying to say I'm crazy? when I went to your schools, your churches--"
[nota bene: I do also play music recorded in this millennium. quite a bit of it...tho at this moment my heart is in 1991...I'm listening to 8-Way Santa by Tad, one of the great lost albums, a mini-epic of rural pharmacological madness...]
I was supposed to be working on a 4th Step this weekend, but have partied instead...watching the Thief in the Night movies, reading various trivial magazines, drinkin' Rebel Yell, listenin' to Little Feat--this isn't "local color," this is my life, Mr. Hollywood Fancy Pants!!!! [ :) hi, grigorss.]... here in East Podunk, about to relocate to The Town So Ominously Country I Haven't Been Able to Contrive a Sarcastic Name for It Yet (my new house--I chose the one w/ the pool--is in the town where I work)...
so, I have not become an ex-blogger, just a desultory one. Laura and I work apace on the Paris plan...I read this hysterical (in all senses of the term) article in the NY Times about the Museé de Quai Branly and decided that it alone would be worth the trip...I'm insisting on a meal at Taillevent, Laura says "whatever," and we're looking at accommodations near Saint-Sulpice, not for the Da Vinci Code connection but because it's relatively cheap and it's close to lots of good stuff.
And that, mes amis, is the news from Lake Choronzonbegone, where the coffee is strong, the womyn are too, and the temperature is unseasonably below average (thank Goddess).
Hey--so don't you have this "angel"?
And isn't she supposed to give you wisdom and stuff?
So--when you're all worried about life sucking, doesn't she, like...tell you it's all alright and shit?
Ah, yes, Dear Reader--She does, my Angel, explain it All...tho not always in comforting terms...but Laura quoted today from Expecting Adam [buy this book NOW. if you already own it, buy another copy!] ...the episode where Martha Beck's then-husband John has a nightmare that encapsulates all the suffering of everyone everywhere, "fire, avalanches, and earthquakes, of horrible accidents he could see coming but had no power to prevent." At a certain point in the dream, he feels an angelic Presence close to him, and begins to talk to the angel about the horror he's witnessing.
"It isn't so horrible," the being says to him, "It depends on what you want to see."
What John sees at that moment is a terrible collision between two passenger planes, "raining twisted metal and fire and broken bodies on the ground...But when John looked more closely, he could see that every piece of wreckage was being transformed as it hit the ground. All the debris was recombining, slowly growing into an airport. The people who had been killed in the collision were walking through the new buildings, boarding the new planes."
The angel continues, "You see, they are going places they never could have reached before. It's not so bad, really. It's just that you don't understand how it works."
I take the "it" here to refer to the infinite chaotic interplay of matter and consciousness--too big for any mind to map and too likely, in the eyes of the ego, to appear as tragedy. But the giant fractal of life and death and rebirth could just as likely be neutral, or comic, or romantic...my Angel is as off-handed about "tragedy" as the one encountered by John, when she's not outright flippant about it. But She always guides me to some kind of wisdom (not all of it verbal/book learnin', but that's the only kind I can easily share here)...
Well, what's your angel's opinion on paying down a mortgage loan?
"It may seem the good schoolboy thing to do," she says, "but it will take nearly ten years for you to realize the difference. Those funds could be better applied to a trip to Paris."
I have clingy cats. They were separated from their mom at a very early age, as she had FIV. Because of this, my cats are very human-centered, and do unusual things like coming when they're called (or even whistled for). They don't like to be on their own, like a lot of cats; they want a person present whom they can cuddle with or boss around.
One of my cats (the black one, of course) does a magickal ritual to bring me home when I've left, and she even performs this ritual sometimes when I'm in my home office (into which no cats may enter--too much breakable stuff). The ritual consists of the kitty raiding a rather too-easily accessible sock drawer, obtaining a sock, and dragging it to the middle of my bedroom floor.
My kitty's ritual combines a couple of the most basic magical laws: the law of contagion (the sock is mine and thus psychically linked to me), and the law of evocation (using the right formula, the desired entity can be made to appear).
And ya know--from the cat's perspective, this ritual has worked every single time.
[Apologies to humble worm, who thought I was going to tell a story :)
I'm not good at telling stories...]
"I have seen this world as a great howl of pain, I have seen this world as a great ocean of blood..."
Lately I've been thinking a lot about suffering--more than just dead birds and bugs. I should be feeling good--several weeks ago, Teresa and I had the dreaded Conversation about me moving out, and strangely she took it very well. Still, her disease progresses and is scary to watch, and she is diagnosed with other, scarier diseases--yet, childishly, I don't know if it is for her or for me that I mourn when I see an emerald-green dead bird and scoop it off the sidewalk into my coffee cup, put it gently into a planter, on moist soil in the shade...
There's a line of "reasoning" that goes: A decent God would not allow innocent people to suffer. Innocent people suffer. Therefore, there is no God. This syllogism makes so many faulty assumptions, it's hard to know where to begin--so I won't, because it isn't my job here to teach logic to the logically challenged. There's another line of "reasoning" that goes: There is a God. People suffer. Therefore, God wants people to suffer because (it's all part of His plan; they deserve to suffer; they're destined to suffer; suffering is good for you; all of the above). This one makes even less sense than the first one, and both depend for their persuasive force (if any) upon the assumption that matter and spirit are starkly separate, even opposite, categories.
I remember how shocked I was to discover that mind and body, spirit and matter might not be "opposites." This singular cognition occurred 22 years ago due to two college classes, one concerning quantum mechanics and modern philosophy (yes, taught by a real, live physicist, in case members of the Truth Society are reading), and the other in anthropology of religion--we were studying the aboriginal Dream Time. It has taken me ever since to process the mere possibility that I might be a spiritual being having a human experience, that seemingly inert matter might have a conscious substrate, that the abstract truth might, after all, have something to do with what someone had or did not have for dinner.
What has been hardest for me to abandon from that patriarchal, either/or, flesh-damning charnel house of Truth (whether masquerading as Theology, Scientism, or New-ageyness)? Probably the reassurance it whispers: follow the rules, sacrifice your desires, and it will all be all right. The pain you feel is God's intention--you're being purified. Or--it's only neurons firing, grief, love, loss, suffering--merely mental, nothing more. Or--it's all an illusion, brought on by negative vibes.
Reunite spirit and matter and you come face to face with: shit happens.
You might deserve it (or you might not). It might make sense (but it probably won't). You might have been able to avoid it through proper planning and foresight (but don't bet on it). I guess the Grail knight answer lies somewhere between the triad of reductive follies mentioned above, and can be summed up in the (welcome) cliché Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. For me this saying has been a koan--the harder I've tried to wrap my mind around it, the more my mind has warped to fit. Sometimes... I almost believe.
In the morning: watching my black kitty "play" with a white moth...she's killing it, of course, killing it slowly as its tiny moth ganglia jam up with survival/flight responses, the ancestors of fear. I used to rescue bugs, slugs, and spiders from the cats, and still usually try to save the latter two (slugs are nasty when squished, and I like spiders), but the law of the jungle prevails more and more in the shadow'd halls of the Temple of Doom, as I admit to myself that even bugs make choices and even kitties create karma that they and only they can deal with...even kitties have True Wills, and a cat can't be a cat without killing (pace the Dalai Lama).
[Don't fear, Dear Reader; were I to chance upon you beset by ruffians, I would do all in my power to effect your safe escape...which makes me speciesist, I guess...]
Later that morning: I'm at my alma mater for a professional development workshop, I'm there early, eating in the cafeteria whose glass walls look out onto a garden patio. Thinking about my killer kitty, I can see birds swooping down on bugs, and groundskeepers and custodians preyed upon by the American economy... who/what am I preying upon w/ my blueberry bagel, chocolate pudding, coffee? Juan Valdez, no doubt, still searching for his desaparecida daughter...milk from a cow imprisoned in some hellish factory farm...
...fondly remembering (even as I drink it) this bitter coffee that propelled me so many mornings to academic glory, my radio show, assignations with the Goddess in library stacks or Wiccan circles or greening boughs scattering light and shadow across the bricks of my future...the coffee's awkward bite like a solecism on the lips of one beloved: wrong but in completely the right way.
Going out the door I find an emerald-winged and ermine-throated, very dead bird on the sidewalk, sped towards his future by who knows what predation, finding its fulfillment in false trees and sky of the building's glass facade.
(<-- this guy does, too) 
