It should be enough for the rest of your workday, or for your festive gathering tonight.

Beannachtaí na Féile!

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We know him as St Ciarán of Saighir, one of Ireland’s earliest Christians. It is said that he met St Patrick in Rome. Sensing a kind of saintly outlandishness in him, Patrick gave him a hand-bell, telling him to go home and set up a monastery wherever it rang unrung. It rang, unrung, in a wilderness scarce in everything except savagery.

Reverent remembrance, already old in the eighth century, loves his story:

The blessed Ciarán took up his habitation like a hermit in the waste, for all about was a waste and tangled woodland. He began to build his little cell of mean stuff, and that was the beginning of his monastery. Afterwards a settlement grew up by God’s gift and the grace of the holy Ciarán. And all these have the one name, Seir.

Now when he came there he sat down under a tree in the shade of which was a boar of savage aspect. The boar seeing a man for the first time fled in terror, but afterwards, being tamed by God, it returned like a servant to the man of God. And that boar was Ciarán’s first disciple and served him like a monk in that place. For the boar immediately fell to before the eyes of the man of God and with his teeth stoutly severed branches and grasses to serve for the building of the cell. For there was none with the holy man of God in that place. For he had fled to the waste from his own disciples. Then came other animals from the lairs of the waste to the holy Ciaran, a fox, a badger, a wolf and a stag. And they abode with him as tame as could be. For they followed the commands of the holy man in all things like monks.

One day the fox, being more subtle and full of guile than the rest, stole the slippers of the abbot, the holy Ciarán, and turning false to his vow carried them off to his old earth in the waste, designing to devour them there. And when the holy Ciarán knew of this, he sent another monk or disciple, the badger, to follow the fox into the waste and to bring his brother back to his obedience. So the badger, who knew the ways of the woods, immediately obeyed the command of his elder and went straight to the earth of Brother Fox. He found him intent on eating his lord’s slippers, so he bit off his ears and his brush and tore out his hairs. And then he constrained him to accompany him to his monastery that there he might do penance for his theft. So the fox, yielding to force, came back with the badger to his own cell to the holy Ciarán, bringing the slippers still uneaten. And the holy man said to the fox: “Wherefore, brother, hast thou done this evil thing, unworthy of a monk? Behold! Our water is sweet and common to all. And if thou hadst a desire of thy natural craving to eat flesh, the omnipotent God would have made thee flesh of the bark of trees at our prayer.” Then the fox, craving forgiveness, did penance fasting, and ate nothing until the holy man commanded. Then he abode with the rest in familiar converse.

Afterwards his own disciples and many others from every side gathered about the holy Ciarán in that place; and there a famous monastery was begun. But the tame creatures aforesaid abode there all his life, for the holy elder had pleasure to see them.

What a charming end to our battle with the Beast in ourselves and in the world! Ciarán and badger and boar and fox and stag and wolf singing matins together in a little thatched church in the wilderness, its door antler high and wide to nature inside and outside us:

Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei, et opera manuum ejus annuntiat firmamentum.

Singing lauds together:

Cantate Domino canticum novum, cantate Domino omnis terra. Cantate Domino, et benedicite nomini ejus: annunciate de die in diem salutare ejus. Annunciate inter gentes gloriam ejus, in omnibus popules mirabilia ejus...

Singing nones together:

Jubilate Deo omnis terra: servite Domino in laetitia. Introite in conspectu ejus, in exultatione.

Singing vespers together:

In ilia die stillabunt montes dulcedinem et colles fluent lac et mel, alleluia, Euouae.

It must be that Ciarán was at ease with animal nature in himself, else the boar-brutal, fox-vicious, stag-shy animals of the wilderness wouldn’t have been so happy to sing Nunc Dimittis, bringing compline to an end, with him:

Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace, quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum, quod parasti ante faciem omnium populorum, lumen ad revelationem gentium et gloriam plebis tuae, Israel.

Bethlehem and Saighir or, as it is phonetically rendered in the text, Seir.

Over the centuries, Christians have become used to Bethlehem, to the idea of two domesticated animals, an ox and an ass, breathing warmth on a wonder-child lying in their manger.

But what of Seir? What of two savage animals, a wolf and a boar, what of them singing matins? What of them, before they go back to their monastic cells at night, singing Simeon’s Song of Salvation:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

A wolf! With predatory eyes! Breaking off from the hunt and seeing salvation — with those eyes?

Is this the messianic outcome of history and of creation as the Bible foresees it?

Is it that, here in Seir, Ciarán and the animals are already living that outcome?

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb...

The lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp and the weaned child shall put his hand in the cockatrice’s den.

There will be no hurt on God’s holy mountain.

A sense I have is that there is something quite different going on in Seir.

The sense I have of him is that Ciarán is a Christian Orpheus.

In his nature, in all of it, not just in part of it, he has emerged into the Orphic note and that is why the animals, savage like the boar and shy like the stag, are happy to sing it with him.

Not that it is all Orphic plain sailing in Seir.

When it does eventually happen, the regression, while comic, is serious, especially so in the case of the badger.

One day there it was, another bowl of vegetable soup set before the fox. Looking down into it, his mouth wearied and watered for flesh, for bleeding, hot raw flesh deep as his teeth. In his mind he had a hare in sight, his nostrils drinking her smell. Mightily he resisted the impulse and soon again he was calm, the soup, as it so often did, tasting like penance. Next day, passing his cell door, he saw that the abbot had left his slippers outside to dry in the sun. Thinking that he might find the taste of hide in the leather, he yielded to his instincts and made off with them and before he knew what was what he was back to his old ways in his old earth in the wood.

No sooner had the badger entered the earth than he too regressed, turning snarlingly savage, biting off the fox’s ears, biting off his tail, tearing the fur from shoulder and belly. Never, during all those years in the wild, had he fought as ferociously as he did now, in the interest, seemingly, of monastic law and order.

So what then of the Orphic note? Does it exist? And if it does, are there people who in their very being become it? Is it immanent in all of nature, in rocks, in animals, in stars? Is the universe but a blossoming of it? Is it an astronomical exuberance of it? Is it the eternal divine silence in its adventure into sound that we are talking about? Is that what the Orphic note is, the sound of the eternal divine silence, that sound solid in rocks, stellar in stars? And when someone reverts from sound to silence, will wolf and badger and boar and fox and stag, as by impulsion from an awakened instinct that lessens established instincts, will they turn on their trails, following what is now their chief desire, to be sym-phonic with it?

To be symphonic with it in Ciarán of Seir is to be symphonic with it in themselves. In Seir, to be symphonic with it as sound is to be symphonic with it as silence. The boar and the stag who were symphonic with it as sound at matins, at lauds, at nones, at vespers and at compline, were symphonic and maybe homeophonic with it as the eternal divine silence.

It should be remembered as a great day — the day a handbell rang unrung in Ireland.

And Seir? Seir is the bindu, the centre of the mandala, the place of universal emergence and return.

And Ciarán? As Ogma once was, Ciarán is now the philosophical question. To understand him is ultimate understanding of all things.

In Ireland, St Ciarán’s Christianity preceded the Christianity of St Patrick. Isn’t it time we gave it precedence in other than a temporal sense? In this of course, even in thinking about it, we must remember that it was Patrick who gave the hand-bell to Ciarán, and so, in fairness, the question of precedence must remain undecided. What is important is that, having been a founding bell, the hand-bell could be the bell of refounding.

Christianity isn’t only a morality that has its source in divine command.

As well as so much else that it presumably was, at Seir Christianity was the lived apprehension of unity in plurality out of which an ecumenical morality prospered. Ecumenical not just among human beings of different persuasions and languages. Ecumenical across all boundaries, among all species living and extinct, among all worlds visible and invisible.

And as for what happened to Brother Fox and Brother Badger, well, yes, it happens to individuals, it happens to tribes, it happens to civilizations and we only have to look at the one we live in to know that it happens to worlds.

As Christ born on the bestial floor does, as Christ in the Canyon does, Ciarán of Saighir suits our world.

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My religious readers will likely appreciate the first part and excoriate me for the second. My non-religious readers will be friendlier; they will skim the first part, and possibly enjoy the second, though they will wish it were said more simply. Shout out to the heretics of both parties who will read and think, “Interesting.”

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Part One

In trying to articulate a sexual morality, both for the sake of offering counsel to others and for the sake of clarifying and strengthening my own convictions, I have often resorted to this metaphor: sex is a language with which we can either tell the truth, or lie.

There are high points in sexual experience as there are in the experience of language. Often we go through our days having functional linguistic interactions with other people, but then there are also the times when language, brought somehow into relief, standing out against surrounding world of apparently mere things, brought intimately within the fire of a heart, itself catches fire and, passing between us, can enflame the hearts of our hearers. It becomes, rather than an instrument of commerce, a transmission of wakefulness of spirit, of the mind’s and soul’s life. Sometimes it is the whole life of the writer that does this, when the writer can summon the ordinary light of words into a burning focal point. Sometimes it happens seemingly by grace in the words of an “ordinary” and unstudied person, under the pressure of enormous feeling, tragedy, overpowering love or care. In a way, the great treasures of oral literature, which I know mostly through the old English and Scottish ballad tradition, are this grace incarnate in the life of a people (my people).

I think when this happens, we tell the truth.

Perhaps I am naive, or revealing my philosophical ineptitude, but I can’t in the end conceive of truth as expressed in the word I speak as some mere correlation of thought and reality, in the mode of a card describing the species of the dead insect to which it is attached.

True words are words of fire that spread from heart to heart. If the logos is indeed the Logos, this is the fire that He has come to cast on the earth, that He would were already kindled. This is the fire that He had already begun to cast on the earth through the tongue of Adam when he gave Adam the gift, grace, and labor of naming the animals. We latter-day revert animists should reflect that Adam’s naming of “animals” really means his naming of everything, because everything is animate. And this “naming” means, not a mere placeholder in a linguistic game — it means offering the presence of the named a home, inviting the presence of the named not merely into being, but into life (and this is why the history of Israel really begins, in a certain sense, with Moses’ encounter with the Burning Bush where God names Himself).

This naming, this primordial telling, this primordial “Godspell,” “good word,” is really an action as radical as the creation itself, I might dare to say. God’s word gives being; man’s naming sets that being alight in the heart of the world.

None of the “things” had God’s own breath. This breath of life was given to man. Man’s vocation is to enkindle things with that fiery breath. Where the first Adam finally failed, the second Adam succeeded. This is Pentecost. This is why the Gospel is true, not finally because it contains factually correct propositions about physical and metaphysical reality, but because it is a gateway into the life of a world set aflame, that is, into true life. This is also why the Gospel word does indeed finally sit in judgment on Christian history and Christian community, indeed on the whole world (cf St John 12:48) — not, of course, in the way fundamentalists understand it, the fire of whose “truth” has been extinguished in a trivial facticity.

So this is the feeling of “truth” and “truth-telling” that I have in mind when I say that sex is a language in which we can either tell the truth, or lie. Because of course, the other great mystery of language happens in Genesis after the Logos has enlisted Adam in the fundamental human task, of naming (enlivening, revealing, kindling, presencing) the logoi of created things. That is, the Adversary uses language to lie, and teaches us to use language to lie. The naming of things that was given us as a way to be God’s co-workers in giving life to the world, becomes a dying and an intended transmission of death, that is, murder. See the direct connection:

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it (St John 8:44).

In the enkindling moment of sex as truth-telling, we mean with our hearts the actions of our bodies. We “name” the beloved; we intend to transmit life. My Roman Catholic readers will immediately and joyfully seize on that last sentence for the purpose of upholding the traditional teaching against contraception, but this is not what I intend, nor will I go down that rabbit hole here. The transmission of life I intend here is not procreation. It is the most fundamental affirmation of the beloved, it is the overflowing of a heart that wills the beloved not merely to be but to live. And if it wills that the beloved live, it wills finally that the beloved live forever. It wills that the beloved possess not merely a passing life but an eternal life, not merely a moment of joy but the fullness of joy. In personalist terms, it affirms the value of the beloved, it is a sursum corda, it is the elevation of the Host. I trust that I am not far afield from the deep tradition to make sex very explicitly and directly Eucharistic in this way.

It follows from this, that if this is sex as truth-telling, much traditional sexual morality falls into place not as some alien nomos imposed on us from “above,” but as the manifest and obvious integrity of a reality that is open to the experience and reflection of every human being, believer or unbeliever. If we will the eternal life and eternal joy of the beloved, if this is the meaning of the word that we speak through and in sex (and I invite you to remember and reflect on your own greatest experiences of sexual ecstasy here, even if you may see them as lies or betrayals in hindsight), how could we be speaking truly unless the whole life environing this act were congruent with that will?

What does such a life look like? It looks to me like exclusivity, fidelity, devotion, all the patient and painstaking adjustments required for those; it looks like a death to self in so many ways — of course, the kind of death to self that is an entrance into life, not an entrance into destruction (St Matthew 16:25). But it does not have the pained feeling of “sacrifice” as that word has decayed in our usual speaking. It is a “sacrifice” in the literal etymology of the word, a making holy, a doing of the holy — the holy being above all (and in the end, only?) the reception and transmission of the Spirit of Life to the beloved. The life of sexual truth looks like marriage.

Now let me move on to the counterpoint, because I am concerned here to excavate my heart, indeed, to tell the truth, and I have said only half the truth.

So let’s talk about Wilhelm Reich for a moment.

Part Two

Reich’s early life was shaped by the dysfunction of his parents’ marriage. His violent, rigid, and authoritarian father would berate and abuse Reich’s mother for her alleged infidelities, whether he imagined these were actually consummated or merely contemplated. At the same time, Reich’s father (as Reich discovered when still quite young) struggled with promiscuous desires — indeed it seems that in the beginning at least, his accusations against his wife were pure projection. In the end, this dismal pattern of abuse and dishonesty culminated in the actual infidelity of Reich’s mother with his beloved tutor, the father’s discovery of this infidelity, and his mother’s subsequent suicide (though it is unclear whether this was an actual suicide, or death from complications after a botched abortion).

This childhood experience lay at the root of Reich’s lifelong effort to identify and heal the sexual repression that he came to believe lay at the root of so much (perhaps all) human misery — the repression that produced authoritarian, “armored” personalities and bodies and families and societies, that blocked human beings from the spontaneous and joyful experience of and engagement with incarnate life (“orgastic potency,” not limited of course to its genital expression). He referred to this negative transmission in his later writings, where psychoanalysis and radical social theory gave way to vitalist metaphysical speculation, as “the emotional plague.”

I can’t help but imagine the violence and repression of his turn-of-the-century central European, assimilating Jewish household, with its whole weight of half-rejected tradition and bourgeois status-seeking, and ask: what if his parents could have been honest with each other about their desires? Is it really true that the erotic desires we experience that overflow the banks of conventional sexual morality, as it is experienced and enacted in a coercive social code, are “lies”? Is it really true that the affirmation of the other and of the self that we experience in the entire life of erotic attraction — from its first revelation to its consummation, whether or not that ever occurs — must imply lifelong fidelity and exclusivity?

Let me attempt to express why it might not be. I will take the risk of some personal honesty here — not that this whole piece has not been intended to be honest.

First, something phenomenological. I experience the ebb and flow of vital enthusiasm in my life across all domains — practical, social, aesthetic, religious, intellectual — as being intimately linked with whatever might be my concurrent experience of the intensity of sexual eros. I have taken to referring to this as my “Matthew 5:28” problem. (I could get into a detailed linguistic exegesis of the verse in question, but first, I am more concerned with the verse as it is typically understood than with excavating some “original meaning”; and second, such excavations typically strike me as disingenuous, in much the same way that “historical Jesus” quests seem to end up reflecting the investigator’s own face from the bottom of the well, as Albert Schweitzer observed.)

A “problem,” as Hans Jonas observes, is “the collision between a comprehensive view and a particular fact.” The “comprehensive view” is the total mythical, religious, philosophical, and moral view of human sexuality (indeed, of cosmic and divine life as a whole) expressed in the first half of this essay. The “particular fact” is that when I permit the free flow of eros, eros violates the norms commended to me by the reflections above (and the norm apparently presented by Jesus in Matthew 5:28); and on the contrary, when I contain or restrict the free flow of eros, it is not merely eros in its limited dimension of appetitively experienced sexual aliveness that is contained — aliveness across the entire spectrum of my life is dulled, dampened, and turned off. I die a little. Or a lot.

Essentially, when I am open to sexual perception, interest, and desire across the board, I am more alive in every department of life, more engaged, more excited, more energetic, more perceptive, more hungry. When my sexual aliveness is dampened, I am less interested in being alive. I take this as a clue that the fundamental vital force, drawing no distinctions between spiritual and psychic and biophysical, is inescapably sexual in its roots, whatever else it may also be.

I love being aware of beautiful women for this reason. When my life is “lit,” I experience physical desire when I am aware of a beautiful woman, but I experience far more than physical desire; that desire is an index of the extent to which my psychospiritual organism is a sensitive receptor for a universal energy that then separates prismatically into creative power in a myriad of forms — as many as I can acquire the skill to express. It is raw fuel for life. When I write well, eros is the fuel. When I crush the free flow of eros, I crush my ability to write, to create, to love, to be tender, to appreciate even apparently non-erotic beauty, to be patient with my child, to pursue my own health, to give gifts, to work well. I lose my entire “appetite.”

It fell upon a holy day, / As many in the year, / Musgrave to the church did go, / To see fine ladies there.

I remember visiting the Barnes in Philadelphia with a new lover, and seeing for the first time the canvases of van Gogh’s human, all-too-human characters — such as this provincial French postman whose homeliness is so tenderly portrayed that I could only stand and weep. I could weep because my lover’s body, my desire for her body, had awoken me. (Please visit the Barnes if you are in Philadelphia — it is a revelation. Even better, visit it with a new lover.)

Desire and tenderness are not opposed; desire is the root of tenderness, even if it can be perverted and twisted.

The presence or absence of my “Matthew 5:28” problem is an effective gauge for whether or not I am truly living or just going through the motions. There is much, of course, to be said for going through the motions. But I do not believe that we should aim at merely going through the motions. I think we should aim at being lit, being alive.

“The glory of God is a man fully alive.” Of course St Irenaeus was not thinking of a man, for example, whose entire psychospiritual system is responsive to the flow of eros in the presence of a beautiful woman. But he should have been.

It is not apparent to me that sexuality exercised outside the confines of marriage must fail in “speaking” truthfully about this eros. By “outside the confines of marriage” I mean — sexuality exercised without a promise, explicit or implicit, of permanence, fidelity, or exclusivity.

In this realm, a sexuality that speaks the truth about the value of the sexual other is a sexuality that speaks a vital, present, and existential truth about the other’s presence within, and transmission of, the flow of universal eros, of the vital life energy that feeds us in every endeavor and experience of our lives. Sex then becomes a mutual celebration not of some half-known, intuited inwardness raised to an effectively disembodied spiritual realm, where the other is perceived and received as an immortal, almost as an idea; it becomes a mutual celebration within time of something that is itself alive, dynamic, and changing, something that is itself in coming and going; something that can come and go in one form, and come and go in another form; a dance that can be danced with many partners.

Is there a reason why that mutual celebration cannot be something that is more or less transient? Even without consummating it, I have experienced this transience and this celebration. In all frankness — my life has from time to time been enriched profoundly by the erotic presence of women with whom I had no formal relationship of any kind, and certainly no commitment whatsoever, sometimes not even friendship — sometimes not even real acquaintance. And yet for a season, they occupied a place in my erotic imagination and energy flow that enlivened me dramatically, that invisibly and secretly fed my inspiration in my entire engagement with life. Indeed I owe periods of spiritual renewal and advancement, in mysterious ways, to some of these muses. I daresay much of the wealth of the world’s culture is owed exactly to this erotic influence of women on men, utterly distinct from any formal or explicit relationship they may have.

I will say further simply that I know this is true not only for me, and not only for men. Here there is scope for the actual valorization of animal vital energy without descent into bestiality — a valorization that, I note, the tradition is painfully unable to provide. This frame permits me to say yes to that animal vital energy without devolving into an impersonalism. I can celebrate animal desire as such, without becoming a beast.

The Christian tradition is classically hostile to imagination across the board — a tendency which reaches its apotheosis in certain 19th century Russian ascetic writers such as St Theophan the Recluse and St Ignatius Brianchaninov. How much more hostile it is to the explicitly erotic imagination (here its mercilessness borders on sadistic mania)! There are various figures, including many in the “re-enchantment” camp, who, following the Romantic trail, attempt a retrieval of imagination: but what religious man will now attempt a retrieval of the erotic imagination? Yet I will say — the erotic imagination, distinct from degradation and cruelty and perversion, is an index of the life of our soul and body. It is not something that should be suppressed; it is something that should be cultivated, educated, catechized.

What if Wilhelm Reich’s parents could have engaged with the erotic imagination that so evidently tormented them, with transparency and honesty and without shame? What shame should there or could there fundamentally be regarding this erotic imagination that is simply the index of our entire receptivity as “living souls” to the vital energy of the cosmos, that force that through the green fuse drives the flower? Is it really to be desired that, ostensibly for the sake of defending an objective “truth” about erotic and sexual communion, we lie and hide our desires, even from those with whom we supposedly share our deepest life? What is this, and where does it lead?

So, cruelty and degradation and perversion: where do they come from? If marriage and erotic communion outside marriage both find their dignity in genuine regard for the sexual other — either regard for their person, for their spirit, contemplated, valued, and loved in the light of eternity; or regard for their participation in and transmission of the universal vital energy within their incarnate finitudes of season, time, and space — then what turns either use of the “language” of sex into a lie rather than the expression of truth is simply the denial of the other in either of these manifestations. In the case of marriage, the denial that the other is a person known and loved by God. In the case of non-marital sexuality, the denial that the other, like myself, is not a machine or a puppet, but a freely dancing eddy in the vast cosmic field of energy, that now unites, and now parts; that now is superposed on another wave, that now breaks and ebbs back into the ocean to seek its next return to the shore.

It may seem to pose a greater risk to truthfulness, a greater temptation towards the lie, to valorize sex outside the structure of marriage — but married sexuality can itself become a great temptation to lie against the truth of eros, to seek death rather than life, as is endlessly attested in both literature and folk culture. Marriage does not by itself confer safety and security against the temptation of erotic untruth, however much foolish humans may perennially confound rule with integrity. And of course, likewise, the mere presence of erotic aliveness in a sexual encounter does not confer safety from a self-seeking that fails to recognize the other as a person bearing a gift, and not a thing to be exploited.

I think that what we want — what I want — is, in all honesty, not one or the other of these, but both of them. We want marriage, but we also want the sexual life of lovers meeting for the first time; where our mutual desire is not spiritualized as the service to some greater thing than the presence of the living, fiery universal vital energy that is between us here and now.

The whole question is whether we can have both — and how. Speaking personally, I am not satisfied with an answer that denies either. Denying marriage is tantamount to denying God; denying free eros is tantamount to denying life. I negate the negations.

Epilogue

Then there is the pragmatic reality within which all this is occurring, which is that although eros has the dimension of an encounter between two subjects, it is also generative not just in the sense of giving subjective life to those subjects; it is generative in the sense of giving life to new subjects. Those new subjects are themselves the proper objects of moral concern on the part of their parents, which is to state the obvious: that family and children’s welfare is implicated in sex. (And also, incidentally, since women bear intrinsically so much of the burden related to childbirth and child-rearing, women’s welfare is also implicated in a way that calls for explicit recognition.)

However, it is a wholly different matter to say, “Children’s welfare is best served by deep, exclusive, and permanent pair bonding,” and to say, “The primacy and preferability of deep, exclusive, and permanent pair bonding as a context for sex can be drawn from neutral phenomenological observation of human life.” The latter is the religious claim, and the former is no longer a religious, but merely a practical claim that admits in theory of other solutions. That our present cultural situation, confused and taking neither position with consistency and seriousness, is a terrible mess, is itself also an accident; after the dissolution of our traditional patterns, other patterns may arise (which I note will not necessarily be any repetition of anything ever before elaborated by a human culture; new things happen). Some of these patterns might be quite functional, or better than functional. But in the meantime, we are not there; we are here.

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I recently returned to the Desert Fathers after a long absence. It was a trajectory that drew me back into a very simple-hearted faith. I had an insight into the reality of God’s providence in my life, over and against all theological speculation; I felt where God had been with me even in my failures, bringing great good out of them. I stepped back from my usual reading into the simpler things that some part of me knows are close to the “one thing needful” — the Psalms, St John of Kronstadt’s My Life In Christ, the Discourses of Abba Dorotheos of Gaza, and then back to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

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If you don’t know these, they’re the record, treasured by Orthodox and Catholic monastics and layfolk for nearly 2,000 years, of the brief teachings, in word and deed, of the first ascetics who fled Christianity’s “success” in the third and fourth centuries and went to live in the wilderness. The age of martyrdom was over, and the Spirit inspired men and women to find a new way of living out the Gospel’s impossibly radical demands in solitude and spiritual warfare in the remote deserts of Egypt and Syria. You must read them to get a taste of them; it might revise your whole opinion of what Christianity is.

Some call these sayings Christian koans, but they are not that; they are too saturated in Christian caritas. By turns, they shock with revulsion and with the recognition of undeniable truth manifested in a superhuman love that reveals precisely what it ought to mean to be human — what we have sunk beneath. They convict, they offend, they set the heart on fire. Perhaps they are the most direct existential evidence of the perfect continuity between the Gospel and the ancient church. And since they remain the foundation of Orthodox monasticism and piety, a concentrated expression of the fragrance that permeates the whole of Orthodox spiritual life, they are evidence (to the one whose heart is open to it) that the Orthodox Church lives in direct spiritual continuity with the Gospel and the desert. This evidence precedes and exceeds all doctrinal disputation and in a way renders it irrelevant. There is a golden thread connecting the Gospel, the Desert Fathers, the saints of Russia’s “northern Thebaid,” the triumph of the New Martyrs, and the teaching of contemporary saints.

OK, that was my encomium to the Desert Fathers and to all the ascetic saints of Orthodoxy. (See, I am not just a hater: I love my Church.) Now comes the difficult part.

I want to be as honest and straightforward as I can be.

As I started to assemble a reading list for myself, I remembered St John Cassian, the man who more than any other transmitted desert spirituality and monastic life to the west (he was born more than a century before St Benedict). In browsing his Institutes, I came upon the (in)famous sixth chapter, which the bashful Victorian editors of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series declined to translate. A sample:

When the thought of the feminine sex first creeps up on our mind through the subtle suggestions of the crafty demon, beginning with the recollection of our mother, sisters, relatives or of certain pious women, we should hasten to drive it out of our inner being. If we were to linger over it, the tempter might take the occasion to make us gradually think of other women and so introduce evil thoughts. That is why we must carefully remember this precept: “Guard your heart with all vigilance.” We should observe according to God’s chief commandment the deadly head of the serpent. It is the principle of evil thoughts, by which the devil tries to creep into our soul. Nor should we negligently allow the rest of his body to penetrate into our heart, that is, by assenting to temptation. If allowed in, it will doubtless destroy the captive mind with its virulent bite.

(What follows is a transparent expression of my visceral reaction to this world of ascetic “piety.” I suspect that many ascetics would have expressed themselves in similar terms if they were honest about their reactions to sex, but few — Tertullian was one, perhaps — would be so straightforward.)

I despair of specifying all the ways in which I find this teaching so profoundly, monstrously perverted (later, St John spends some time discussing how often a monk might have a nocturnal emission without its indicating something amiss in his spiritual life — apparently two months is a good heuristic). I find it so in itself, though really, it’s none of my business and not my concern (except inasmuch as this culture of renunciation still seems to bear such evil fruit in the life of the Church, particularly since the Church is literally ruled by monastics — bishops in the Orthodox Church are monks). It’s a conversation monastics are having with each other about the difficulties of the strange way they’ve chosen to live. It feels like a technical discussion about spaceflight being carried on by professional astronauts, except much less heroic and interesting.

Sex is problematic. Everyone can agree.

If you’re trying to be celibate, it’s problematic because you want it and you’re not letting yourself have it. This is actually an extremely simple problem. Not easy, but simple.

If you’re married, it’s potentially problematic for a whole host of other, far more complicated and difficult reasons — perhaps because you want to have sex with people other than your partner or your partner wants to have sex with other people than you (or both); perhaps because you have “impermissible” or troubling sexual fantasies of various kinds; perhaps because you and your partner have mismatched sex drives; perhaps because neither of you wants sex with the other enough; perhaps because you want it but circumstances (work, health, children) make it difficult; perhaps because you have practical or psychological reasons to fear childbirth and child-rearing.

If you’re not married or otherwise partnered, it’s problematic even if you don’t have moral qualms about casual sex, because you very likely want more of it than you can get, or want it with people who don’t reciprocate your desire, or want sex within a committed relationship and for one reason or another can’t make one happen.

Sex is very literally a hot mess. I always laugh at the celibates who imagine that the only problems come from the fact that we non-celibates want sex too much. Believe me, I want to tell them, the problems for married people are generally much more about not wanting it enough. But this is a symptom of the entire issue that I want to bring to light here. This touches on the global way in which religion and spiritual life are presented to us by a Church whose piety and praxis have been wholly formed by celibates.

When it comes to teaching on sex — and I mean specifically teaching on sex, not on marriage — the teachers held up by the Church as the normative guides to spiritual life, the ones who are supposed to instruct us in what it means to “work out our salvation,” have nothing positive to say. Why? Because all of them are celibates, that is, because all of them have chosen a particular strategy with regard to the character of sex as a “hot mess” — they’ve renounced it. What a gloriously simple solution! All the complexity is gone with that No. All the work is gone, apart from a perpetual, lifelong effort to subdue and sublimate, a perpetual, singular struggle with a secret temptation.

Do I find that effort impressive? I do not. In an adult, I find it autistic and lazy. It is “impressive” in the way a man-child’s collection of Star Wars memorabilia is impressive. “Astounding — you’ve succeeded in a pointless task that required a yearslong, unflagging effort not to feel the direct and indirect self-harm you’ve inflicted by your avoidance of real life.”

Is it indeed pointless, this lifelong rejection of sex? Well, in itself, what is the point, please tell me? Whatever inward achievements of soul might occur, they’ve occurred at the cost of cutting off communion of the most fundamental kind with other human beings and the world. In itself, what is the point — what does it achieve? There is no way to answer this except to claim that sex in itself is an evil and an imperfection. Now certainly as I said quite clearly above, sex is surrounded with all kinds of complications and dreadful difficulties. So is agriculture. So is painting and writing poetry. So is childrearing. So is architecture, so is actual conflict resolution, so is urban planning. So is the entire actual life of human beings in the world.

We are surrounded by a “cloud of witnesses” who, whatever their protestations, whatever the post hoc theology, pursued a way of life whose fundamental strategy was avoidance and rejection of sex, and whose whole praxis surrounding sex consists of managing an imperious drive which they refused. They were generally obsessed with sex far more than non-celibates. It is the perpetual unspoken secret subtext of the life-way that they offer. And they invite us to share it — by proposing all sorts of ways in which we worldlings too might share in their silent self-torment: even if not absolutely, since we do indulge from time to time, then at least partially. They cast their veil over our hearts. We accept them as spiritual teachers, and they become not the servants of our joy but the masters of our self-doubt.

Now: if only I could simply remove this part of their teaching and praxis, and take the rest! If only I could listen, for example, to their teaching on humility… but wait a moment. In the Discourses of Dorotheos of Gaza, the saint tells us that

Before anything else we need humility: a being ready to listen whenever a word is spoken to us, and to say, “I submit.”

Here, the same ascetic simplification is at work that is at work in the complete renunciation of sex. Rather than participate in a generative, fruitful, delightful, painful, confusing, confounding, infinitely complex and infinitely rich reality that demands our utmost attention and discernment and constant, laborious learning — that is, rather than participate in dialogue and relationship with other human beings — we are to hear, and submit. The saint’s solution to the vast, thoroughly intractable reality of relationship is to find a way to make ourselves not exist.

What cowardice, masquerading as virtue!

How can I take this submission as a rule in a world where I have jobs to do — jobs, by the way, that I believe God gave me, and that I embrace joyfully? What would it mean to “submit” when a word is spoken to me (screamed at me?) by a child having a tantrum, or by a subordinate who is shirking the work he needs to do for the team to reach its goals, or by a soldier whose carelessness is putting the platoon in mortal danger? Or, for that matter, to submit when the world — including perhaps members of my own family — wants to pull me away from an artistic endeavor to which the depth of my soul calls me, so that I can sweat my life away in manual labor?

Follow this problem out through the entire self-effacing “morality” that is proposed to us by the monastic asceticism that has sexual renunciation as its root and its “glory.” It is a morality that solves every problem of real-life aspiration, difficulty, and responsibility by counseling that we cease to exist. I think this is an autistic way of understanding the Lord’s saying that we should take up our Cross, that we should lay down our life for our brother, that we should lose our life in order to find it in Him. It represents a kind of adolescent narcissism and a refusal of human maturity.

In the end, it is predicated on fear and despair: I can’t do it, so I won’t try. The heroic and human attitude is, I may not be able to do it, but I will die trying.

This, by the way, is love greater than fear. A love that ventures, instead of refusing everything that seems impossible (such as grappling with the hot mess of sex rather than escaping it by refusing it completely) and hiding away in self-effacement — a self-effacement that so often ends up being just a thin layer on top of resentment, and a resentment that often ends up silently becoming a self-justification for genuinely evil and perverse acts.

An even deeper problem is that this entire issue cuts into the very reverence I have for the Church itself. I’ve written a great deal about the love I have for the saints, and how this love is the first tie that binds me to the Church. Well: this cloud of witnesses is almost entirely comprised of monks and nuns. Early on, and in terrible times under the yokes of Islam and godless Communism, it was also comprised of martyrs, and scattered here and there are some pious kings and queens, a few warriors, and, thanks be to God, a small handful of normal layfolk. But in general, the instinct that is inculcated in all situations of theological doubt is, Find a holy ascetic saint, see what they said on this matter, and trust it.

Listen: it’s better than trusting someone just because they can spin an eloquent and convincing theological yarn, which is the alternative that seems to be most common. But the trouble is that once I have seen the rotten root of ascetic piety — the spiritual escapism that dresses itself up in a false and deceptive podvig — the Church’s whole system of counsel comes into question.

“What then shall I do?”

“Abba, give me a word!”

How I wish the shelves of normative Orthodox teaching were taken up with the treasured sayings of men and women who lived in the world, who built businesses, who led armies, who made paintings and sculptures and symphonies and great monuments, who raised families, who learned skills and crafts, who asserted themselves boldly for the sake of the common good, who delighted in the pleasures of life, who laughed and ate and drank heartily, who traveled and marveled at the depths of nature and of human history, who were passionate lovers, whose thirst for knowledge was unquenchable, who wept and dreamed — who engaged not in the ascetic effort of self-abnegation but in an Orphic podvig drawing inspiration up from the mysterious, fathomless depths of their hearts where they are in dialogue with the Living God.

But the Church will not present them to me. The Church will not sing them. The Church will not offer their icons to me to venerate.

So I am left to find them for myself.

Give me Goethe, and Nietzsche, and Rilke, and Beethoven. Give me Beowulf and Roland and Aragorn and Elrond and Gandalf, Ilya Muromets and Dobrynya Nikitich; Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Baudelaire and Rabelais and Montaigne; Blake, Whitman, Joyce, Lawrence, Milosz; Bukharev, Berdyaev, Sergius Bulgakov, Florensky; Mahler, Wagner, Stravinsky, Rakhmaninov, Satie; Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Marc Chagall, Magritte, Renoir; Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Péguy; Alexander, Joan of Arc, Lincoln, Lee, Washington, De Gaulle; Marco Polo, Shackleton, Magellan, Ibn Battuta; Ben Franklin and Robert Owen; Edison, Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell; Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Marie Curie; Einstein and Bohr and Bohm; Florence Nightingale and William Wilberforce.

Give me a menologion of the saints of the world! And give me determination to find the holiness in each of them, in spite of whatever hot mess may surround it.

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But such as I have I give unto thee: a Samhain playlist.

Beannachtaí na Samhna oraibh!

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But such as I have, I give unto thee: a long, contemplative playlist. As usual, with no track details… I trust that if anything moves you, you’ll figure out how to find it.

One note: the first long piece uses no electronics — only human voices, recorded in the Abbey of Le Thoronet in France (which is a giveaway to those who are already guessing what it is).

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Finding the Scriptures

I know the difference between the holy scriptures and all the books written merely by human beings, and I suspect you do as well. There is an infinite depth shining in the scriptures’ simplest things.

Once when I was a child, I had a beautiful dream: I was walking in the neighborhood where I grew up, in suburban Washington, DC, on a street I had known all my life. Suddenly there was a new street I had never seen before; and as I turned in curiosity to walk up it, I found myself no longer in the suburbs but on a rocky road in a wild moorland with bracken, heather, gray skies, and the distant sense of the presence of the sea. It was a place for which I had always longed, without having seen it or known it. My heart was filled with joy.

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(Dear reader, perhaps you know this joy, a child’s joy from before the weight of life has been laid on it: the joy of a gift received, the joy in which we taste life as perpetual fulfilment rather than perpetual longing alone. Of course, there is a godly longing in the midst of fulfilment, what St Gregory of Nyssa would call epektasis, the soul’s reaching out for the “endlessness of royal riches” which the lady of the Tuatha Dé Danann tells Bran is to be found in the Land of Emain, as the bards relate in his Voyage. Listen to a modern bard tell this story if you don’t already know it; it’s the best way for it to come to your heart:

The Scriptures are like this: we know them well enough, by heart sometimes, but then one day we look again at the familiar and discover that it is strange, marvellously strange, that there is a truth hidden we had always before passed by, heedless. And that truth proves to be lembas, as I am always moved to say, lembas for the journey of this life. Often that truth is full of a grace that we need so desperately in the moment we find it. Indeed, finally, this is the real definition of scripture, this is the identifying mark of divine inspiration in a text: perhaps this will affront those who live with the need of tight and precise definitions, but I will say that any text through which this grace comes that elevates the habitual working of your mind and heart, that shows you not just a new pathway for your soul, but a pathway truly full of life, the life for which you thirst in a land barren and untrodden and unwatered — this text is holy scripture. There is the normative canon, but there is also the canon to which your heart witnesses that it is awakening you. And as John Moriarty says, the most imperative waking is to wake from our habitual, quotidian “wakefulness.”

“Become As Little Children”

The text I want to open here is St Mark 10:13-16:

And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.

This text came to my heart as I felt Samhain approaching. I am presently working with a Druidic curriculum which, rather than presenting esoteric doctrines and mythology, begins by directing attention to the numinous as it is revealed in our concrete experience of nature and human life rooted in nature. I think this is a very congenial approach for Christians, since it is wholly complementary to orthodox faith and practice — after all, St Anthony the Great said, “My book is the nature of created things, and whenever I wish, I may open it and read the words of God.” This attention to nature is perhaps a way towards a recovery of the indigenous folk Christianity that was largely destroyed by the Industrial Revolution.

In one reckoning which I am “trying on,” the lunar months — from moon’s dark to full and back again — are defined by solar calendar events that fall in them. The current moon cycle is thus the cycle of Samhain, the cross-quarter day that in ancient Celtic reckoning marked the beginning of the year and the beginning of its dark half. I will be marking Samhain especially then on the full moon night of this cycle, November 5, rather than on Halloween itself, the modern remnant of the ancient festival.

But how dearly I love Halloween! Far from rejecting this “secular” festival, I feel it as my child’s heart felt it. It was the night itself that entranced me: I mean the night as a phenomenological reality, not as a “time” on a clock. It was late autumn; it was dark and cold; the leaves were falling; the streets were littered with acorns; woodsmoke was in the air; these were the days before mercury vapor, when the streetlights were incandescent. The common talk among Pagans is that at this time “the veil between the worlds is thin.” Some scholars claim that this is a modern conceit, that ancient pagans did not think of the festival this way; but as a child, I felt it so keenly — revealed even in the simplest reversal that we all wandered late in the dark, cloaked in the “otherness” of our enchanted costuming, adopting the mischievous or heroic aspects of our beloved exemplars.

To honor and evoke those magical Halloween nights of my child’s heart, I will christen the full moon of Samhain the “Lantern Moon.” In the text from St Mark’s Gospel, I feel the Lord’s blessing on this childhood magic. (Of course I don’t mean the dark corruptions of terror that increasingly accompany it. There is an appropriate and truly delightful “fear” associated with these liminal experiences, but the cultural egregore that wants to plant destructive, gnawing worms of fear in our souls is doing something altogether different and altogether perverse.)

Exiles and Treasures

As I sense my way more deeply into that scripture, I reflect on the life of my child’s soul that still lives in me — jaded as I may be, contorted by life as I may be. I think of the Hymn of the Pearl, that ancient Gnostic Christian story of the soul’s descent into this world from its homeland:

When, a quite little child, I was dwelling
In the House of my Father’s Kingdom,
And in the wealth and the glories
Of my Up-bringers I was delighting,
From the East, our Home, my Parents
Forth-sent me with journey-provision.
Indeed from the wealth of our Treasure,
They bound up for me a load.
Large was it, yet was it so light
That all alone I could bear it.

Gold from the Land of Beth-Ellaya,
Silver from Gazak the Great,
Chalcedonies of India,
Iris-hued opals from Kashan.
They girt me with Adamant [also]
That hath power to cut even iron.
My Glorious Robe they took off me
Which in their love they had wrought me,
And my Purple Mantle [also]
Which was woven to match with my stature.

And with me They [then] made a compact;
In my heart wrote it, not to forget it:
“If thou goest down into Egypt,
And thence thou bring’st the one Pearl –
[The Pearl] that lies in the Sea,
Hard by the loud-breathing Serpent –
[Then] shalt Thou put on thy Robe
And thy Mantle that goeth upon it,
And with thy Brother, Our Second,
Shalt thou be Heir in our Kingdom.”

We have to read this text in a way that is true for us. We have to appropriate it by identifying not something that we think but something that we feel, something that we know with immediate certainty, not something that we merely “believe” on pious hearsay or thoughtless repetition.

For me, “my Father’s Kingdom” is the Emain of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Silver Branch land. That is my soul’s homeland. The gold and silver are the tales of the bards as they live (and yes, they still live) in the tradition of my people and in me. The precious stones are the inspired strains of music — geantraí, goltraí and suantraí. The adamantine sword, that can cut even iron — and our life in this Age of Iron has so many chains — is the Awen of God which “has flooded our hearts through the Holy Spirit he has given us.” Never doubt that this sword can cut iron.

Samhain, Yule, Magic, and the Commandments of Men

As much as I would like to say about Samhain, the Samhain of my heart, I would say more about Yule (which on the lunisolar reckoning described above, will fall on January 3, 2026 — comfortably midway between the New and Old Calendar dates for the Nativity) — but I have already said a lot. I am embarrassed to admit that I have already quietly begun listening to my favorite Yuletide music — and we are not even in the Nativity Fast yet!

But this is the magic my child’s soul received when I came here from the Silver Branch Land. As I reflect on the world of feeling that encompasses Samhain and Yule for me, I see simply that there is no difference between the pagan and the Christian. They are all of a piece. The same voice is speaking through them. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.

To the child, it is all gift, it is all magic, it is all lore, it is all remembrance. It all comes from the same place; it all grows from the same hidden roots. My celebration of the Nativity would not, could not be what it is without the entire world of Yule that mantles it in snowbound beauty and fills it with light from within.

The soft-heart balm-vision of the child in the manger would not taste like anything without the lantern- and gift-bearing Father Christmas leading his donkey laden with gifts through the snow — the Holly King come to offer his gifts with the Wise Men of the East.

Indeed it is only through this deeper root that I can even understand what the Christian mystery is. Without this deeper root I go astray; my mind can hear and play with the doctrines, but my heart and soul are far from them: This people pays me lip-service, but their heart is far from me; they worship me in vain, for they teach as doctrines the commandments of men.

I wonder if you can understand me, and let the marvellous other meanings of that scripture into your heart. It is not talking about submitting ourselves to outward words, to delineated doctrines and texts acclaimed as “revealed.” No, the precise opposite: it is talking about how we lay waste to our souls by seeking, constructing, worshipping the idols of such doctrines and texts when we cut the taproots of our souls that are sunk deep in the magic, deep in the Awen, deep in the Spirit. We make idols of texts when we close ourselves to their actual inspiration. The way to tend the roots is to tend to those deep oceans, deep woodlands, nights of magic and joy, that the Lord blesses in children — the children we once were, the children we still are in our greatest sincerity.

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Happy Friday, friends.

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I had often heard it said that you can take the man from the bog but you can’t take the bog from the man. I was myself within three weeks of being ordained a priest and within three months of taking up a lectureship in Classics when, without warning, the bog won. That didn’t mean that I had bartered the Gospels for the Satyr play. What I told myself was that I must refuse definition. Not just definition by Christian collar and academic gown. All definition conferred or imposed by society, in splendid array, saying yes to itself. It all went back to a morning when I was fifteen. With our two sheep dogs, my father and my uncle and myself set off for the mountains and by three o’clock that day, the dogs having backed him into a shallow shaft at the base of a cliff, we had him, his horns flowing grandly back and up and out behind his withers, his beard flowing down below his knees, his nostrils so pretty I was ashamed of my own nose, his hooves so trim and so delicate that, certainly up here in these, his heights, I felt awkward and flatfooted. But that of course wasn’t all. There was a smell off him that would almost knock you, and by that alone we knew that we had found what we had climbed for, the bravest and grandest and most majestic wild goat of them all, and that evening, railed in at the top of a scaffold half as high as our high church, he was the newly inaugurated, crowned king of our town and king of the three-day fair, called Puck Fair, in his honour.

As I came out of a shop next day the sun came out from behind a thunder cloud and the shadow of the goat fell full upon me, so that for a dreadful instant his beard was my beard, his horns my horns, his hooves my hooves. Unarguably, the thing coming down upon me, unarguably for that moment, it was a destiny.

I fled from it, for as I saw things in those days, I couldn’t be both Christian and who I was. It was only at the expense of who I was that I could be a Christian.

Harshly, at the expense of who I was, that’s how I lived for the next nine years.

Listening to them morning, noon and evening, and thinking of them as heavenly hammer blows, I would lay myself open, as open as hot horse-shoe iron on an anvil, to all eighteen strokes of the Angelus, three followed by three followed by three then followed by nine in slow but determined succession, and that I would do in the hope that I might one day look up, on Judgment Day look up, and find myself acceptable in God’s eyes.

Three weeks short of consecration, without warning one night, I lost the fight. I came home, and in August on all three days of Puck, on gathering day, middle day and scattering day, I held my own with neighbours and strangers who came over to drink with me, not one of us so much as lifting his glass above the common secret, so well kept from ourselves, that we were drinking to the high good health of His Majesty crowned with rings and strings of mountain flowers about and upon his horns, and in its way that was a blessing because, so unlike early Greece in this, our myths were much too polite to sponsor what it was we were doing, they were much too polite to bring what it was we were doing out into the open.

It took me all of thirty years to come to terms with what happened to me in the sweet-shop doorway, and I only came to terms with it then because I saw it and welcomed it as a Christian destiny, pioneered and therefore sponsored by Jesus in Gethsemane. Instead of driving them underground, I attempted to live my instincts, from their darkest roots up I attempted to live them, into sanctity. I lost that fight too of course, but instead of giving up didn’t I one day stand unredeemed before God, and in some ways it worked.

By the time I was safe to live with and was again respectable, I was too old to get married.

So you have me now. Jimmy Lyne is my name. I live alone at the foot of the Reeks. I go to Mass every Sunday. And every year, come August, I go to Puck Fair, our festival, in our town, of being honest with ourselves and with God.

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I’ve had this inspiration for some time, and have finally come to a way of implementing it.

I feel at my best when I am able to speak with people with mutual sincerity and earnestness about the things that matter most to us — about the things of the soul.

There is little enough of this in a world where although we are increasingly “together,” we are increasingly alone in our deepest feeling and our deepest concern — for our lives, for those we love, and for the world.

The fundamental alchemy of the soul is opening ourselves at the depths to ourselves, and to the others we meet. In the vale of soul-making that this world is, soul-making happens above all in relationship. In communion. In friendship. With the Mystery inside us, and the Mystery outside us.

There are so many modes and frequencies of this entrance into deeper communion. Although I love many of them, my own, as I can admit to myself after more than half a lifetime, is a word from the heart, spoken and heard. It isn’t enough on its own — it must be received and held in the body. But it is essential.

I live on the edges of tradition, often moving about in it as one who knows it well enough to feel at home and still preserve his freedom. I have lived in many traditional worlds, and if that is a language you speak, I can speak it also, perhaps while encouraging you to find a space for movement within the tradition you inhabit. If you believe yourself to be outside any tradition, as a seeker, I can encourage you and help you to view them all with an open heart and a clear eye, while still pursuing the fundamental insights of your soul that are rays of the manifold grace of God. Who knows — perhaps you will find a home after all, one day.

Perhaps I have this to offer to you. And if you think I might, I invite you to become a paid subscriber to this publication. My paid subscribers will get an email with my snail-mail address. As often as you write me a physical letter (I would love a handwritten one, if your handwriting is clear!), touching on the life of your soul in the world, I will respond in kind, listening and offering you the response of my heart with clarity and sincerity.

I would like to listen, and to be an anamchara, a friend of your soul.

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I am imagining it — but there really was such a girl. She is gone; her life — her growth, her sicknesses, her joys, her loves, her children, her labor, her wonder, her death, but more, infinitely more, the felt, experienced reality of all these and of her entire life-world bound into an unfathomable whole called her “soul” — is forgotten, lost in an absolute abyss of time. My spiritual and imaginative labor to grasp it consciously, when I consider it, has spanned my whole life, from my childhood awakening of feeling for and curiosity about ancient things (enflamed first of all by the traditional music of Brittany, Scotland, and Ireland), to my own travels in the lands of my ancestors, to all the accumulated knowledge and experience that has provided the canvas on which my imagination can invoke her. A life’s labor — true, such a joyful and deeply desired labor that it hardly seems appropriate to call it “labor.”

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As I awaken this vision in my heart and mind, it feels so tenuous, like the barest glimpse caught of a ghost — fleeting but heavy with feeling — out of the corner of my eye. Even reading some of the great imaginative masterworks of historical fiction that can evoke lost worlds with such poignancy and power can still feel pale compared to my own present embodied reality.

And yet I have a deeper connection to this girl. She is a grandmother. Between her and me, there is a literal, physical continuity. But there is more than a merely physical continuity, and a soul-link deeper than my own imaginative power.

What Is Real?

To divert for a moment into a piece of pragmatic metaphysics, I believe that the final realities of the world are qualities, and that the original and final mode of knowledge is feeling, not thought (though in the roots, it is probably impossible to disentangle thought and feeling — or perhaps, “thinking” in its integrity is merely a specific kind of feeling). When moderns judge qualia in the philosophical sense to be “epiphenomena” of an underlying “reality,” this is precisely an inversion. The logical, cognitive, rational, and in the case of modern science, mathematical “realities” are derivative; they are abstractions from reality. Reality is what is experienced, what appears, what is felt, what manifests itself to us.

Even for a scientist bent over his instruments, the reality is not the abstraction specified by the mathematical structures he records; the reality is his sensuous apprehension of the instruments. More deeply, the reality is his entire reception of a flux of human felt experience that preceded his birth and into which he has entered as a participant, feeling the feelings of those who have gone before him in this stream (that of “natural science”) — that is, this reality is a complex of perceived qualities that belong to a human (and more-than-human) community. And that complex includes so much beyond the experience of desire and endeavor and knowledge that we call “natural science” — it includes the entire affective experience of that community as it has coalesced and flowed into him: the loves, fears, frustrations, aspirations, dreams, desires, and historical and cultural triumphs and traumas of all those who have also lived in this stream. He has received so much, for good and ill, so much of which he is reflectively utterly unaware, and indeed, of which it is impossible for him ever to become fully aware, in spite of the nobility of any effort to bring this experience into reflective and critical consciousness.

He is an embodied member of a continuum of communal human experience, receiving the integrated complex of felt qualities from that entire continuum, and re-expressing it again in his own life and activity, with his own particular genius — receiving, feeling, metabolizing, questioning, creating, transforming, and offering (to some degree intentionally, but mostly without conscious intention) the fruit of this lifelong process of becoming back to the communities of which he is a member.

This is the real meaning of “tradition.” A “tradition,” etymologically, is what is “handed on.” We usually frame “tradition” in terms of things — objects and events of language, patterns of craft or skill, behavioral patterns such as religious rituals or mating customs. But the real meaning of “tradition” is altogether deeper: it is, in philosophical terms, “non-thematic.” Our bodies are literally “tradition.” Our felt experience, our “soul” as a holistic, creative reception of its world, is also “tradition,” because every human being, whether explicitly or implicitly, whether at the level of speech or at the level of presence (and who knows how deep and subtle the world of “presence” really is), contributes the totality of their life of felt experience to the streams in which they live and move — and we receive them through those streams, as well as passing them on to all with whom we are, in turn, in relationship. I emphasize again: all this is beneath and prior to conscious awareness, though it can rise to that awareness to varying degrees.

Tradition Cannot Die

This unfathomably rich gestalt of feeling we thus receive, creatively integrate, and pass on to the human, non-human, and more-than-human world that surrounds us finds expression in all the human arts: in music, in story, in folkways, in visual and plastic arts, in practical crafts luminously shot through with aesthetic sense and devotion, in the ritual praxis that condenses all these into an incandescence: a magnifying glass focusing the sun on a single point and kindling it to flame. Thus expressed, transmitted, ever preserved, ever transformed, it is living tradition. “Tradition” as a merely specific and discrete transmission of reflective thought-structures may die or become unrecognizable, but as this received gestalt, it never dies — or perhaps, more cautiously, it is vastly longer-lived.

It has a great weight, this tradition: not a weight in the sense of something difficult to carry or to bear — in that sense it can also be supremely light and easy. Its weight is its depth — a richness of accumulation so far beyond our individual incarnate life as to stagger and confound our quotidian senses and powers of reasoning. Every movement of feeling we have is lived through and in it. When you feel a pulse of anger, or desire, or wonder, your feeling is travelling an ancient road, one blazed long before human beings ever appeared on earth. You are quite literally feeling the world as it was felt by ancestral beings who lived billions of years ago — indeed, to give some credence to the hylozoists who see “experience” as aboriginal to the universe, you are feeling the world in a way that rhymes with the feelings of the simplest beings which existed in some kind of primordial chaos. Within your living feeling, all the rage and longing and joy of your ancestors (both physical and spiritual) is present — more, the rages and longings and joys of your ancestors: the very specifity of their lives living still in you.

What burden, and what grace! You can thank them, you can curse them; what you cannot do, what you literally cannot do, is ignore them. But you can find within yourself, at a depth just as impenetrably shrouded in mystery, a response of creative integration and aspiration. Aspiration towards what? I would simply say, aspiration towards God: aspiration to faithful movement, for yourself and for all to whom your act will come (in the end, for the entire cosmos), towards greater appreciative awareness of the richness of felt value in the world, towards an inclusion of the whole of this “tradition” and all its bearers, towards an inner expansion into wholeness. An aspiration to feel more. An aspiration to open your heart.

Hostility and Integration

I rarely discuss politics, but some deep and unpalatable political and metapolitical themes are constant presences in my experience and thought. Many of these have to do with identity. As you might guess from all the preceding reflections, as intellectually elaborate as they may be in my autodidactic mode, I love my folk, and I love my “tradition” in the sense in which I expressed it above. I am a mongrel Amerikaner son of Europe. My father’s folk are from Austria, my mother’s folk from the British Isles. My deep ancestry is in central Europe and southern Scandinavia. My Y-DNA indicates a direct male line that predates the arrival of the Kurgan (Aryan) tribes to Europe. I carry around my neck, from time to time, when so moved, a cave-bear bone from a site in Austria where, 30,000 years ago, humans and cave bears both lived. Those caves, the caves of Ice Age Europe, the lost cathedrals of my people’s Dreamtime, were the Cuiviénen of my folk, where we awoke to gaze at the stars above us and within us and within the Earth (yes, in our ancient tradition, there are stars within the Earth).

This is the stream within which I was born and nurtured — religious, mythical, artistic, and yes, biological. My experience of it is an experience of quality, of the true fundamental “stuff” of which the universe is made. My response to it is one voice in a choir that spans the ages, a song from heart, bone, and blood. It is a response to value, to what I feel, appreciatively perceive, as precious, worthy of devotion, worthy of sacrifice, not because sacrifice is some kind of good in itself, but because in the presence of that holy reality, I go out of myself towards something elementally beautiful. Here, the truncated notion of “tradition” proposed by exoteric religions appears particularly pale and bloodless. No one sane will live or die for a syllogism. But for the specific, intangible yet supremely concrete, incarnate, pulsing life that is the soil in which grow our deepest loves? Yes, we will live and die for that — and it is good that we will. No argument is possible or needed here. Either you have this depth experience or you don’t. To those who don’t, those who do can only gesture — tell them a story, sing them a song, sit silently with them and watch the migrating birds. And above all, tell the stories, sing the songs, sit silently with our children.

Yet, we live in a world where the bearers of these fathomless gestalts of quality, value, meaning, and beauty, face one another with knives, guns, and fire. I do not hesitate to say that I experience the presence in the world of a malign power that wants the soul-reality of my folk to die. It wants us to be obliterated. It wants the value that we feel, that we “perceive” through every gross and subtle faculty, to be destroyed. It wants the distinctiveness and incommensurability of that value to disappear. It promotes with tireless, gnawing ruthlessness a “Colours of Benetton” world in which “differences” are celebrated within the ruling mandate of a supremely superficial devotion to ersatz “values” promoted by commercial interests. Literally, it wants my folk, as a folk, to disappear, and all our greatest treasures with us.

(If there is a Satan, this is Satan. “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” Money is Mammon, a universal solvent to render commensurate the incommensurable. The marketplace of all things, in which all values are reducible to monetary “value,” laid the first foundation of the phenomenon of AI.)

Yet, as a human being, I have a still deeper faculty than that of my feeling of value: in the depths of my soul, I can feel and attend to a momentary flash of imaginative charity which tells me that when another human being faces me across the barricade of hostility and destruction, he also is the bearer of a “tradition” — he also is the bearer of an unfathomable depth of human experience, of a gestalt of human apprehension of something supremely specific, precious, and beautiful that has been handed on to him, physically, culturally, spiritually, by all his ancestors.

Now: the crowning creative act, it seems to me, is not to quench that “momentary flash of imaginative charity,” but to accept it and to act from it, to seek a new creative synthesis of my experience as it widens through this charity.

A concrete example, the example in fact which prompted all of these reflections. I found myself sitting in the breakast bar of a Holiday Inn in southern California — a supremely multicultural “economic zone” in the “propositional nation” (a contradiction in terms) of the United States of America. A Mexican father, wearing Red Wings (therefore a construction worker who likely feeds his family by building other people’s homes), was guiding his little son to the pancakes and Lucky Charms. In a moment I saw his regal ancestors, tribal leaders in ancient Mexico, felt the vastness and beauty and terror of an ancient life-world wholly unknown to me, and felt his concrete rootedness in that world — which lives in him, as I noted above, whether he knows it or not. To whatever degree he and his tradition also, like me and mine, are in the process of mastication and digestion by the “Colours of Benetton” world of autonomous, deracinated capital (i.e. Mammon),1 they are also, inescapably, like us, the bearer of a vast gestalt: yes, a gestalt of feeling, value, and beauty, alien as it is to me. The same is true for everyone I might see as an “other.”

I can’t now feel it: but then, most likely, he can’t either. I have spent a lifetime, in one way or another, outfitting and training my soul to be able to dive into the ocean of my own tradition and bring up pearls to conscious awareness. What would I have to learn, how would I have to live, to be able to do the same for his tradition, in any meaningful way? I can’t even speak Spanish, let alone Nahuatl. But as limited as my achievements might be in the effort, they would not be nothing. At the very least I could glimpse Xochitlalpan from afar and venerate the Virgin of Guadalupe with deeper sensitivity and reverence.

Answering the Machine

To this end, the malign force I am describing, which hereinafter I will designate with the shorthand of “the Machine,” but which others in other times have called by other names,2 has two basic stratagems that it deploys tactically, according to the prevailing circumstances. These stratagems could be thought of as fundamental cultural temptations.

The first is to create and encourage situations which foment hostility, which bring the tribes into acute or chronic states of warfare with one another. Conquest, subjugation, civil war, colonization, and slavery are the manifestations when we respond to this temptation. Mass migration is the current overwhelming form.

The second is the obverse of the first: it is the encouragement of the direction of our vital energy towards vacuous cultural superficialities, all deracinated — the lowest common denominator universe of mass media, social media, fake corporate art, cultural (and racial) homogeneity, mass feeling through artificial spectacles, electronically distributed norms of thought, judgment, feeling, pleasure, and rage (though of course, never rage directed against itself), inculcated psychoses like the trans phenomenon. It is essentially the generation of a false tradition whose purpose and function is not the transmission of genuine values, but the transmission of empty and valueless counter-values to the genuine, living values it supplants.

AI “creations” are the apotheosis of this soulless, false “tradition” — “creations” that do not originate in the creative response of a soul to felt values. The issue is not so much that AI instances do not think, though of course they do not. The ultimate issue is that they do not feel.

What then is the response of integrity — integrity of soul in the sense indicated above, that is, the unfathomable whole within which our entire creative reception of tradition is synthesized — to the assault of the Machine on everything good, true, and beautiful?

Living Against the Machine, For and In the Heart

It seems to me that our response to this radical threat must be twofold, in parallel to the two dimensions of the Machine’s assault: one directed against the “traditions” themselves, as indescribably rich gestalts of felt meaning, faithfully received and creatively integrated and transmitted; the other directed against the willingness of the bearers of these traditions to give themselves to creative communion with the Other in order to broaden and deepen their own capacity for appreciative awareness of value.

At the risk of being misunderstood, but speaking (of course) out of my own tradition, I will identify these two dimensions of an integral heart-response to the threat of the Machine as the Pagan and the Christic.

The Pagan response is the response which turns in tender awe and ardor towards tradition: to receive it, to receive it more deeply, to receive it faithfully, to hold it in the heart, to plant it and water it and cultivate it, to turn to it in preference to anything offered from outside, perhaps not without a kind of valorous jealousy and pride rooted like hickory in its incomparable beauty that speaks to the heart: “deep calleth unto deep.” To bleed for it if necessary: to sweat for it: to go hungry and thirsty for it: to feel it as our mother and our child, our beloved homeland, for which we long when the ocean stands between us and our heart’s desire.

To which the Christic response adds, contradicting nothing, that there is a wellspring at the roots, from which everything in the Cosmos draws its birth and its becoming:

Ask veit ek standa, heitir Yggdrasill,
hár baðmr, ausinn hvíta auri;
þaðan koma dǫggvar, þærs í dala falla;
stendr æ yfir, grœnn, Urðar brunni.
(Vǫluspá 19)

“An ash I know standing, ‘tis called Yggdrasil,
a high tree sprinkled with shining drops;
come dews therefrom which fall in the dales;
it stands ever green o’er the Well of Wyrd.”

What I am calling “the Christic response” is the vision of the source of my tradition, and all traditions, and the becoming of my tradition, and all traditions, and the mutual openness of all traditions, the openness of the living heart that across the gulf of my love for “my own” depths — so great a love, an agony of love! — will see and feel and open to the Other, admit him to fellowship, sit with him at the fire and share his treasures as he shares ours with us, and thus create what is new and ancient, creative and faithful. The Ursprung of all things.

Perhaps it seems strange to quote the greatest monument of European Heathen prophecy to describe the “Christic” dimension, but it makes perfect sense to me. Wyrd is the web of becoming that connects all things. The sensitivity to Wyrd, the attentiveness to it, which opens us to what is strange and new, to creative transformation, to the reception of new universes of feeling we have not hitherto suspected, is the foundation of all our feeling — the feeling of the impossible richness of those loves rooted in our own soil, and the movement of the heart to expand, in risk, in uncertainty, in unknowing, towards the Strange and the Stranger.

When Jesus speaks in the Gospels, I recognize in his voice the voice of the Christ. If the Well of Wyrd had words, it would speak his words. I recognize the voice which says: “Love, and do not be afraid. Put out into the deep waters, the waters of creative and open reception.” And I see a human model of faithfulness to this venture, even as the rulers of this world put it to a bloody end. I will confess that this is not a certainty for me, but rather a hope — I see the victory of the Risen Christ over Hell and Death. I hear the intransigent demands of this Christ: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

I do not believe this claim merely as some arbitrarily asserted dogma. I perceive that it is an ineluctable and necessary fact. Unless we devote ourselves to the Christ, to the Christ within ourselves, to the Christic impulse in Creation, with the sincerity and totality Jesus demands, we are ranging ourselves against the very source of every good we think we might love more. And unless we devote ourselves to our tradition, in the sense in which I have defined it here — the gestalt of our people’s felt experience and embodied knowledge of the world: specific, concrete, incarnate, embodied in song, story, mores, crafts, arts, wisdom, lifeways, folkways, and the “inarticulate speech of the heart” — we are ranging ourselves against the very goods that the Christ has structured the world to evoke. “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.”

This, in brief, is why I believe that to respond with integrity to the moment, to this apocalypse (unveiling) of the Machine, requires of me, if I were to say it in two words, Christian Druidry, or perhaps (ideally) Christic Druidry. For “Druidry” substitute whatever term you prefer for the magical inheritance of body, soul, and culture that you feel — however tenuously you feel it! Name it if and when you can. But whether you can name it or not, feel it. Feel it more.

Where the Machine offers you ersatz substitutes, where the Machine pushes you relentlessly into the proximate dissolution of a life focused on Mammon and into the more immediate and direct dissolution of a life lost in AI, turn back to the embodied tradition that lives in your heart and your bones. Read the stories. Tell them to your children. Sing the songs. Learn the crafts. Practice the ways. Be like the noble men and women of old. Venerate the ancestors. Leave the “broken cisterns” hewed by the Adversary and his minions and return to the “fountain of living waters.”

And where the Machine finally turns your attention to the desolation of your soul that it itself has wrought, and whispers to you to hate the Other because he is the cause of your desolation, open your hands and your heart and your mind to offer and receive, knowing that this act — stepping out on the wild waters to walk where it is impossible to walk — is to evoke the deepest magic of all, the magic of the Enchanter who sang the world out of chaos.

These are the mythic times, and we are the heroes of old. Let us live accordingly.

This post was not written using AI. AI would have used shorter sentences and fewer big words.

“By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” (Joseph Smith)
πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι. (Heraclitus)

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I dream a lover, one I’ve never met in the flesh. I wake up, boil water, shower, have breakfast and tea. I set out in the dark on my mountain road with the windows down. We’re at the stage of summer when the heat lasts all night, subsiding by pre-dawn, touching me tentatively, gently, as I drive through the invisible banks of warmer and cooler air.

Already sensually activated by my dream, I feel the eros of my bodily experience in the moment: the caress of a summer night, the visceral curve and lean of my body as I respond to the winding road, the pleasure of speed and power, the momentary illumination of trees and houses, the washes of memory palpable as I pass trailheads I know well, and the hills where they lead. I think of the starlight on those hills as they wait for the sun they already feel coming. Do the trees and hills and hidden night creatures live in a pure eros which I now taste only when visited by a dream? Is that dream, that eros, a divine gift to awaken me not to another day of work, but to my presence on the earth?

When I refuse to receive the world from which that dream was an emissary, I might as well not be alive. Or perhaps, my “life” becomes a living death, flat, insensible. I am a blind man groping through a landscape in which I can see almost nothing. The days pass filled with things to which I am not exactly indifferent, but whose depths I can’t grasp. My heart is enclosed, entombed. I am separate from the people around me, even those I love. Their feelings evoke frustration or fatigue, rather than interest and sympathy.

In a moment, I can see the entire catastrophe of our civilization in this closure. I catch a glimpse of thousands of years of what can only be called abuse and brutality, institutionalized by the powers of state and church to crush the lives of human beings here at their source. Sometimes when I see monstrous evils, I wonder how anyone could be capable of them. Here is how: I already have the beginnings of it in myself; I already know the first steps on that path, and only the emotional, social, and material wealth that has surrounded me since I was born has prevented me from travelling down it until I reach actual atrocities. There is a continuity between the dead heart I feel in myself that manifests as indifference, and the greatest cruelties of which human beings are capable. I would not frame this as my common participation in “original sin” — I would frame it as the common subjection of humanity to the torture of being cut off from the root of life, and I mean that in the most concrete and realistic sense. This is what Reich called “the emotional plague.”

This is the war against eros. That is its strategic dimension, but its tactical execution is always via a war against sexuality. Obviously, I am not collapsing eros into sexuality, but I am pointing out that to deny the sexual dimension of eros is to deny eros in its incandescent heart. There is no “purely spiritual” eros. This is not a bald metaphysical assertion, “for the sake of argument,” but a confession of my own experience. At various times, I have spent many years working, with whatever degree of inner conflict and hesitation, to excise sexual desire from my experience of eros — or at least, if I can’t excise it, to corral and contain and suppress it, to tame it and master it. But when I have mastered it, to my dismay, I find that it was itself, in all its intractable wildness, the very wellspring of that wider and deeper eros that enflames my soul with spiritual desire, that makes the path of the heart sweet.

Eros does not respond well to being mastered. There are animals that cannot be tamed, that cannot live in captivity. Eros is like this. If I work to tame it, if I imagine that I have mastered it, I find that the very aspiration to spiritual life that put me on the path of taming it is drained and neutered. I don’t deny that the human capacity to acquiesce, to remain on a path of death, seems almost superhuman. Entire lives can be spent this way. Entire civilizations can be built this way; ours has been. I recall a saying of an ancient desert ascetic: “Don’t trust the flesh until it is in the grave.” But nowadays, I find Pascal more compelling: L’homme n’est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête. That is: “Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune remains, that he who would make himself an angel makes himself a beast.”

But then — what to do, how to live with an ineluctably wild animal, whose presence is somehow necessary to our life in the most direct sense? (We used to have a sense of this when as tribal peoples we lived with wild animals and knew that they had medicine for us. John Moriarty recounted a story of a Kenyan tribesman visiting a western city and asking in deep surprise where the animals were, and how we managed to live without their medicine. The last wolf in Britain was killed in Scotland in 1680 — and I wonder how my folk have lived without wolf medicine, and what that has done to their souls. Perhaps this is an answer to the entire question with which I am wrestling here.)

Here is not the war against eros, but the war of eros, the war between eros and the values that eros would spurn. What values? Well — eros is the wellspring of tenderness for our mate, our children, indeed for all living things, for the earth herself; the wellspring of our sense of beauty perceived by the heart and felt in our whole body. And yet, eros is also a pillar of fire leading us through a wilderness single-mindedly, single-heartedly, furious, wild, willing to trample that tenderness and that heart-sense of beauty, for the sake of seizing what we desire. After all, only an iota separates Ἔρως from Ἔρις, the goddess of strife and confusion. Is it not so?

Our very experience of erotic communion — here I mean sexual communion specifically — reveals this. The communio oppositorum, the “communion of opposites,” which we dance in a relationship of a man and a woman, is a kind of war. Mustn’t it be? We are polar beings, on every level, from cells to souls. We are so different from one another. Perhaps a casual sexual liaison doesn’t reveal this in depth, but any attempt to build a lasting relationship certainly does.

However, a casual sexual liaison (or indeed also, sex within a committed relationship, but considered in itself) does reveal this: here at the very heart of incarnate eros, the war, the clash of opposites, Heraclitus’ “strife” that is the “father of all,” is generative — that is, the gulf of difference, while remaining, reveals itself as the source of life. Both the life felt by the sexual partners in the pleasure and fulfillment and self-giving of their embrace; the life that is transmitted to their community by their experience of that life and its flowering in their whole inward richness and their whole presence to the world; and the life that may come from that embrace in the conception of a child.

This is what I want to hold out: that the prophetic course for our civilization, and by that I mean our now unavoidably global civilization, is to abandon the war against eros — whatever its ultimate origin — and to embrace completely, consciously, with full, activated, open hearts, the war of eros. I contend that in forgetting the body and in attempting, futilely, to sever sexuality from eros, we have stopped listening to God, and the first place to listen to God now is not in a text, not in words from a pulpit, but in the body, in eros, in our sexuality. I do not know what this might entail in terms of a transformation of our sexual mores and the transformation of our entire civilization. When you meet a new lover you have no idea how you will be changed by what is about to happen to you. It is an invitation to risk and adventure. This after all is at the very heart of eros: self-abandonment, an abandonment of our certainties, an entrance into a wilderness where we rely on God; this is why religious conversion is a deeply erotic experience. Perhaps, at the end of this millennial experiment in repression and brutality, this is the place where we will finally rediscover our faith.

This post was not written using AI.

Anam Cara

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Constriction and Openness, Suffocation and Breath

Among Christians there is so much closure and constriction, so little free movement of life: everything is tightly hemmed in. Thought and action must be strictly controlled. We’re not to let our minds wander; this is serious business down here; the prospect of eternal torment looms; there is no laughter, there is no free play; delights are to be shunned, whether of the body or of the mind. This is an askesis that never reaches its conclusion in the joy of a game being played — but after all, isn’t askesis an athletic training? And what athletic training has athletic training as its own goal? Isn’t the goal to have the capability and skill of playing the game? And what is the point of a game, except the joy of free, spontaneous, and playful exertion?

Thought and action must be strictly controlled. Let’s dwell on the “thought” for a moment. Is it any wonder that the world has turned from a Church and a discipline that saw the free flow of thought and feeling as a terrifying danger? There is a current movement of reactionaries, mostly young men, but some young women too, into the Church — but it strikes me that they are reacting not against a skillful freedom, but merely against the contrary slavery of modernism, liberalism, futurism (whatever you want to call it), against another flavor of social and ideological conformity. Their solution, guided by tragic masters such as Jordan Peterson (whose reaction seems not to have set him at liberty within himself in any way whatsoever), is to retreat into the slaveries and constrictions of the past. I listen to their serious discussions of orthodoxy and heresy and my skin crawls. I want to give them a glass of wine and tell them to spend a week in a nudist colony.

I don’t just have this response to the new warriors of orthodoxy (whichever orthodoxy they’ve seized on in their desperate attempt to escape uncertainty and suffering). I have the same response to a lot of the old exemplars as well, including most of the canonical structure of the Church. The Pedalion should be used as a door-stop and never opened. (If you don’t know what it is, consider yourself blessed — but Catholics and Protestants, you have your own editions of this monstrosity.) Indeed, not just the canonical structures — often the spiritual structures as well. Did the Lord descend into the tomb so that you could spend your whole earthly life resolutely lying in a tomb? Or did He descend there so that He could raise you up into the air and light? If we’re not to give a thought to the morrow, as He tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, why do you locate your salvation in an unknown future? Why would you suppose He didn’t come to bring you deliverance now?

Jesus’ Aramaic name — Yeshua — means “God saves” (“Jah saves,” perhaps, in a nod to my Rasta friends). What does this mean, “saves”? He sets captives free, he sets us in an open space, he takes us out of the dungeon into the air, he brings us where we can breathe. In the very root of His name is yāšaʿ — to save, deliver, liberate. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, this liberation has the sense of rāwaḥ — spaciousness, relief, freedom to breathe and expand, deliverance from a condition of ṣārāh — narrowness, constriction, anguish, and, we might say, suffocation. Surely there is a resonance with rûaḥ — wind, breath, “spirit” in the most elemental sense.

How many Christians — let alone anyone else — know this joy of free breathing in their hearts and bodies? How many even conceive of the spiritual life as a way of grasping the promise of this liberation?

Hebrews specifies the existential depths: Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. Freud avant Freud! (And infinitely better theology, of course.) Our bondage, our constriction, our suffocation, comes from fear — and in the end, all fear is the fear of death.

This is why Christ is Risen! is not a rational proposition. It’s a hand held out to lead us out of prison and up from the grave. A hand offered to us that invites us to dance.

The explicit content of a spiritual writer’s theological or dogmatic position is far less important to me than the spirit that animates it, which is something I smell and feel more than something I cognize and analyze. Is the writer’s heart armored, in the terminology of Wilhelm Reich? What is the point of even entering into a consideration of a “theology of eros” from a place where we are afraid to think, afraid to feel, afraid to move, afraid really even to breathe — where we doubt and second-guess and constrain every impulse of the mind and heart and body? It’s all just drawing on the walls of the cave. It reminds me of the clergyman in Lewis’ Great Divorce who declines an invitation to leave Hell because he’s running a really interesting book discussion group down there.

I have a radical proposal for how to consider, feel, enter into this life. A radical proposal for an erotic theology and an erotic spirituality.

Scripture and tradition speak of the soul’s union with God in nuptial symbolism. Well — before the nuptials, there is a courtship. That is what incarnate life on earth is.

Life As Courtship With the Divine

Let’s step out of the fusty sense of “courtship” that we may have from culture and habit, and imagine something altogether more free and vital and full of tension and delight. Very likely, you have courted a lover, and have been courted by a lover. (Traditionally, men court and women are courted, but it’s obvious that in any courtship, each person fulfills both of these roles, giving and receiving.) I ask you to evoke that experience — which was real perhaps even in spite of surrounding events and contexts in your life that were difficult and painful, even in spite of doubt, uncertainty, anxiety.

Courtship is an awakening — an awakening to ourselves, to the potential for joy deep within ourselves, to the presence of gifts deep within ourselves that before now we have only felt obscurely, but which we suddenly begin to find ourselves capable of bringing out into daylight and holding in our hands as we extend them to our longed-for beloved. Or perhaps to the one whom we merely sense and hope might be our longed-for beloved — but still, what life there is in that sensing and hoping! Courtship is also, of course, and sometimes blindingly so, an awakening to the all-consuming reality of the Other, the radiant value of the Other, drenched, saturated in meaning and beauty. No one courting a lover is asking questions about the meaning of life. They know the meaning of life; the tormenting questions are no longer about meaning, but about exigencies — will I be able to embrace this life? Will I be able to join myself in my depths, in my body and my heart and my soul and my mind, with this shining light?

Courtship does not stop when this movement of lovers together culminates in the sexual embrace. Sex is not the end of courtship; it is one moment in it. If it were an end, we would be like those animals who mate once and go their separate ways. No — we take the same mate again and again, sometimes for a lifetime; the mating reveals itself not merely as a destination (and it is that, a value in its own right — as one moral theologian says, “Sex is a pre-moral good”), but also as a path. To that whole mess of pottage that considers sex as having its “purpose” in procreation, I apply my signal instruction from Jesus: Let the dead bury their dead. Sex, in one vitally important way, is a path to the union of souls — a union that will be, in its consummation, without confusion, and without separation.

However, I want to avoid the danger of spiritualization here. Sex is a path, but not merely a path. The body is a path, but not merely a path. The animal in us is a path, but not merely a path. Paradoxically, the only way we can follow these paths — which I believe are really one path, the creaturely path — is not to regard them as mere paths. Sex, the body, the animal, have value in themselves. Why would the Lord be courting us embodied, sexual animals if He did not desire us?

I am inviting you to feel all the delights and premonitions of blessedness that adorn our life — to feel them with the living heart that beats beneath your fear, your frustration, your grief, your constriction. I am inviting you to take the Resurrection seriously as a promise from One whom we trust and love that despite all apparent empirical evidence to the contrary, death has been met, defeated, and overcome — and thus, salvation in the sense promised by Yeshua’s name — liberation, freedom, expansion, free breath in open air and limitless space — is restored as the root of the world. Thus I am inviting you to feel those delights and premonitions the way you desire a lover and the way you feel your lover’s desire for you. I am inviting you to feel again the joy of courtship, and this life as that joy — and all your joys in this life as manifestations and revelations of that joy. To taste your desire here for your lover not as something to reject in favor of an abstraction — not as something to reject and clench against — not as something to corral and constrain — but as something to embrace with gratitude and abandon and delight.

Of course, courtship is also often tragic. We can recall the great, tragic courtships of literature. The courtship that is the embodied life of each of us, and of the world itself (which is also moving towards union with God), is also tragic, full of impossible stalemates, irretrievable losses, blind catastrophes, and irredeemable failures, weighed down by dumb misfortune and weakness. But the protagonists of this story, both human and divine, are as relentless in the fire of their desire, as relentless in the creative intensity of their determination, as the greatest heroes and heroines of romantic literature. That is what romantic literature is — the rallying cry of and to the human spirit not to flag and not to give in to defeat: to listen to the voice of the beloved and remember our longing for her body and her face.

I am suggesting a view of life that is romantic, passionate, and fully engaged with desire on every level — the desire for experience, for knowledge, for wisdom, for skill, for beauty, for delight; the desire for the sunrise when we’ve climbed a hill before dawn; the desire for the lover we are courting; the desire that sweats and yearns and hungers; the desire that is unquenched in the quenching of desire: Restless in life and seeking no end in death, as the bard Robin Williamson declared. I am suggesting that we situate that desire not as something to be repressed and constrained, but something to be accepted, embraced, and oriented toward what the ancient hymns call “our Orient on high” — the Divine Lover who is courting us with burning desire in the heart of everything that comes to us in this life.

This post was not written using AI.

Anam Cara

Transcribed from the audio collection One Evening in Eden, published by Lilliput Press.

So I’m telling Death (Death, you have to imagine, here’s the old skeleton coming at you with his scythe, you know), and I say to Death, “Come at me and mow me down, but there’ll be a part of me, no matter how vast the blade of your scythe is — and it is vast and can cut very deeply — no matter how vast the blade of your scythe is, there’s a part of me that it cannot cut down. And the part of me that it cannot cut down is not my immortal soul; it is that core of me that was in love with Eve. Because I once — because I, Adam — loved Eve, and because I experienced that love in its paradisal beauty and its paradisal intensity, that the blade of your scythe can never reach.

I am immortal not because I have an immortal substance in me; I am immortal because I loved and because I experienced love, and death shall have no dominion over love. Even though life might be a war of death and love, death can have no dominion over this love. So I recover that pristine core in me, and I recover a confidence in that pristine core in me; and if I loved once, that in some sense conferred a kind of Shulamite immortality, if I felt everything that Shulamite in the Song of Songs felt, you know — to take Eve down into the banqueting house, even though there might have been no banqueting, like “stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick with love.” Do you remember taking Eve into the garden of spices? “Come away my love, my dove.” I was the Solomon and she was the Shulamite. “Do not stir up my love, I’ll wait till he please.”

The beams of our house are cedar and the rafters of it are fir, our bed is green. Because of that love there is a kind of immortality in me. I’m not immortal because of immortal substance in me — I might be immortal because of that too, but even if there isn’t that immortal substance in me, because I experienced that love, that Song of Songs love, because the Song of Songs once sang itself in me, there’s part of me over which your scythe and its blade shall have no dominion.

So I’m now recovering confidence in myself, but I could tell death: “I have loved and so I’m deeper than scythes,” I could even tell Christ “Although I am all body, all second-hand head” — and the Lord save us, after 20 years of “input,” you know, of Encyclopedia Britannica input and of people imagining that the “Brain of Britain” is the great thing to be, and to have all the answers, to have all the silly answers to all the silly questions, to have all the unnecessary answers to all the unnecessary questions, my head does feel a little bit “inputted,” it does feel a little bit like I picked it up on a pawn shop, doesn’t it? Like it’s full of other people’s ideas, and I suppose there might be a suggestion here that I’ve been caught up in the rigmarole of incarnation after incarnation after incarnation, so this head has been around a long, long time; but even though I am all body, all second-hand head, I’m a Christian again. But I’ve opened my mind, I’ve opened my gates long ago to dark horses.

I’m a Christian again, but I’m going to be a Christian now with a difference. I’m going to open my mind and open my life to my animal instincts, to animal nature in me, to sexuality in me, to all the needs of body and soul in me. So what I’m here talking about and pleading for is a Christianity that can help us towards the sanctity of inclusion and integration, as opposed to the sanctity of repression and exclusion.

You know, I’ve talked about this elsewhere, like about the “tourniquet Christianity.” I don’t need to go into it now, but tourniquet Christianity — where you wear the tourniquet around your middle. Do you remember when he was mad in the heath, poor old King Lear, mad in the heath, crying out, “But to the girdle do the gods inherit. All else, all below the girdle. All below the middle is full of sulfur and hell and fury and fiends.” That belongs to the fiends.

When I make the sign of the Cross on myself now as a Christian, I don’t say “In the name of the Father and of the Son” and go to my heart. I go down to the soles of my feet. Do you know what I mean? I want to include all that I am in the oikumene that I am. I want to be ecumenical in a religious way to all that I am. And if I had time now today, I would say that in Gethsemane, in the person of Jesus, all that we inwardly are became religiously enfranchised. That’s a big statement. But after Gethsemane, I think that is true, that the great oikumene is the religious oikumene, is the oikumene of all that is. And I sometimes want to go for the sanctity of inclusion and integration, as opposed to the sanctity of exclusion and repression.

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Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices. (Song of Solomon 8:14)

The nakedness of woman is the work of God. (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Towards sunset, I come down to the Yuba. The day has been hot, but the heat is tired. Isolated houses in the pinewoods give way to the wild, winding slope. A short scramble among steep rocks to where the river beckons. The water is that northern water I know, cool, alive and life-giving, serene in its pools, gentle on the weathered rock. Its touch is tender. In winter, it would dash me on the rocks and sweep me downstream, but a dam upstream bridles it for the summer. If I lived here, I tell myself, if I swam in this water every day, I might live forever.

The high, sturdy, rusty span of the wood-planked bridge above. Translucent fish in the depths. A woman sunbathing, naked, so achingly lovely in every line of her body, in her slow movement in the sun, a silent, arresting glory, that my heart is still, my desire even is still. Her smile will bid a man come and live.1 She will bless him with a blessing he wants more than breath; he must want it thus, in order that his desire bless her in return as she deserves. Men say they want blessings, but in the end, this is perhaps the only blessing they want, the summit of blessings. I say this not to cheapen anyone’s life or desire: on the contrary. I say it because that blessing is supremely real, it is life, not a life that can be discussed and dissected; nothing that can be merely imagined, supremely concrete. Most of what we say we want is fog, cant, wilful forgetting, perversion, confusion. Perhaps all.

Whatever your faith, if your faith is not a garland and a song around that body, I’ll have none of it, God will have none of it, it is a lie, its salt hath lost his savor and will be cast out and… trodden under foot of men.

What are the paths of the forgetting?

In a motel off the freeway, in the wasteland of the Central Valley of California, I watch a parade of clients as they visit a prostitute in a neighboring room. The men are fat. They smoke and stand behind the building watching videos on their phones before and after. Maybe as long as there have been men working far from home, there have been scenes like this, but no matter how primordial, the human desolation is still stark against the fire of the evening sky.

I have come down from the mountains. I am among the flatlands and their people. I search the drawers but find no Gideons’ Bible. I open my pocket New Testament and read, Let the dead bury their dead.

I let them.

I turn, sightless now and longing, to the precipices, to the high groves of pine, fir, juniper, and redwood, choirs singing the silent green song of earth under the stars, a song that outlasts all our human songs, rapt, tireless. They are not waiting for me. They do not know me. Calamity: I am unknown to the green angels of the earth. How long would I need to be a silent pilgrim there in the heights, before they took notice of me? Before they smiled on me? But I am content, and discontent, to have been with them, shy, for a moment, the fleeting way that at the river I caught a glimpse of her slender legs, the curve of her breasts, her mount of Venus drinking the sun. Accepting my portion and the grace that is given me. An abyss opens and I know myself to be standing on its brink.

There are higher places still. I remember them, and I will not forget, even here. How often has my spirit turned to thee!

In those high places, beside the coals of a fire, body cold beneath the blanket of stars, heavenly white river revealed, I am a child adrift on an ocean, I have no lore to guide me; it is all forgotten by my faithless fathers, I am an orphan, I am in a sanctuary older than the earth, I cannot read the holy book, the song goes on around me and above me, and I understand nothing I can say. Is it desire or promise in my blood? I will dwell in the house of the Lord unto length of days.

To go up, we must go down; to go down, we must go up. The men of the flatlands do neither. The desert their toil has built, their souls broken by whip’s crack before they could even be really born, has neither rivers nor mountains, and I live in the midst of it, until I heed the pilgrim call again and follow the sparrows from the southlands to the place where I’ve left my heart.

The wild lives, the wild lives in me.

I come to the temple. I bow at the doors and cross the threshold into the embrace of the dark. For a moment, here in the desert where throats are parched and eyes burn, there is water; water to drink, water to give me tears.

The spring rises, and again I give thanks.

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This post was written without using AI.

This post was not written using AI.

Unfortunately, I am not a scholar. My existential hunger was always deep enough to keep me from sticking to any academic program; I would always eventually say, Why does this matter? I need prayer, not “theology.” (Yes, I know the maxim of Evagrius!) Consequently I am deeply aware of how inadequate my intellectual foundations are for any discussion, including the one I’m about to have. But still, I have been alive for awhile; I have endured and enjoyed and explored, and on that level, I know that I know something, even if I might be unable to situate it thoroughly or bring out all its implications. With that apologia pro vita mea, here are a few thoughts.

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I was struck in the ongoing ferment brought about by the topic of re-enchantment and tradition by a comment of to the effect that there is a close relationship between Renaissance magic and modern science. I feel the truth of this observation immediately. When I was researching the reception of astrology by Christians a few years ago, I was struck by the fact that astrology found its way to acceptance in the Christian West by the same path that all the natural sciences did: through the Western opening to Greek learning preserved in the Muslim world. (Preserved in the Muslim world, I should add, thanks initially to the work of Syriac Christians — the initial transmission was from Greek to Syriac, and then later to Arabic and Persian.) That is to say — astrology was received as a branch of natural science, and it was under this banner that it ultimately received acceptance (becoming so deeply integrated into the worldview of the medieval West that the greatest representative of the science in the 14th century was a Cardinal of impeccable orthodoxy, Pierre d’Ailly).

There are real scholars doing yeoman’s work on this topic, but it strikes me that modern science and Hermetic magic in all its permutations are twin brothers. The question is, Who was their father? Is it is a situation where one clearly betrayed his paternal inheritance and sold it for a mess of pottage — that is, modern science stripped away the fundamental religious orientation of ancient science and set off down the path that would end in denying the existence of anything not sensually perceptible or mathematically tractable? Or is it a situation where both brothers had the same underlying goal and pursued it differently — one through the sensually manifest, the other through the subtle and occult?

The negative Orthodox reaction to the presence of Thrice-Greatest Hermes in the temples of the Renaissance West indicates a perspective on this question, and in the end, it is one I share. When I studied ancient and medieval astrology, I was eventually overcome by the realization that, once I penetrated beyond the psychologism of modern astrology, I was seeing a strange kind of clockwork, clothed in mythology. There is of course a deep beauty to the harmonic vision that sees the human soul mirrored in the sky; this is a universe in which the human soul is truly at home rather than a strange exile. And yet, the vision is still one of a kind of clockwork.

Here we enter into the realm of eerie historical “coincidences.” The clock was invented by medieval monks.1 To me it feels that this development is not unrelated to the Scholastic impulse to exhaustively distill the life of faith into rational postulates, the better to convince the mind of rational truths. And this in turn is not unrelated to the gradual overcoming of the Patristic rejection of astrology, in favor of a budding “scientific” worldview that sees the cosmos above all as a transcendently beautiful divine mechanism. Thus our coherence with the rhythm of God’s creation is imposed outwardly by the striking of mechanical bells to bring us to prayer.

Of course, the soul is a living soul (man became a living soul, according to Genesis 2:7). What could be more essentially traditional than to see the living soul’s bond with non-human creation in our common origin from the Creator? Thus the rhythm of prayer, since the early days when Christians first sang a vesperal lucernarium to Jesus,2 was conformed to the organic created order. In the application of a rigid mechanical structure to prayer, I cannot help but see the first stone being laid in the construction of the prison (or charnel house) of modernity.

St Thomas’ fundamental proviso regarding astrology was that it must not be interpreted to deny the freedom of the will — making him thus remarkably “modern” as an astrologer, as the science rapidly degenerated into fatalism and only in the 20th century did modern astrologers again assert this reality of free will. But I must say that the way astrology is deployed almost universally in contemporary lay discourse (that is, among astrology enthusiasts, not reflective professionals, of whom there are few enough anyway) suggests that this fatalism is perhaps an ineluctable consequence of the whole field. What could be a beautiful and poetic reading of the symphonic relationship between the soul and the stars — finally explaining the deep harmony of “the starry heavens above and the moral law within,” perhaps? — becomes a way to explain, to excuse, to justify, to preen. An existential mythopoetic conviction of the soul’s belonging-in-the-universe becomes a mere subjection to cycles: cycles that repeat, cycles that imprison.

This sense of the slavery to cosmic elements returns us to the most ancient strata of Christian revelation. These are the principalities and powers, the fates, to which the ancients felt themselves in total subjection. Perhaps this despair was really at the root of Stoicism, so beloved of modern “influencers,” who have perhaps not advanced to the stature of its greatest exemplar:

As it happens to thee in the amphitheatre and such places, that the continual sight of the same things, and the uniformity make the spectacle wearisome, so it is in the whole of life; for all things above, below, are the same and from the same. How long then?

“All things above, below” — are we hearing Marcus Aurelius’ agonized, weary, disillusioned echo of the first words of the Hermetic Emerald Tablet?

All this is perhaps a roundabout way of coming to answer the question posed above: yes, it seems to me that both Hermeticism broadly, and modern science, are in a fundamental sense faithful to their common father, whose image is coming into view; and that view is that they are fundamentally Godless because fundamentally impersonal. Not Person, but Pattern, and thus Mechanism, reign at the heart of the world. I would go so far as to discuss the approaching apotheosis of AI as the coming would-be reign of the Machine in the inmost spaces of the human heart, but that is perhaps a topic for another time.

I think that the resort to Hermeticism per se is thus not the answer to modernity that it is advertised to be, because it is simply an alternate modernity. Within themselves, the magical apparatuses of the medieval and Renaissance worlds, whether theoretical or practical, tend in the same direction to which the “wonders” of modern science tend. We may think we can “moderate” the use of digital technology, but it turns out that digital technology has its own telos that is inimical to our simple human plans. The Machine has a “logic” of its own; we think we are its master, and we end by becoming its servant, and then finally by remaking ourselves in its image — that is to say, by unmaking ourselves. The perennial response of traditional Christian wisdom regarding such “technologies” is visible in its response to magic conceived as this willful manipulation of occult forces of “nature” (whatever that might mean): that is, it condemns it. And this for the cogent and utterly practical reason that the exemplars of this tradition saw and knew where this willful manipulation would end: in death.

Those of us who can see this death impending in mainstream modernity’s embrace of the Machine, and those of us who can see this death impending in an enslavement to the elements of the world conceived in the alternate “modernity” of the Renaissance re-appropriation of ancient magic, need to join our minds.

But all of this leaves the hunger for re-enchantment painfully unresolved. If the door is closed to Hermeticism as an occult technology, as the apotheosis of the Machine in a different garb, what is the way forward to a living cosmos? What is the way forward to the childlike delight in our presence in God’s creation?

I would say that it is personalism, in the sense of an identification of the existential heart of reality in persons and the communion of persons, rather in any thing or the interactions of any things or the laws that govern the interactions of things, whether those discerned by modern exoteric or ancient occult sciences. But that is not enough, because at best, the modern expression of personalism leads people into a deeper experience and valorization of the depth and holiness of human hearts and human souls. Needless to say, this should not be gainsaid! All the great 20th century personalists, from Emmanuel Mounier to Dietrich von Hildebrand to Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) to Pope St John Paul II himself, helped provide a personalist key to many of our great social and cultural ills. But all that is “mere” philosophy. I believe we need a praxis of personalism that goes deeper: and I believe the praxis of re-enchantment is the praxis of personalism extended to the entire cosmos.

Thus my inspiration is not Hermeticism, but folk magic. And I say very explicitly inspiration rather than source, because there is a great deal of darkness here as well. There is darkness anywhere we seek to exist as if we were among things that we manipulate, whether more successfully or less, rather than among persons with whom we are in communion, and whom we must radically respect — each as an ineffable abyss revealed ultimately in freedom and love.

The genius of folk magic is that it is softer, and I think much more naturally and easily brought into the sphere of faith, where we recognize that in any relation between Two, there is a Third always present: the Lord.

Between me and the mountain, the Lord is also there. If I stop feeling toward that mountain that it is a mere thing — if I become a practical hylozoist and a practical panpsychist — then I relate to it as a brother or sister, with a fundamental posture of listening and of respect. Isn’t this the very ethos of St Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures? And I do not need to project any kind of human consciousness onto these non-human persons. The more I sit and attempt to make myself present to plants and to animals, the more I feel that after so much speaking, it is time for humans to be quiet and listen, perhaps for a very long time. Listen not to their words, because perhaps they have none, but to their being.

Folk magic thus also attends to the hidden realities of the world, but the gravitational attraction to power is less than in exoteric or esoteric technologism, because it is more fundamentally rooted in the acknowledgement of irreducible persons as the central participants in a dance or chorus of creation. Folk magic is more like prayer and sacrament than is either Hermetic magic or modern technology: it does not demand; it asks. It understands that in the end, there is no mechanism. There is freedom, there are souls, and there is God.

This is the truism of re-enchantment: when the Gospel arrived to ancient peoples, they were never asked to give up this personal relationship to the living, personal cosmos or their sensitivity to this communion of beings. They were asked to radically reorient themselves to the Will of the One Who made it, and to walk in it in obedience to Him, that is to say, in obedience to Life. To “preach the Gospel to all creatures” in the language they can hear and understand: which is a profound and subtle skill to learn. I have been struck, especially in America, by the sense that the Gospel has never been preached to the creatures here. Once in a moment of ecstasy swimming in Lake Tahoe, I felt how much the mountains of California need hermits living in them to do this work. Of course, we do have our father among the Saints, John (Muir) of Yosemite, and we have the monks of Platina and many others. (Blessed Seraphim Rose required his novices to read Ishi Between Two Worlds so that they would know something of the peoples who lived in that God-blessed wilderness before them.)

At the risk of saying something too personal, I will say what the Lord laid upon my heart: that the old wisdom of our “dual-faith” ancestors is acceptable to Him, provided that we work all the works of simple magic with the intention of serving His love, and never imagine that we have any power all our own. He gave the herbs to heal. He gave the Earth her holy places where inspiration comes more freely and abundantly. He drew the leys on the land, as he drew the sinews and blood vessels in our bodies. He gave us the stars and the sky for wonder, He gave us the mountains and forests for joy. And He gave us healing in all these things, if we come together with them in the consciousness of His Presence. And above all, He gave us His Son and His Awen.

“What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”

The current moment for “re-enchantment” strikes a deep chord for me. A few of my readers may know that in a past that now seems both distant and poignantly unrecoverable, I was ordained a priest in the Orthodox Church (I would mention the jurisdiction but I prefer to retain at least a little anonymity on this platform) and served several years in a parish. When I left the priesthood, I also, for a time, became an apostate from the faith: at first from Orthodoxy, and later from Christianity tout court. That I ever found my way back — to Orthodoxy, not to the priesthood; that’s no longer a possibility, a fact for which I’m quite grateful as I don’t believe I’m suited for it — is a miracle of grace. I am old enough now to know that life has great, irremediable sorrows, sorrows that can only have their healing in God’s Kingdom; that I once stood at the altar, and no longer may, is of course one of these sorrows for me.

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Why did I leave the priesthood and why did I apostatize? In the beginning of my Orthodox life I was, as many of the “Orthobros” are today, an insufferable rigorist in terms of ecclesiology, doctrine more broadly, and praxis. I think that God sends trials and temptations especially to such people to humble them (which is why I don’t worry overmuch about the current crop of young male converts; and are correct about this — they will either mature in the faith, or leave). The trial and temptation that came for me, as I inclined further and further towards a deeply ascetic Orthodoxy, was that inwardly, I rebelled. I rebelled against the spirit of works such as Tito Colliander’s Way of the Ascetics, which, although it is a modern book, is a fairly pristine representative of traditional Orthodox ascetic piety. At the heart of it, there was no place for my body, no place for my affective life; ultimately, no place for me, no place for the entire created order.

Please believe me when I say that I am deeply familiar with the stock responses about the incarnational character of Christian theology and spirituality. I am deeply familiar with them — and also, in the end, they are not a response to the most profound and fundamental question: what is the nature of created things? (whose controversial recent book I am now reading with great enjoyment) might say that “the world is God’s icon,” and I do not know how deeply in his book of that title he explores the nature of the icon itself. It seems to me that to valorize the created world simply because it images forth the uncreated God is precisely not to valorize the created world at all. It is to leave all value in God, and the question of what the bestowal of value on the created world by God really means is left unaddressed. What does the created world itself contribute? Anything? Nothing? If something, then what, and how?

This question is of course central to our spiritual life. What are we doing here? Are we creating, or obeying? Is virtue creative, genuinely creative, or is it a matter simply of asymptotic approach to an unreachable archetype in whom all being, all truth, all value, subsist? Is the fundamental gesture of spiritual life to become nothing? It seems to me that, incarnational tensions and protestations to the contrary, there is something Buddhist at the heart of this metaphysical spirituality. Indeed, not Buddhist: Perennialist. Schuon himself, in a moment of lucid honesty in Esoterism As Principle And As Way, says that Perennialism’s closest metaphysical expression is Advaita Vedanta. So much for the Abba of Jesus!

While I have found my way back to the communion of the Orthodox Church, I wear my metaphysics much more lightly than I did before, in part, because after the winding path that brought me home — which included great succor from personalists and existentialists, mostly Catholic, who might be anathema to both sides of the current re-enchantment debate — I see the tentative and human, all-too-human character of all metaphysics per se. Here, Berdyaev, the fiery prophet, is once again my master, as indeed he was at the very beginning of my journey into Christian faith long before I read the Ladder of Divine Ascent. “We have lost all confidence in the possibility and fruitfulness of an abstract metaphysic,” as he wrote in the first lines of Freedom and the Spirit. (And before accusations fly against Berdyaev, I ask readers to remember that he was the spiritual son of a great confessor of the faith, St Alexei Mechev.)

In the same text, Berdyaev also says:

The torment of doubt may be defeated, yet even in the new-found faith the depths of previous uncertainty are revealed. Such a faith will possess quite a different quality from that belonging to those who have not had these doubts, and who have inherited their beliefs from tradition. The man who has travelled far in the realms of the spirit, and who has passed through great trials in the course of his search for truth, will be formed spiritually along lines which must differ altogether from those pertaining to the man who has never shifted his position and to whom new spiritual territories are unknown.

All metaphysics — whether the Platonism and Neoplatonism that the Fathers took up and transfigured, or the Aristotelianism through which the Angelic Doctor shone piercing, prismatic rays of revealed truth — is provisional. In this, perhaps, I am now forever a son of the East: an apophaticist who takes apophaticism very seriously indeed. In moments of prayer, particularly at times of utter grief and desolation, I have understood the silence of St Thomas. I see all metaphysical speculation and “it looks like straw.”

All of this is to say: the desire for re-enchantment is elemental and irrepressible. But as sympathetic as I am to traditionalist revanchism (and I am indeed very sympathetic, given the world as it is), re-enchantment will not be found in adherence to some metaphysical schema, even one with tremendous traditional bona fides. It will not be found in Scholasticism; it will not be found in Neoplatonism; it will not be found either in Hermeticism, if this last is conceived and enacted primarily as another set of foundational metaphysical dogmas. What I want — and what I think is needed for the healing of our minds, hearts, souls, bodies, families, civilizations, indeed, for the healing of the earth — is something different; something more innocent, more childlike, something that does not summon forth the armories of a rigid traditionalism.

I wrote recently:

We want magic because we want Faerie, and we have wanted it since we were children: and having become disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, we want to know how Faerie stands in relation to him. We want to know if the the Lord’s feet really did “walk upon England’s mountains green,” we want to know what hath Avalon to do with Jerusalem. And the Fathers will not tell us that.

Quid ergo Avalonis et Hierosolymis? This is the question that possesses my heart, that has possessed my heart for so long. The approach to an answer — as tempted as I am, in spite of all I know, to seek an answer in further metaphysical speculation! — is I think not through what is high, but through what is low.

By this I mean: to rediscover and reinhabit a genuinely re-enchanted life-world, the place to look is not the high metaphysical speculation of the spiritual masters held up by this or that orthodoxy (including esoteric orthodoxies) — it is to rediscover the more humble mind and life of the simplest pre-modern believers. And above all, that means animism: it means that we acknowledge that enchantment is with us, willy-nilly, whether we want it or not: and it is present because we inhabit a world that is not primarily a world of things (as the materialists tell us) or a world of One Thing (as the Perennialists and all their co-travellers tell us) but a world of persons. Human persons; non-human persons; persons with gross bodies; persons with subtle bodies. Persons with whom we must relate. Persons who act freely within their capacities and spheres of power. Persons who exist in relationship with one another, with us, and with the Lord. Persons who are creative, unpredictable, terrifying, benevolent, malicious, delightful. Persons on all levels of being.

This felt and experienced life-world is what I might refer to as Christian Animism, or perhaps, if I am bold, Christian Druidry. Note that I say “felt and experienced”: the way into it is to experience the living world and the living beings that surround us, whom our ancestors knew well, but in whom sophists told us that we should not believe, with whom they told us we must not engage. Many of us say freely that we have this experience in the temple, of the real presence of the angels and the saints — but I am not sure, if our alleged experience of numinous beings is thus segregated from the forests and the mountains, that we are really the believers we claim to be.

I do not pretend to understand the metaphysics of this animist world. Whether I understand it or not, whether I use this or that more-or-less-cogent schema to orient my mind in it, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that I acknowledge it, that I accept it, that indeed I love it, that I receive it. If God is the Creator, then surely He created all this also — all these persons with whom He calls me to live, just as He calls me to live with the other sons and daughters of Adam and Eve.

Of course, a radical purification is needed here. Where our ancestors worshipped these beings, we must not. The darkness that accompanies so many of the principalities and powers is terrifyingly real, and the same darkness afflicts those who turn first to sorcery, necromancy, the manipulation and appeasement of these powers to achieve their ends. There is a real meaning to “pagan darkness,” and I had experiences while I was away from the Church that confirmed this truth to me irrefutably.

But the fact that we no longer worship other men does not mean that we cease to believe that other men exist, or that we try to live our lives without relating to them at all. The fact that there are men given wholly over to evil does not mean that there are no men struggling in the path of the good. We accept this field of relationship as one of the Creator’s greatest gifts, in spite of its character as an arena that tries our faith. Why should we not extend the circle fully, and accept relationship with a living, personal world as the place of our salvation?

Spirits of the woods, the fields, the ocean, the water, the stars: how might we, Christian men and women, speak to them? Listen to them? Preach the Gospel to them? Receive the Gospel preached by them to us? Might a Christian astrologer learn to hear the Gospel preached by the circling stars? Might a Christian Druid in the High Sierra preach the Gospel to the spirits of the ancient trees who have awaited its coming since the dawn of time? Is our troublesome and painful presence in the world now a fruit above all of the fact that we have failed in this fundamental vocation?

And still more: might the stars and the mountains and the forests and the sea, might the hawks and bees and coyotes and bears, might the living stones and the breath of the air and the bright fire, have something to teach us, to reveal to us, that we could receive in no other way? Might not the earth herself, in her holy places, where our ancient ancestors built stone circles, and our more recent ancestors built churches, teach us a love and a wonder we cannot learn unless we listen to her?

I leave you with the question, but this is the path my heart leads me on as I continue to attempt to discover what it means to be a Christian in this world: not negating this world for the sake of some other, but answering the spiritual flame in the heart of every created thing, addressing it, listening to it, singing with it, as a Mystery that has not been fathomed yet by any metaphysics, and never shall be, but is open to the voice of Magic and of Love.