"I've Opened My Gates Long Ago to Dark Horses"

From A Lecture By John Moriarty in 1992

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.