Nov 26, 2023·edited Nov 26, 2023Liked by Graham Pardun
It is wondrous to perch on the windowsill of this conversation. Thank you both.
I want to know more about this Evagrius and natural contemplation. I Experience this but I didn’t have a way of thinking about it outside of my own mind yet. Can you put me in the direction of any texts! Thank you!
An addendum - from my reading of the NT the enchantment received by the first Christians was that when you came to Jesus you got dosed with the Holy Spirit and knew God. Note Acts 10:43-46
Nov 24, 2023·edited Nov 24, 2023Liked by Graham Pardun
As a son of a Midwest pig farmer my default is K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Sweetheart. To me “enchantment” is that Jesus came so ordinary folks could be sons of God also, filled with the Holy Spirit walking with and knowing the Father as he did, the loving, personal Isness of the Father, all as accessible gift. Jesus simply said “pray to your Father who is there in secret” and in another part of the NT “draw near to God and he will draw near to you”. Let us become little children to enter the Kingdom of God and as William Blake wrote “like lambs joy about our Father’s tent”
I think the robust, so personal Father is now the ignored, unfashionable person of the Trinity, but Jesus wasn’t ashamed of the Old Man, the Ancient of Days. IMO the Neoplatonic influence has etherealized, philosophized, and distanced the Father, the Living God, after all Jesus said, speaking to his and our Father “ now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom you sent”.
Jesus in John 4 proclaimed that the living water he would give would be in us “a spring of water welling up to eternal life” meaning we would filled with a splendid knowing of the Father and the Son. Now that’s magic radiating the light of life on all we see.
And to say a little more: You only need the image of Mary as a compassionate Queen Mother, always there to intercede for you, if you've come to imagine the Father as remote, faraway, unapproachable, terrifying -- in other words, as an emperor.
Jeff, I think I pretty much always agree with you, but these paragraphs here especially have struck me hard -- what you're saying is exactly it, exactly it. My intuition for a little while now -- and now growing into a strong conviction, but just now starting to draw words to itself -- is that this "reenchantment" mania now -- while quite understandable, and certainly better than the desolation of left-minded mechanical materialism (not a high bar) -- is off the mark; dangerous, even. What's lost in all this enthusiasm, this mania? The simplicity of standing as a child in the presence of the Father, everywhere -- not a scary or remote Father, but a loving one. Nothing is more radical than that childlike confidence, which Yeshua experienced for himself and offers us. And, beyond that, nothing more is needed.
It seems to me the heart of being filled with the Holy Spirit is knowing the love of the Father, Romans 5:5, 8:14-16, Galatians 4:6-7, Filled with the Spirit we exult in the love of God. And 1 John 4:13-16, 19! “Every good and perfect gift is from above , coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights” The world and the philosopher especially scorns the Father in heaven. The legalist scorns the Father who gladly receives the prodigal sinful son, our own inner elder brother holds us back from that simplicity, thinking we must be better before we can really be close to the Father. Remember Hebrews 4:14. It’s so good it has to be true! Perhaps an aspect of resisting and grieving the Holy Spirit is resisting this gift of simplicity. As Jesus said "so foolish of heart and slow to believe all the prophets have written"
Nov 26, 2023·edited Nov 26, 2023Liked by Graham Pardun
At the risk of excessive length I would like to add a couple things I wrote on this subject sometime ago.
Michelangelo and William Blake were right about God.
From a Biblical perspective the nature of God is seen as reflected in aspects of the created order. Yes, God to a certain degree does have the nature of space, wind, emptiness, mist, air, sky, force, energy, light, darkness so congenial to Buddhist/Hindu/New Age types. However humans as being made in the image of God, are the best representation of what God is like – especially a human at their highest development, a mature, wise, good, vital 50+ man or woman. I knew a dynamic, spiritual woman in her late sixties, another one in her eighties. They both reminded me of a female God the Father carrying personal authority and full of love and kindness and approachable.
To me saying God is NOT like a man – Our Father in Heaven - is dumbing God down, making God less than what he is, flattening the divine out, a less than human gas. In a true sense since humans are made in the divine image, humaness is intrinsic to God, God is even MORE human than we are, as our humanity is but an image of that which is being imaged. though divine humanity is an infinite multidimensional cube compared to our simple flat squares. God is even more perfectly human than us who are echoes, a flatter image of him.
There is much wisdom and truth in Michelangelo’s and William Blake’s depictions of God as a dynamic, active, wise older man. Far from being simplifications of God they point to his personal depth, his danger, his joy and love and perfect humanness and the familiarity and commonality we encounter when we meet him for he is like us for we are patterned after him.
(I realize and respect that in Orthodox Iconography depiction of the Father is frowned upon)
In all this talk of a wild Christianity I see no talk of the wild spiritual life of Jesus had with God the Father. A wild life we can also have as being fellow sons of God filled with the Holy Spirit – John 1:12, Galatians 3:26, 4:6. A wild Christianity with the Father because it is empowered by the Holy Spirit doesn’t need nature immersion to happen, though having the privilege of nature immersion I suppose may be a useful adjunct for many. After all when Jesus gave prayer instructions in Matthew 6 he said to close the door to your room!, not to go forest bathing.
When you look at the actual spirituality espoused by Jesus and practiced by him in the Gospels it is utterly unfashionable by those who look to non-dual awareness, and “Christ Consciousness” "ground of being” as the ticket. No, nothing as ethereal as that! A Father in heaven, “pray to your Father who is there unseen”. Jesus was by no means ashamed of the old man and talked about and to him a whole lot. God speaking in an audible voice, expectation of specific even miraculous answers to prayer, lifting eyes in prayer, a robust intensely personal God the Father that isn’t you, but you can know, and directly know his love for you as an individual.
Jesus on the cross cried out “My God, my God why have you forsaken me” far from being a cry of abandonment it was act of teaching and prophetic proclamation – which was a part of his job at the time, it was a quote from the first line of Psalm 22 which contains prophecy of what was happening at the moment, and was a statement of deep faith and knowing.
I could go on and on with more examples from all over the Bible of this wonderful dualistic experience of the Living God. The Father made us as individual humans and intends to keep us that way. This is all very childlike as Jesus says we are to be. I know vigorous attempts have been made to squeeze this knowing of the Father and the Biblical record into a new orthodoxy of a “wiser” quasi-Buddhism.
However The final state presented as the ultimate is us embodied as individual humans even as Jesus is now, in the presence of God, in a new physical creation of multiplicity, filled with the Holy Spirit, not generic vanilla pudding non-duality. Sounds like fun to me, which all children delight in.
By William Blake - we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice. . . . . . And round the tent of God like lambs we joy . . .
God, you just never stop. Almost the yard entire of Christendom has been the playground of your jovial, wise older man. Where is Zipporah when you need her, blade to phallus, just a bit of the edge of the murderous singularity of the demand for one image, over and over and over.
Anyone with a balanced diet doesn't feel the sweats when some meals are passed without a usually present staple. The addict on the other hand must have the one thing in every serving or else the shivers.
As fifty something year older man I assure you my own image creeps into the divine, almost effortlessly, at every turn. In the tradition of my people that you seem to think you own there has always been a contention around all of this. The woman and the animal excised by the majority, at least since Jeremiah, and those holy under currents always finding there seep back in, not from compromise, only fools read the writing on the wall upside down.
The misogyny and the human exclusivism is what makes the vanilla pudding, the mind on one metaphor.
Name Blake as if but no way he stands with you here, not on this side of all that has unfolded since.
Anyone who reads that moment on the cross as play acting to teach misunderstands how myth works in the human that He was, how David there could be embodied to summon something beyond the torture of Empire and the very real terror of the body at that point. Your need for a G-d who cannot need is palpable but as foreign as the litero-certain you bathe in while thumbing you nose to the very rare gathering of interest in Yeshua that isn't your Man-ing up, down, in , out ...Man everywhere G-d is.
I think this is like half a dozen places you run this pray in your closet not the woods schtick on these threads. Its bullshit dude. The context was about something completely other happening in the community. This isn't midrash, its a headlock. Almost no one on these threads is actually pumping the homogenized spirit without viscera that you set up as a straw man. Carry on if you want but ths is a note to tell your whining about the poor neglected image of the man is Quixote vs Windmill shit. The church is your oyster, baby. Has been for centuries. Why hang out in the corner waiting to roll us, She-God peasants. Between us we barely have a siddur long enough to pass one night outside songs of phallus and city.
OK, I'm not as fired up as you are -- and I think Jeff had something real to say here worth a second read or two -- but I will agree that the "go to your closet, not the woods" theme -- which has appeared before -- is a pretty irritating misnomer. Jeff -- the Father created the whole more-than-human living world for a reason, bro! "Go to your closet and pray" said by someone who spends most of his time walking the hills of Yisrael, praising the lilies of the field, can't mean exactly what you think it means when we're dying here in this horizon-to-horizon urban wasteland of almost nothing but closets...
I think what is essential and the most nourishing in the Holy Spirit is what is available in all places and times. For many people be it those embedded in the moneyed tech world or a miserable urban slum nature immersion is not readily available and is a privilege and at best a possible adjunct to knowing God. Are they shut out from the fullness of the Holy Spirit? So I guess I am irritated by what comes across to me as privileged people having the luxury of nature exposure. How strange that was once the background of human life is inaccessible to so many!
I have had that wonder of nature immersion since earliest childhood, surrounded by the lilies of the field in a hands on relationship with streams, fields forests, the sky and weather and am even paid now to be in that space as part of my employment. I tell my students that part of their generation’s mission is to restore and heal and enrich the biosphere.
I have found that the invisible Christ Jesus is the source of ultimate life not the glories and wonders of the created order, blessings though they be. Yes, nature points to and is an expression of God, and I think of Orthodox Father Roman Braga meeting God in windowless solitary confinement. Straight up knowing of God in you and with you as you being the temple of the Holy Spirit is the core gift and discipline as Jesus said, “but only one thing is needed” and focusing on that one thing is key, the rest being gifts met along the way. Seek first the kingdom of God which is “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” “the Spirit of power, love and of a sound mind” “God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” Ps 73:26.
I guess I am not as impressed with the lilies of the field as some are. Been there, done that, still like them though, talk to trees even and exult in the clouds and sky.
So much salt and light here! I could read these sort of conversations all day. The sympathetic vibration between the two of you harmonizes well and begs for more instruments to join the symphony.
After reading Mircea Eliades book on shamanism I saw how we have patholigized peoples differences rather than encouraging those differences as gifts. I think Martin Shaw understands this and why he often uses the word Shaman in a positive way. He'll probably get in trouble from those who have become religious pillars of salt and fluorescent lights. In premodern, aboriginal cultures things like autism or schizophrenia would have made someone a shaman. Their unique gifts of seeing and feeling would have made them guides. The machine aura is predictability and control which tends toward too much order and not enough beauty. A home is not a frame, walls and a roof, but all of the potential to fill that space with careful attention. I believe that we have a collective intuition of sorts that is crying for the feminine beauty to hold the machine in a balance. Historic trends like the feminist movement seem to be attempts at this, but rather than it being a celebration of the deepest feminine sensibilities, its mostly angry women throwing rocks at men. Rather than celebrating and demanding that feminine attributes like mothering, beauty, creativity, intuition etc become more central to our ethos as a culture, we have "women's healthcare", which is code for "the right to not be a mother". I could go on and on about ways our culture needs guides like Grant, Natasha and Martin Shaw to help us respond appropriately to these deep, collective impulses toward the good the true and the beautiful. You are our prophets of earth, water, wind and fire. You may even have to live outside and cook food on a fire of your own feces, to wake up the general cultural audience. Become our holy fools and keep writing beautiful things!
Also "He'll probably get in trouble from those who have become religious pillars of salt and fluorescent lights" was brilliant.
And "A home is not a frame, walls and a roof, but all of the potential to fill that space with careful attention" is something I've felt, and wanted to say, but didn't know how to say it, and you say it perfectly here -- that's it exactly.
Such profound truth to meditate on.
I wonder what it would be like to take that incisive, compassionate vision of home, and to think again about what it meant that the first followers of Yeshua met in homes -- and about what that could mean for us, who are looking for home once again...
You definitely should! Just start with "Making the Garden," a short essay of his in First Things, freely available. Pretty much everything is there in that little essay. But I finally got -- after many years (and when I still had a job) -- all four volumes of his out-of-print Nature of Order, and it's hard to describe how good and important it is. I kid you not, if this house burns down, I'm grabbing my kids and those four books.
Living in Bali where books are hard to come by I am a devotee of Internet Archive. archive.org Nature of Order is available to read online, a four volume book. Join, feed Nature of Order into the search engine and give occasional donations.
Great stuff to sit with here, Natasha and Graham. A friend who cannot subscribe for lack of connection and, most nights, fingers upon her limbs was intrigued yet also a bit hurt. I think she misunderstood a coulple comments of Graham's, not knowing him as well as I. She asked me to pass this along.
Greetings gatherers of extracts and flowers, you citizens of empire gone to its rest. It did hurt a bit to hear my own kind turned out a bit from such a fetching exchange. I cannot speak from my hearth kin. It is the burning season and as such we two peoples keep a distance (understandable I am sure) until the buds return and the cinder is returned as payment to the roots but we, spirits of the trees, are as much enmeshed with the feasts of the Galilean peasant as any primate from what we have seen. It isn't a question of Pan's death but of the human waking to his confusion in kneeling before a sibling.
Enchantment is the singing within. Why one would ever wish for an end to music, the wind-words in leaf, promises of water circling through the channels, is beyond me but none of us can pick what sort of thuggery will sit in the chairs built from our pith. Even the timber of the God-man can be nailed to nonsense I guess. I don't blame you for so-called Chrisitians first dreamed that they alone peopled the earth and then sought to make their dreams come true. But I do think you might want to take it easy on the tinkerbell jabs. You primates have so few friends in the dark these days. And the nightlights of yours may prove less eternal than your people had promised. Surely, having seen the vapid portrayals of the magic with which you are deeply familar, you know better than to dip your brush in that ink of diminshment. I think the problem is not too many words about faerie from the vapid but too few thoughts about the diversity of the angelic among the companeras.
Rumors of disenchantment are similar to claims of being without a god. Everyone is in-filled with song. Some filter out all other voices but that of their own kind, prefering a solo akin to monologue while others let in the symphony. The fruit of the former is the city as opposed to the forest which, of course, is where my people make our stand.
In that quote from Weight of Glory Lewis, I think, does seem to be suggesting that world is a synonym for earth with the opposite of them both being, I suppose, heaven. All I know of that is my people do not live in your world, or partake in your worldliness, but we certainly share the earth with you, if share is a word that can be applied to how your species relates to much of anything these last centuries. In the mother tongue of that brown-eyed peasant of note, the root of the word for tree is also that of counselor?
Tell your friend I literally worship the ground she walks on (very slowly). Tell your friend I literally hug and kiss her leafy kindred as little messiahs, as the green faces of the Holy One -- literally. Tell your friend that the kitsch language of reenchantment is, in my mind, a desecration, a loud game we play in front of her kind, instead of listening in silence -- but that I am also impulsive, intuitive, and immature, and tend to overreact at the slightest thing, not only throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but throwing the bathroom from the house, the house from the cliff, the cliff from the mountainside, the mountainside from the majestic range.
Don't tell my Orthodox friends this, but I'm actually pretty confident that trees are intelligent and have feelings. I regularly ask them to pray for me, in the way that a much better Orthodox person would constantly be asking saints to pray for them. For me, though, I can see a tree when it's right here; when I hug it, I can feel it's presence, I don't have to imagine anything -- unlike with saints for me, where everything has to be imagined, starting with only an unsmiling plywood [=dead tree] icon as raw material. The last thing I want to do is to have to project some kind of kitsch image onto a tree and interact with that image instead of the tree itself...
We hear you, Buddy. I wonder if all is projection and kitsch in my basket though. Until very recently in the human experience, the shamanic (for want of a better word) was about a crossing over from the human world to world of tree or deer or river. The sense was that in each world the subject was *the* people of that world and in to be a good guest was to take on that form to both learn from and be better "'heard" in a sense. It was about both good manners and expert technique, much less about dress-up or kitsch. The idea that the ability to exchange shoes was reciprocal, that a tree might take human form be better met in our world just seemed a fair esimation of the equality of their personhood. Of course this is a weak generalization of many more nuanced particulars. But just as all that wander aren't lost, all that shift shapes aren't kitsch. The shape shift, to be mutable in order to be made know is at the center of this gig, yes?
I get what you are on about. I just think everything full and round has an empty and flat version and the point of the journey across is to go in to meet the former. We almost always become aquainted with the latter first and, in that disappointment, many a real meeting never comes. Maybe. I don't know.
Naw, man -- I hope it didn't sound like I'm accusing you or your dryad friends or dryad-loving friends of any projection or kitsch. You and your ilk are definitely not the man of straw I'm flailing and wailing about here or in the conversation with Natasha above; you know I want to see the world how you do, and in the moments I'm able to -- via reading your poetry, when it finally clicks -- I am happy. As usual, I'm using language in a careless way, so it's confusing. For me reenchantment refers to recent escapees from hardcore left-brained materialism waxing eloquent about symbolic this, faerie that, saint so-and-so...when it's all been just atoms and void for so long, it can seem wondrous that everything is full of sparkle again. And it is possible to throw oneself into an even deeper sickness. The ancient shamanic peoples -- I let them be; they were in tune with the infinite non-human worlds in ways I will never be. When I repeat the early Christian epiphany "the great god Pan is dead" I am not talking about these honorable ancestors of ours. I'm talking about the classical pagan world -- the tired, tired, overextended world of the twilight of the idea of world empire -- which was particularly wrapped up in anxiety and dread, their heads cluttered with omens and easily offended gods. The world in which, at any moment, pandemonium could send your lost little human heart through the meatgrinder of over-elaborated histrionic over-religious sensibility. That the great god Pan had overnight been exposed as nothing was first of all a great *relief.* And now it seems like many people want to go back to a world where a demon could be lurking anywhere, a saint could be miffed at the slightest disrespect at his local shrine or whatever...
What I want to do when I stand before a tree is see the tree -- as much as possible (knowing that some projection, and some imagination, is inevitable). That's not a materialist stance rejecting the possibility of a tree having inner life -- I'm convinced that everything is alive to a degree and that trees especially have inner life, personhood even. To quote Kerouac again: "The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual life is. All these people thinking they're hardheaded materialistic practical types, they don't know shit about matter, their heads are full of dreamy ideas and notions. Look, there's a pigeon..."
Just digging for sense, my friend. One thing I promise this is never about is what is being said about me. I am work in progress, implicated in a hundred ways to forget how many others are around us everyday, and not really even more than ankle deep in the work owed.
It is all about the carrying of the words on all this forward to light the ruins we have made of being together. I do poke around in language to see who is under the tongue, my own included but not in a way you need worry about insult or some business. Jeff riles me because of what that work has done in the world and because it is a drive to end what's mutable, to lock out natality from the Word, which is how it would die. And sometimes I am just a bit of an asshole when I am tired.
Me too, man...my wife says I yell incendiary things into the air, when really what I mean to do is ask questions of actual people.
I have this overwhelming intuition that there is a way to describe things, that there are words out there that can be said as a bridge of life back and forth between myself and the myriad things beyond words, and that there is a way for words to create functioning community, and the feeling of those words being forever on the tip of the tongue sparks some real tongue-lashings from me...
Yeah, to the extent that anyone's trying to shut down life-giving, open, shifting horizons, for the sake of the known, but lifeless, quantities -- that makes me mad. And sad and frustrated. We're dying here, man, and that makes me interested in one thing: bold moves, insane creativity, total openness.
It is wondrous to perch on the windowsill of this conversation. Thank you both.
I want to know more about this Evagrius and natural contemplation. I Experience this but I didn’t have a way of thinking about it outside of my own mind yet. Can you put me in the direction of any texts! Thank you!
An addendum - from my reading of the NT the enchantment received by the first Christians was that when you came to Jesus you got dosed with the Holy Spirit and knew God. Note Acts 10:43-46
What a joy to read such a beautiful and insightful dialogue. A lot of thanks. May God bless you both!
As a son of a Midwest pig farmer my default is K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Sweetheart. To me “enchantment” is that Jesus came so ordinary folks could be sons of God also, filled with the Holy Spirit walking with and knowing the Father as he did, the loving, personal Isness of the Father, all as accessible gift. Jesus simply said “pray to your Father who is there in secret” and in another part of the NT “draw near to God and he will draw near to you”. Let us become little children to enter the Kingdom of God and as William Blake wrote “like lambs joy about our Father’s tent”
I think the robust, so personal Father is now the ignored, unfashionable person of the Trinity, but Jesus wasn’t ashamed of the Old Man, the Ancient of Days. IMO the Neoplatonic influence has etherealized, philosophized, and distanced the Father, the Living God, after all Jesus said, speaking to his and our Father “ now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom you sent”.
Jesus in John 4 proclaimed that the living water he would give would be in us “a spring of water welling up to eternal life” meaning we would filled with a splendid knowing of the Father and the Son. Now that’s magic radiating the light of life on all we see.
And to say a little more: You only need the image of Mary as a compassionate Queen Mother, always there to intercede for you, if you've come to imagine the Father as remote, faraway, unapproachable, terrifying -- in other words, as an emperor.
Jeff, I think I pretty much always agree with you, but these paragraphs here especially have struck me hard -- what you're saying is exactly it, exactly it. My intuition for a little while now -- and now growing into a strong conviction, but just now starting to draw words to itself -- is that this "reenchantment" mania now -- while quite understandable, and certainly better than the desolation of left-minded mechanical materialism (not a high bar) -- is off the mark; dangerous, even. What's lost in all this enthusiasm, this mania? The simplicity of standing as a child in the presence of the Father, everywhere -- not a scary or remote Father, but a loving one. Nothing is more radical than that childlike confidence, which Yeshua experienced for himself and offers us. And, beyond that, nothing more is needed.
It seems to me the heart of being filled with the Holy Spirit is knowing the love of the Father, Romans 5:5, 8:14-16, Galatians 4:6-7, Filled with the Spirit we exult in the love of God. And 1 John 4:13-16, 19! “Every good and perfect gift is from above , coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights” The world and the philosopher especially scorns the Father in heaven. The legalist scorns the Father who gladly receives the prodigal sinful son, our own inner elder brother holds us back from that simplicity, thinking we must be better before we can really be close to the Father. Remember Hebrews 4:14. It’s so good it has to be true! Perhaps an aspect of resisting and grieving the Holy Spirit is resisting this gift of simplicity. As Jesus said "so foolish of heart and slow to believe all the prophets have written"
At the risk of excessive length I would like to add a couple things I wrote on this subject sometime ago.
Michelangelo and William Blake were right about God.
From a Biblical perspective the nature of God is seen as reflected in aspects of the created order. Yes, God to a certain degree does have the nature of space, wind, emptiness, mist, air, sky, force, energy, light, darkness so congenial to Buddhist/Hindu/New Age types. However humans as being made in the image of God, are the best representation of what God is like – especially a human at their highest development, a mature, wise, good, vital 50+ man or woman. I knew a dynamic, spiritual woman in her late sixties, another one in her eighties. They both reminded me of a female God the Father carrying personal authority and full of love and kindness and approachable.
To me saying God is NOT like a man – Our Father in Heaven - is dumbing God down, making God less than what he is, flattening the divine out, a less than human gas. In a true sense since humans are made in the divine image, humaness is intrinsic to God, God is even MORE human than we are, as our humanity is but an image of that which is being imaged. though divine humanity is an infinite multidimensional cube compared to our simple flat squares. God is even more perfectly human than us who are echoes, a flatter image of him.
There is much wisdom and truth in Michelangelo’s and William Blake’s depictions of God as a dynamic, active, wise older man. Far from being simplifications of God they point to his personal depth, his danger, his joy and love and perfect humanness and the familiarity and commonality we encounter when we meet him for he is like us for we are patterned after him.
(I realize and respect that in Orthodox Iconography depiction of the Father is frowned upon)
In all this talk of a wild Christianity I see no talk of the wild spiritual life of Jesus had with God the Father. A wild life we can also have as being fellow sons of God filled with the Holy Spirit – John 1:12, Galatians 3:26, 4:6. A wild Christianity with the Father because it is empowered by the Holy Spirit doesn’t need nature immersion to happen, though having the privilege of nature immersion I suppose may be a useful adjunct for many. After all when Jesus gave prayer instructions in Matthew 6 he said to close the door to your room!, not to go forest bathing.
When you look at the actual spirituality espoused by Jesus and practiced by him in the Gospels it is utterly unfashionable by those who look to non-dual awareness, and “Christ Consciousness” "ground of being” as the ticket. No, nothing as ethereal as that! A Father in heaven, “pray to your Father who is there unseen”. Jesus was by no means ashamed of the old man and talked about and to him a whole lot. God speaking in an audible voice, expectation of specific even miraculous answers to prayer, lifting eyes in prayer, a robust intensely personal God the Father that isn’t you, but you can know, and directly know his love for you as an individual.
Jesus on the cross cried out “My God, my God why have you forsaken me” far from being a cry of abandonment it was act of teaching and prophetic proclamation – which was a part of his job at the time, it was a quote from the first line of Psalm 22 which contains prophecy of what was happening at the moment, and was a statement of deep faith and knowing.
I could go on and on with more examples from all over the Bible of this wonderful dualistic experience of the Living God. The Father made us as individual humans and intends to keep us that way. This is all very childlike as Jesus says we are to be. I know vigorous attempts have been made to squeeze this knowing of the Father and the Biblical record into a new orthodoxy of a “wiser” quasi-Buddhism.
However The final state presented as the ultimate is us embodied as individual humans even as Jesus is now, in the presence of God, in a new physical creation of multiplicity, filled with the Holy Spirit, not generic vanilla pudding non-duality. Sounds like fun to me, which all children delight in.
By William Blake - we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice. . . . . . And round the tent of God like lambs we joy . . .
To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee.
God, you just never stop. Almost the yard entire of Christendom has been the playground of your jovial, wise older man. Where is Zipporah when you need her, blade to phallus, just a bit of the edge of the murderous singularity of the demand for one image, over and over and over.
Anyone with a balanced diet doesn't feel the sweats when some meals are passed without a usually present staple. The addict on the other hand must have the one thing in every serving or else the shivers.
As fifty something year older man I assure you my own image creeps into the divine, almost effortlessly, at every turn. In the tradition of my people that you seem to think you own there has always been a contention around all of this. The woman and the animal excised by the majority, at least since Jeremiah, and those holy under currents always finding there seep back in, not from compromise, only fools read the writing on the wall upside down.
The misogyny and the human exclusivism is what makes the vanilla pudding, the mind on one metaphor.
Name Blake as if but no way he stands with you here, not on this side of all that has unfolded since.
Anyone who reads that moment on the cross as play acting to teach misunderstands how myth works in the human that He was, how David there could be embodied to summon something beyond the torture of Empire and the very real terror of the body at that point. Your need for a G-d who cannot need is palpable but as foreign as the litero-certain you bathe in while thumbing you nose to the very rare gathering of interest in Yeshua that isn't your Man-ing up, down, in , out ...Man everywhere G-d is.
I think this is like half a dozen places you run this pray in your closet not the woods schtick on these threads. Its bullshit dude. The context was about something completely other happening in the community. This isn't midrash, its a headlock. Almost no one on these threads is actually pumping the homogenized spirit without viscera that you set up as a straw man. Carry on if you want but ths is a note to tell your whining about the poor neglected image of the man is Quixote vs Windmill shit. The church is your oyster, baby. Has been for centuries. Why hang out in the corner waiting to roll us, She-God peasants. Between us we barely have a siddur long enough to pass one night outside songs of phallus and city.
OK, I'm not as fired up as you are -- and I think Jeff had something real to say here worth a second read or two -- but I will agree that the "go to your closet, not the woods" theme -- which has appeared before -- is a pretty irritating misnomer. Jeff -- the Father created the whole more-than-human living world for a reason, bro! "Go to your closet and pray" said by someone who spends most of his time walking the hills of Yisrael, praising the lilies of the field, can't mean exactly what you think it means when we're dying here in this horizon-to-horizon urban wasteland of almost nothing but closets...
I think what is essential and the most nourishing in the Holy Spirit is what is available in all places and times. For many people be it those embedded in the moneyed tech world or a miserable urban slum nature immersion is not readily available and is a privilege and at best a possible adjunct to knowing God. Are they shut out from the fullness of the Holy Spirit? So I guess I am irritated by what comes across to me as privileged people having the luxury of nature exposure. How strange that was once the background of human life is inaccessible to so many!
I have had that wonder of nature immersion since earliest childhood, surrounded by the lilies of the field in a hands on relationship with streams, fields forests, the sky and weather and am even paid now to be in that space as part of my employment. I tell my students that part of their generation’s mission is to restore and heal and enrich the biosphere.
I have found that the invisible Christ Jesus is the source of ultimate life not the glories and wonders of the created order, blessings though they be. Yes, nature points to and is an expression of God, and I think of Orthodox Father Roman Braga meeting God in windowless solitary confinement. Straight up knowing of God in you and with you as you being the temple of the Holy Spirit is the core gift and discipline as Jesus said, “but only one thing is needed” and focusing on that one thing is key, the rest being gifts met along the way. Seek first the kingdom of God which is “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” “the Spirit of power, love and of a sound mind” “God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” Ps 73:26.
I guess I am not as impressed with the lilies of the field as some are. Been there, done that, still like them though, talk to trees even and exult in the clouds and sky.
So much salt and light here! I could read these sort of conversations all day. The sympathetic vibration between the two of you harmonizes well and begs for more instruments to join the symphony.
After reading Mircea Eliades book on shamanism I saw how we have patholigized peoples differences rather than encouraging those differences as gifts. I think Martin Shaw understands this and why he often uses the word Shaman in a positive way. He'll probably get in trouble from those who have become religious pillars of salt and fluorescent lights. In premodern, aboriginal cultures things like autism or schizophrenia would have made someone a shaman. Their unique gifts of seeing and feeling would have made them guides. The machine aura is predictability and control which tends toward too much order and not enough beauty. A home is not a frame, walls and a roof, but all of the potential to fill that space with careful attention. I believe that we have a collective intuition of sorts that is crying for the feminine beauty to hold the machine in a balance. Historic trends like the feminist movement seem to be attempts at this, but rather than it being a celebration of the deepest feminine sensibilities, its mostly angry women throwing rocks at men. Rather than celebrating and demanding that feminine attributes like mothering, beauty, creativity, intuition etc become more central to our ethos as a culture, we have "women's healthcare", which is code for "the right to not be a mother". I could go on and on about ways our culture needs guides like Grant, Natasha and Martin Shaw to help us respond appropriately to these deep, collective impulses toward the good the true and the beautiful. You are our prophets of earth, water, wind and fire. You may even have to live outside and cook food on a fire of your own feces, to wake up the general cultural audience. Become our holy fools and keep writing beautiful things!
Beautiful, Blake! Amazing!
Also "He'll probably get in trouble from those who have become religious pillars of salt and fluorescent lights" was brilliant.
And "A home is not a frame, walls and a roof, but all of the potential to fill that space with careful attention" is something I've felt, and wanted to say, but didn't know how to say it, and you say it perfectly here -- that's it exactly.
Such profound truth to meditate on.
I wonder what it would be like to take that incisive, compassionate vision of home, and to think again about what it meant that the first followers of Yeshua met in homes -- and about what that could mean for us, who are looking for home once again...
(Also, have you read Christopher Alexander?...)
I have not, but I suspect I should. Do you have a recommendation?
You definitely should! Just start with "Making the Garden," a short essay of his in First Things, freely available. Pretty much everything is there in that little essay. But I finally got -- after many years (and when I still had a job) -- all four volumes of his out-of-print Nature of Order, and it's hard to describe how good and important it is. I kid you not, if this house burns down, I'm grabbing my kids and those four books.
Living in Bali where books are hard to come by I am a devotee of Internet Archive. archive.org Nature of Order is available to read online, a four volume book. Join, feed Nature of Order into the search engine and give occasional donations.
Great stuff to sit with here, Natasha and Graham. A friend who cannot subscribe for lack of connection and, most nights, fingers upon her limbs was intrigued yet also a bit hurt. I think she misunderstood a coulple comments of Graham's, not knowing him as well as I. She asked me to pass this along.
Greetings gatherers of extracts and flowers, you citizens of empire gone to its rest. It did hurt a bit to hear my own kind turned out a bit from such a fetching exchange. I cannot speak from my hearth kin. It is the burning season and as such we two peoples keep a distance (understandable I am sure) until the buds return and the cinder is returned as payment to the roots but we, spirits of the trees, are as much enmeshed with the feasts of the Galilean peasant as any primate from what we have seen. It isn't a question of Pan's death but of the human waking to his confusion in kneeling before a sibling.
Enchantment is the singing within. Why one would ever wish for an end to music, the wind-words in leaf, promises of water circling through the channels, is beyond me but none of us can pick what sort of thuggery will sit in the chairs built from our pith. Even the timber of the God-man can be nailed to nonsense I guess. I don't blame you for so-called Chrisitians first dreamed that they alone peopled the earth and then sought to make their dreams come true. But I do think you might want to take it easy on the tinkerbell jabs. You primates have so few friends in the dark these days. And the nightlights of yours may prove less eternal than your people had promised. Surely, having seen the vapid portrayals of the magic with which you are deeply familar, you know better than to dip your brush in that ink of diminshment. I think the problem is not too many words about faerie from the vapid but too few thoughts about the diversity of the angelic among the companeras.
Rumors of disenchantment are similar to claims of being without a god. Everyone is in-filled with song. Some filter out all other voices but that of their own kind, prefering a solo akin to monologue while others let in the symphony. The fruit of the former is the city as opposed to the forest which, of course, is where my people make our stand.
In that quote from Weight of Glory Lewis, I think, does seem to be suggesting that world is a synonym for earth with the opposite of them both being, I suppose, heaven. All I know of that is my people do not live in your world, or partake in your worldliness, but we certainly share the earth with you, if share is a word that can be applied to how your species relates to much of anything these last centuries. In the mother tongue of that brown-eyed peasant of note, the root of the word for tree is also that of counselor?
Tell your friend I literally worship the ground she walks on (very slowly). Tell your friend I literally hug and kiss her leafy kindred as little messiahs, as the green faces of the Holy One -- literally. Tell your friend that the kitsch language of reenchantment is, in my mind, a desecration, a loud game we play in front of her kind, instead of listening in silence -- but that I am also impulsive, intuitive, and immature, and tend to overreact at the slightest thing, not only throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but throwing the bathroom from the house, the house from the cliff, the cliff from the mountainside, the mountainside from the majestic range.
Don't tell my Orthodox friends this, but I'm actually pretty confident that trees are intelligent and have feelings. I regularly ask them to pray for me, in the way that a much better Orthodox person would constantly be asking saints to pray for them. For me, though, I can see a tree when it's right here; when I hug it, I can feel it's presence, I don't have to imagine anything -- unlike with saints for me, where everything has to be imagined, starting with only an unsmiling plywood [=dead tree] icon as raw material. The last thing I want to do is to have to project some kind of kitsch image onto a tree and interact with that image instead of the tree itself...
We hear you, Buddy. I wonder if all is projection and kitsch in my basket though. Until very recently in the human experience, the shamanic (for want of a better word) was about a crossing over from the human world to world of tree or deer or river. The sense was that in each world the subject was *the* people of that world and in to be a good guest was to take on that form to both learn from and be better "'heard" in a sense. It was about both good manners and expert technique, much less about dress-up or kitsch. The idea that the ability to exchange shoes was reciprocal, that a tree might take human form be better met in our world just seemed a fair esimation of the equality of their personhood. Of course this is a weak generalization of many more nuanced particulars. But just as all that wander aren't lost, all that shift shapes aren't kitsch. The shape shift, to be mutable in order to be made know is at the center of this gig, yes?
I get what you are on about. I just think everything full and round has an empty and flat version and the point of the journey across is to go in to meet the former. We almost always become aquainted with the latter first and, in that disappointment, many a real meeting never comes. Maybe. I don't know.
Naw, man -- I hope it didn't sound like I'm accusing you or your dryad friends or dryad-loving friends of any projection or kitsch. You and your ilk are definitely not the man of straw I'm flailing and wailing about here or in the conversation with Natasha above; you know I want to see the world how you do, and in the moments I'm able to -- via reading your poetry, when it finally clicks -- I am happy. As usual, I'm using language in a careless way, so it's confusing. For me reenchantment refers to recent escapees from hardcore left-brained materialism waxing eloquent about symbolic this, faerie that, saint so-and-so...when it's all been just atoms and void for so long, it can seem wondrous that everything is full of sparkle again. And it is possible to throw oneself into an even deeper sickness. The ancient shamanic peoples -- I let them be; they were in tune with the infinite non-human worlds in ways I will never be. When I repeat the early Christian epiphany "the great god Pan is dead" I am not talking about these honorable ancestors of ours. I'm talking about the classical pagan world -- the tired, tired, overextended world of the twilight of the idea of world empire -- which was particularly wrapped up in anxiety and dread, their heads cluttered with omens and easily offended gods. The world in which, at any moment, pandemonium could send your lost little human heart through the meatgrinder of over-elaborated histrionic over-religious sensibility. That the great god Pan had overnight been exposed as nothing was first of all a great *relief.* And now it seems like many people want to go back to a world where a demon could be lurking anywhere, a saint could be miffed at the slightest disrespect at his local shrine or whatever...
What I want to do when I stand before a tree is see the tree -- as much as possible (knowing that some projection, and some imagination, is inevitable). That's not a materialist stance rejecting the possibility of a tree having inner life -- I'm convinced that everything is alive to a degree and that trees especially have inner life, personhood even. To quote Kerouac again: "The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual life is. All these people thinking they're hardheaded materialistic practical types, they don't know shit about matter, their heads are full of dreamy ideas and notions. Look, there's a pigeon..."
Just digging for sense, my friend. One thing I promise this is never about is what is being said about me. I am work in progress, implicated in a hundred ways to forget how many others are around us everyday, and not really even more than ankle deep in the work owed.
It is all about the carrying of the words on all this forward to light the ruins we have made of being together. I do poke around in language to see who is under the tongue, my own included but not in a way you need worry about insult or some business. Jeff riles me because of what that work has done in the world and because it is a drive to end what's mutable, to lock out natality from the Word, which is how it would die. And sometimes I am just a bit of an asshole when I am tired.
Me too, man...my wife says I yell incendiary things into the air, when really what I mean to do is ask questions of actual people.
I have this overwhelming intuition that there is a way to describe things, that there are words out there that can be said as a bridge of life back and forth between myself and the myriad things beyond words, and that there is a way for words to create functioning community, and the feeling of those words being forever on the tip of the tongue sparks some real tongue-lashings from me...
Yeah, to the extent that anyone's trying to shut down life-giving, open, shifting horizons, for the sake of the known, but lifeless, quantities -- that makes me mad. And sad and frustrated. We're dying here, man, and that makes me interested in one thing: bold moves, insane creativity, total openness.
(I have issues...)
welcome home
Man, I love your words! We need you!
AGREE.