Such a great, evocative and poetic essay. As I read it the words that kept coming to me were "Thy will, not my will". And what does that mean? How do I do Thy will? As you ponder your forest platform and move your stones to their right.place what is it that moves you? Moving from the mind into the heart? You wrote "Something more than a common political cause binding us together is needed—something that transforms the depths of the human heart, aligning it with the Creator's great cosmic dance, in ways that the mind can never fully understand—while also ushering the cosmos itself closer and closer to our own hearts, in the reciprocal movement of love." Is this forest liturgy the cosmic love heart vessal of Thy will? Was there a great sense of surrender in the hearts of the archimandrites, bishops, monks in the gulags? And they were grateful for their enprisonment! Creating the forest liturgy to open the heart more and more to surrender? I thank you for this and for telling the story of Father Pavel. I looked him up and am amazed by the stories of him, and this lead to more and more stories of saints in the gulags. Are we on the throbbing edge of Thy will when we are banished like Nebuchadnezzar to crawl on our hands and knees through the dewy grasses and forced to surrender?
A biome tilted toward the delight of wild donkeys...That is an order I could apprentice into. Lovely longing here, Graham. Even your taste in holy fathers, threadbare and grubby yet starlit, can subvert my normal aversions. Peace and salut this looking-for.
I hear you, Graham. But consider that our reality has no intrinsic properties. Reality exists, but existence is not a property. Human beings - and all life, really, have evolved by imposing properties on reality that are relevant to their survival as individuals and as a species. We notice things like taste, smell, heat, length, colour, texture, etc, but these properties are generated by our brain and do not exist outside of it.
So reality exists, but what it is is a mystery. We are evolved to survive and not to see the truth. I find Don Hoffman's book 'The case against reality' really helpful in my attempts to understand some of this conditioning.
So for me agonising about the downfall of Babylon and the Capitalist Patriarchy is strictly a product of this mind-construct and has nothing to do with finding out the Truth about reality. For that we need to go inwards, not outside.
I wish I can find a way back to the wordless wonder at what is; the colour blue or a spring flower.
I sense that wild joy in your tales of the barefoot tree dwelling Fathers of Siberia and I wish you would write more about them? It seems to me that worship, poetry and joy are the clearest pointers towards God.
"Yeshua came bearing another world in his heart—deeply rooted in Eden, the world his Father made in the beginning—which he planted in our fallen world like a seed, by living and dying for us in our world, with eyes and arms open to all its brutality and ugliness. His “work” in our world was rest—Sabbath rest, childlike trust in the Father, to the point of death—and now this new world of his grows like flowers from the concrete of the old one (to borrow an image from Tupac Shakur's poetry) and will never stop growing, no matter how bad things get (cf. Lk 13:18-20)."
This is beautiful and excellent. For all the cogitating and philosophizing about the world and its manifold crises what gets lost is the deep poetry of things. Even for good Plato's profound dialectic--which inspires in me love--it is the likes of the Parable of Cave that hits the deepest. We forget that at our own peril. Actually, we obviously already have. We need to get the poetry right, or the rest is kind of moot.
For the record, if you were to be inclined to do a version of the Gospels and the Psalms, I would definitely purchase it. Just saying.
Yes! It takes a heart of a poet to see the Real/the Beauty beneath the banality and beyond the actual. Your style reminds me a lot of Rubem Alves. His little book „The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet” ,which I read and reread for more than twenty years, is astonishing insightful (if you did not already read it, which you maybe should). Anyway, your approach convinced me once more about the fact that, in the words of the Romanian Hieromonk Rafail Noica (a spiritual son of blessed Sophrony of Essex) „Orthodoxy is the very nature of the Man.”
Concerning the example you mentioned, of Father Pavel Gruzdev, there are some stories from Romanian gulags with prisoners performing the Holy Liturgy on the chest of the most pure, or the most hard convicted of them. Only with a grape seed bring by a bird in the cell and some dry crumbs of bread. With a filthy t-shirt hiding on the inner side a little piece of relics or a used handkerchief as Holy Antimision and an empty box of medicines scrounged from the sick ward, for the Holy Cup...
Thanks for your thorough reply, Graham, I appreciate it!
That's a radical and beatiful vision! Do you have a word for this process of God making this world divine?
As for me, I'm not formally a Christian but a Gaudiya Vaishnava (Hare Krishna in common parlance). Hope this doesn't offend you or otherwise freak you out. I feel a lot of affinity with Orthodox Christianity, as many of my fellow Vaishnavas do also, and find value in learning about Orthodoxy and exploring common ground (as well as points of divergence). I come with folded hands, bowing down before your great tradition with love and respect.
Isn't what you are sketching here still a mundane achievement? Didn't our beloved Yeshua come to dispel precisely this type of mundane vision of the Kingdom of God when He said "My Kingdom is not of this world"? In my understanding, this is not a vision of a better life on Earth, even as a gift from God and not a human creation, but an altogether transcendental experience of the imperishable soul ("He gave them eternal life... ") beyond this world of matter and death.
I was also surprised to find an evolutionary account of the appearance of man on Earth. Don't you believe man was created by God in his own image?
Excellent as expected. I especially appreciated this passage:
"God's radical kingdom cannot be constructed following a blueprint; it cannot be assembled by semi-autonomous swarms of nanobots, no matter how intelligent. It cannot be mapped out as a political program; it cannot be encapsulated by lists of priorities and values; it cannot be consciously organized in any way. All that is human, all-too-human history in the usual sense—little more than building ziggurats, only to watch them vanish under the sands of time. No: As a living organism, it is and always will be beyond the human mind and its dreams of technological control."
The only thing I might have added would've been something along the lines of God's Kingdom also not being achieved *merely* through finding the "right kind" of ritual or spiritual action.
What I don't mean to do is denigrate all ritual/liturgy, because God clearly commanded to be worshipped in certain ways. Rather, this is a call-back to the actions of the ancient pagans, where to be successful in ritual magic or in appeasing their capricious gods through sacrifice and hospitality did not entail having the right interior disposition, but rather in merely getting the steps of the ritual correct: a proper execution of the spiritual algorithm. It was blatant spiritual technology, meant to get the spiritual forces/beings to give them what they wanted. Again, it was about, in this case communal, self-desire and how to achieve it; it was not about being properly ordered toward Love.
I mention this because there is a significant subset of people, properly disillusioned by our attempts at control -- be it from political policy or through or through technological applications of our Baconian science -- that stem from our reductionistic, mechanistic, disenchanted materialism, which they are also disillusioned with, that deliberately embrace ritual magic explicitly as a form of spiritual technology in their attempts to re-enchant their world. I also say it, because it shows that all that is unique to modernity is simply a different or more intense manifestation of this deeper human tendency that directly resulted in our Fall. (And you have talked about this last part, though focusing more on how people were used in ancient times.)
This is beautiful, Graham, and I’m looking forward to reading where the “way of the forest” takes you.
I’m on a not so dissimilar path, on some acres in rural Montana, groping along, making the turn, something like a secular hesychasm or asceticism the intention if not yet the reality. I’m not one that thinks the horrifying persecutions that the believers in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe suffered before disappearing into the catacombs and forests is coming to America. Not in a materially corresponding way. That said, I do recognize that capitalism such as it is practiced here, is as much a cult as bolshevism was, a fraud religion, a hoax salvation, and it is bearing down with wicked resolve now. The spiritual intention of each system however seems to me indistinguishable, the destruction of our reaching towards eternity with every portion and in every moment of our lives here in this world, making of it a part time pursuit (at best) rather than the breath of life. Thus, it is best to vanish as much as possible and set up camp somewhere away from capitalism’s centers, in the forests, the caves, the wildernesses (or what’s left of them, they are largely symbolic after the mad rush of the machine over the last hundred or so years). And there fashion our faith and our reaching towards eternity as intimately and profoundly as we can and as the grace of God allows.
"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
—Shelley, "Ozymandias"
Such a great, evocative and poetic essay. As I read it the words that kept coming to me were "Thy will, not my will". And what does that mean? How do I do Thy will? As you ponder your forest platform and move your stones to their right.place what is it that moves you? Moving from the mind into the heart? You wrote "Something more than a common political cause binding us together is needed—something that transforms the depths of the human heart, aligning it with the Creator's great cosmic dance, in ways that the mind can never fully understand—while also ushering the cosmos itself closer and closer to our own hearts, in the reciprocal movement of love." Is this forest liturgy the cosmic love heart vessal of Thy will? Was there a great sense of surrender in the hearts of the archimandrites, bishops, monks in the gulags? And they were grateful for their enprisonment! Creating the forest liturgy to open the heart more and more to surrender? I thank you for this and for telling the story of Father Pavel. I looked him up and am amazed by the stories of him, and this lead to more and more stories of saints in the gulags. Are we on the throbbing edge of Thy will when we are banished like Nebuchadnezzar to crawl on our hands and knees through the dewy grasses and forced to surrender?
A biome tilted toward the delight of wild donkeys...That is an order I could apprentice into. Lovely longing here, Graham. Even your taste in holy fathers, threadbare and grubby yet starlit, can subvert my normal aversions. Peace and salut this looking-for.
I hear you, Graham. But consider that our reality has no intrinsic properties. Reality exists, but existence is not a property. Human beings - and all life, really, have evolved by imposing properties on reality that are relevant to their survival as individuals and as a species. We notice things like taste, smell, heat, length, colour, texture, etc, but these properties are generated by our brain and do not exist outside of it.
So reality exists, but what it is is a mystery. We are evolved to survive and not to see the truth. I find Don Hoffman's book 'The case against reality' really helpful in my attempts to understand some of this conditioning.
So for me agonising about the downfall of Babylon and the Capitalist Patriarchy is strictly a product of this mind-construct and has nothing to do with finding out the Truth about reality. For that we need to go inwards, not outside.
I wish I can find a way back to the wordless wonder at what is; the colour blue or a spring flower.
I sense that wild joy in your tales of the barefoot tree dwelling Fathers of Siberia and I wish you would write more about them? It seems to me that worship, poetry and joy are the clearest pointers towards God.
"Yeshua came bearing another world in his heart—deeply rooted in Eden, the world his Father made in the beginning—which he planted in our fallen world like a seed, by living and dying for us in our world, with eyes and arms open to all its brutality and ugliness. His “work” in our world was rest—Sabbath rest, childlike trust in the Father, to the point of death—and now this new world of his grows like flowers from the concrete of the old one (to borrow an image from Tupac Shakur's poetry) and will never stop growing, no matter how bad things get (cf. Lk 13:18-20)."
Amen.
Graham-
This is beautiful and excellent. For all the cogitating and philosophizing about the world and its manifold crises what gets lost is the deep poetry of things. Even for good Plato's profound dialectic--which inspires in me love--it is the likes of the Parable of Cave that hits the deepest. We forget that at our own peril. Actually, we obviously already have. We need to get the poetry right, or the rest is kind of moot.
For the record, if you were to be inclined to do a version of the Gospels and the Psalms, I would definitely purchase it. Just saying.
Anyway, I hope this finds you well. -Jack
It has been much too long since I laid on the ground to sleep. Oh Lord restore my trust in Your Goodness, Amen!
Yes! It takes a heart of a poet to see the Real/the Beauty beneath the banality and beyond the actual. Your style reminds me a lot of Rubem Alves. His little book „The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet” ,which I read and reread for more than twenty years, is astonishing insightful (if you did not already read it, which you maybe should). Anyway, your approach convinced me once more about the fact that, in the words of the Romanian Hieromonk Rafail Noica (a spiritual son of blessed Sophrony of Essex) „Orthodoxy is the very nature of the Man.”
Concerning the example you mentioned, of Father Pavel Gruzdev, there are some stories from Romanian gulags with prisoners performing the Holy Liturgy on the chest of the most pure, or the most hard convicted of them. Only with a grape seed bring by a bird in the cell and some dry crumbs of bread. With a filthy t-shirt hiding on the inner side a little piece of relics or a used handkerchief as Holy Antimision and an empty box of medicines scrounged from the sick ward, for the Holy Cup...
Have a blessed Sunday!
Thanks for your thorough reply, Graham, I appreciate it!
That's a radical and beatiful vision! Do you have a word for this process of God making this world divine?
As for me, I'm not formally a Christian but a Gaudiya Vaishnava (Hare Krishna in common parlance). Hope this doesn't offend you or otherwise freak you out. I feel a lot of affinity with Orthodox Christianity, as many of my fellow Vaishnavas do also, and find value in learning about Orthodoxy and exploring common ground (as well as points of divergence). I come with folded hands, bowing down before your great tradition with love and respect.
Greetings from mother India!
Isn't what you are sketching here still a mundane achievement? Didn't our beloved Yeshua come to dispel precisely this type of mundane vision of the Kingdom of God when He said "My Kingdom is not of this world"? In my understanding, this is not a vision of a better life on Earth, even as a gift from God and not a human creation, but an altogether transcendental experience of the imperishable soul ("He gave them eternal life... ") beyond this world of matter and death.
I was also surprised to find an evolutionary account of the appearance of man on Earth. Don't you believe man was created by God in his own image?
Excellent as expected. I especially appreciated this passage:
"God's radical kingdom cannot be constructed following a blueprint; it cannot be assembled by semi-autonomous swarms of nanobots, no matter how intelligent. It cannot be mapped out as a political program; it cannot be encapsulated by lists of priorities and values; it cannot be consciously organized in any way. All that is human, all-too-human history in the usual sense—little more than building ziggurats, only to watch them vanish under the sands of time. No: As a living organism, it is and always will be beyond the human mind and its dreams of technological control."
The only thing I might have added would've been something along the lines of God's Kingdom also not being achieved *merely* through finding the "right kind" of ritual or spiritual action.
What I don't mean to do is denigrate all ritual/liturgy, because God clearly commanded to be worshipped in certain ways. Rather, this is a call-back to the actions of the ancient pagans, where to be successful in ritual magic or in appeasing their capricious gods through sacrifice and hospitality did not entail having the right interior disposition, but rather in merely getting the steps of the ritual correct: a proper execution of the spiritual algorithm. It was blatant spiritual technology, meant to get the spiritual forces/beings to give them what they wanted. Again, it was about, in this case communal, self-desire and how to achieve it; it was not about being properly ordered toward Love.
I mention this because there is a significant subset of people, properly disillusioned by our attempts at control -- be it from political policy or through or through technological applications of our Baconian science -- that stem from our reductionistic, mechanistic, disenchanted materialism, which they are also disillusioned with, that deliberately embrace ritual magic explicitly as a form of spiritual technology in their attempts to re-enchant their world. I also say it, because it shows that all that is unique to modernity is simply a different or more intense manifestation of this deeper human tendency that directly resulted in our Fall. (And you have talked about this last part, though focusing more on how people were used in ancient times.)
Thank you Graham. Your essay makes me recall words from French writer, Gaston Bachelard:
"The world seeks to be admired by you.” Your essay serves the world well.
This is beautiful, Graham, and I’m looking forward to reading where the “way of the forest” takes you.
I’m on a not so dissimilar path, on some acres in rural Montana, groping along, making the turn, something like a secular hesychasm or asceticism the intention if not yet the reality. I’m not one that thinks the horrifying persecutions that the believers in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe suffered before disappearing into the catacombs and forests is coming to America. Not in a materially corresponding way. That said, I do recognize that capitalism such as it is practiced here, is as much a cult as bolshevism was, a fraud religion, a hoax salvation, and it is bearing down with wicked resolve now. The spiritual intention of each system however seems to me indistinguishable, the destruction of our reaching towards eternity with every portion and in every moment of our lives here in this world, making of it a part time pursuit (at best) rather than the breath of life. Thus, it is best to vanish as much as possible and set up camp somewhere away from capitalism’s centers, in the forests, the caves, the wildernesses (or what’s left of them, they are largely symbolic after the mad rush of the machine over the last hundred or so years). And there fashion our faith and our reaching towards eternity as intimately and profoundly as we can and as the grace of God allows.