In this post I’m more cranky than usual, so I invite you to read with compassion rather than judgment — for your own sake, never mind mine.
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Where’s the real “Good News”, Jesus? Why is it so hard to find it in the churches with your name attached? Saints still appear, but more often in spite of Christendom than because of it. “Jerusalem, we have a problem”. (The problem, of course, is limited human consciousness, not the example of spiritual mentors and teachers, whom we keep deifying rather than actually following. Slow learners, all of us.)
“Be not simply good but good for something”, Henry David Thoreau exhorts his readers. Like what, Henry?
“A Christian must be esoteric!” exclaims Father Heinz Naab, in David Lindholm’s article, “Meeting a Modern Druid Christian in the Garden of Delights“. But what that esotericism means is left to the spiritual discretion of the seeker.
“The practice of sacramental spirituality can be pursued apart from the various pathologies of political religion”, notes John Michael Greer in his essay “The Gnostic Celtic Church“. In sacrament rather than creed lies one potent meeting-place for Druid and Christian.
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In Christian tradition, Jesus is about 33 when completes his mission, dying on a Roman cross and afterward appearing to his followers, still spiritually alive. His “actual” age matters less than its metaphorical value, just as dogma matters less than experience. In Christian and Jewish terms, he was the right age to enter the priesthood (see Numbers 4:3).
In terms of the tarot, that much disputed and profoundly useful tool, we can gain further perspective. With Caitlin and John Matthews’ version, the Hallowquest Arthurian deck, the numerological practice of adding the numbers of his age together gives us 6, the card of Taliesin (who assumes forms human and animal before he is devoured by Ceridwen and nine months later is born again as the future bard). A fruitful theme for meditation — I could, for instance, see Taliesin as an avatar of the divine incarnating in creation, a model for human transformation through spiritual practice.
Or we can add the 11 years’ difference between the 22nd and last card of a traditional deck and Jesus’ age, and taking a second passage through the deck, arrive at the 11th card, which in Matthews’ version is the Round Table.
Da Vinci, “The Last Supper”. Wikipedia — public domain
So many of the paintings depicting the Last Supper present Jesus not at the head of the table, but at its center, fulfilling his words (John 15:15) and dissolving the distance between them: “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you”.
And the medieval Round Table, which the 13th century French poet Robert de Boron‘s Merlin creates in conscious imitation of that Passover table of Jesus and his followers, also seats 12, with an empty seat left by Judas and only to be filled when a worthy knight achieves the Grail. (In later versions of the story, it’s Sir Galahad who earns the right to sit in the Siege Perilleux, the Perilous Seat.)
Galahad taking the Perilous Seat. Painting by Evrard d’Espinques (15th c). Wikipedia public domain. Words in red: “… assist galaad au siege …”
Jesus does not establish a hierarchy but abolishes it instead. He is immanu-el — god with us, present in humanity and in the natural world. And as a model for such fellowship — no one can claim a dominant seat at a round table — the object is a fitting symbol. Merging human and divine in his own person, Jesus offers a powerful exemplar. This is how creation is healed: we manifest our true identity instead of cowering behind our imagined powerlessness. For we are fearful of nearly everything — the future, the world, disease, death, and each other perhaps most of all. “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18).
We see how distant we are from such manifestation if we attempt it through such avenues as “identity politics” today, for this spiritual achievement is precisely what politics of any sort can never deliver. Nor, in the end, is it intended to, though “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” fail without the spirit. (Humans as political animals have had long enough, after all: centuries, millennia! And nothing better within “Christian states” than non-Christian ones. Advantages of geography and resources, yes. But does anyone sane imagine America as a “fully Christian nation” (in the terms its Dominionist advocates propose) could provide such consciousness?)
Instead we have a model, a guide and a set of images from a blend of Druid and Christian sources that point toward a profound spiritual practice common to both traditions. But if we would follow it, we also need to hear the scale of things where it happens most readily: “where two or three are gathered together in the name of divinity in creation …” Let what we incarnate today be a sacrament that we share with others we meet.
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Images: Last Supper; Siege Perilleux/Perilous Seat, by Evrard d’Espinques (fl. 1440-1494), Wikipedia public domain.
A Druid Way 
