An altar is an important element of very many spiritualities around the world. It gives a structure to space, and orients the practitioner, the worshipper, the participant (and any observers) to objects, symbols and energies. It’s a spiritual signpost, a landmark for identifying and entering sacred space. It accomplishes this without words, simply by existing. The red color of the Taoist altar below immediately alerts the eye to its importance and energy.
As a center of ritual action and visual attention, an altar is positioned to draw the eye as much as any other sense. In Christian churches like the one below, everything is subordinated to the Cross and the altar immediately below it. Church architecture typically highlights this focus through symmetry and lighting. But in every case, enter the sacred space which an altar delineates, and it tells you what matters by how it is shaped and ordered and organized.
Part of OBOD* training is the establishment and maintenance of a personal altar as part of regular spiritual practice. Here’s a Druid altar spread on a tabletop. Nothing “mundane” or arbitrary occupies the space — everything has ritual or spiritual purpose and significance to its creator.
Such obviously physical objects and actions and their appeal to the senses as aids in spiritual practice all spring from human necessity. We need the grounding of our practices in the physical world of words, acts and sensations in order to “bring them home to us,” and make them real or “thingly,” which is what “real” (from Latin res “thing”) means.
Religions and spiritual teachings accomplish this in rich and diverse ways. We have only to think of Christian baptism, communion and the imposition of ashes at Easter; Hindu prasad and tilak; Jewish bris/brit (circumcision) and tallit (prayer shawl) and so on.
Atheists who focus exclusively on belief in their critiques and debates thus forget the very real, concrete and physical aspects of religious and spiritual practice which invest actions, objects and words with spiritual meaning that cannot be dismissed merely by pointing out any logical or rational cracks in a set of beliefs. Though you may present “evidence that God doesn’t exist” that seems irrefutable to you, you haven’t even begun to touch the beauty of an altar or spiritual structure, the warmth of a religious community of people you know and worship with, the power of a liturgy, the smell of incense, the tastes of ritual meals, the sounds of ritual music and song.
Just as we hear people describe themselves as “spiritual without being religious” as they struggle to sift forms of religion from the supposed “heart” of spirituality, plenty of so-called “believers” are “religious without being spiritual.” The forms of their spiritual and religious practice are rich with association, memory and community, and can be as important as — or more so than — a particular creed or set of beliefs.
Having said all of this, I’ve had a set of experiences that incline me away from erecting a physical altar for my Druid practice. So I’m working toward a solution to the spiritual “problem” this presents. Let me approach it indirectly. Once again, and hardly surprising to anyone who’s followed this blog or is as bookish as I am, the trail runs through books.
Damiano, the first volume in a fabulous (and sadly under-known) trilogy by R. A. MacAvoy, and recently reissued as part of an omnibus edition called Trio for Lute, supplies an image for today’s post. Damiano Delstrego is a young Renaissance Italian who happens to be both witch and aspiring musician. His magic depends for its focus on a staff, and we see both the strengths and limitations of such magical tools in various episodes in the novel, and most particularly when he encounters a Finnish woman who practices a singing magic.
When I read the trilogy at its first publication in the 80s, the Finnish magic sans tools seemed to me much superior to “staff-based” power. (Partly in the wake of Harry Potter and the prevalence of wands and wand-wielders in the books and films, there’s a resurgence of interest in this aspect of the art, and an interesting new book just published reflecting that “tool-based” bias, titled Wandlore: the Art of Crafting the Ultimate Magical Tool).
So when I then read news of church burnings, desecrated holy sites, quests for lost spiritual objects (like the Holy Grail) and so on, the wisdom of reposing such power in a physical object seemed to me dubious at best. For whatever your own beliefs, magic energy — whether imbued by intention, Spirit, habit, the Devil, long practice, belief in a bogus or real power — keeps proving perilously vulnerable to misplacement, loss or wholesale destruction. Add to this Jesus’ observation that we are each the temple of Spirit, and my growing sense of the potential of that inner temple of contemplation — also a feature of OBOD practice — and you get my perspective.
Carrying this admitted bias with me over the years, when I came last year to the lesson in the OBOD Bardic series that introduced the personal altar, I realized I would need both contemplation and creativity to find my way.
My solution so far is a work in progress, an alpha or possibly a beta version. My altar is portable, consisting of just five small stones, one for each of the classic European five elements — four plus Spirit. Of course I have other associations, visualizations and a more elaborate (and still evolving) practice I do not share here. But you get the idea. (If you engage in a more Native-American nourished practice, you might choose seven instead: the four horizontal directions, above [the zenith], below [the nadir] and the center.)
I can pocket my altar in a flash, and re-deploy it on a minimal flat space (or — in a pinch — right on the palm of my hand). One indulgence I’ve permitted myself: the stones originate from a ritual gift, so they do in fact have personal symbolic — or magical, if you will — significance for me. But each altar ritual I do includes both an invitation for descent and re-ascent of power or imagery or magic to and away from the particular stones that represent my altar. Lose them, and others can take their place for me with minimal ritual “loss” or disruption. Time and practice will reveal whether this is a serviceable solution.
This post is already long enough, so I’ll defer till later any discussion of the fitness of elemental earth/stone standing in for the other elements.
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*OBOD — the particular “flavor” of Druidry I’m studying and practicing.
There’s elemental comfort in contemplating the woodpile in our back lean-to (and a second one outdoors) — a reassurance that reaches to the bone. Wood is our primary source of heat, and we spend about $600 a year to heat our small ranch house. Some rooms have electric baseboard which we use only minimally, when we’re away for more than a few days in winter, to save pipes from freezing. Taking a break from splitting, I stand and count days and logs, logs and days. And I give thanks to the waiting trees around our property.
Yes, it’s labor-intensive to feed a stove and keep it drawing well. If you’ve maintained a fire, you know these things, of course — I’m hardly telling you anything new. But for us the payback of wood is true solace: even when the power goes out, and no matter the windchill, we stay warm. Each log is captured sunlight, and if you’ve spent any time in wood heat, you know its delightful penetrating quality, much like sunbathing. (This winter has been mild so far for southern VT — our heaviest single snowfall clocked in at under a foot, and the thermometer dove and hovered just below zero Fahrenheit for only a couple of days last month. Today on our hilltop the mercury hit the mid-40s — briefly.)
Especially at night during a winter outage, with flames or embers our only source of illumination beyond candlelight or short bursts of flashlight, a moment’s reverie can transport us back 10,000 years to a Neolithic cave and the flicker of firelight on stone walls. You sit close to each other for added warmth, and fire-watching feels both utterly ancient and distinctly human. Then the hearth resumes its old and honored place as center of life and civilization. (Brigid, saint and goddess, patron of Candlemas and Imbolc just past, is lady of the hearth-fire.) Without heat on a bitter night, we’re each reduced to King Lear’s “thing itself … unaccommodated man … a poor, bare, forked animal.” At such times, more even than water, heat’s the immediate necessity.
When we first visited the house with a realtor on a bright, cold January day some years back, I remember thinking how much work wood heat would be. But we’ve only needed to start a fire about half a dozen times since late October, when the stove began burning steadily. Since then, the coals are almost always still hot enough in the morning to re-ignite whole logs without kindling. My wife or I wake up most nights now, in the small hours, almost taking turns without consciously planning it, to stoke the fire just once, and return to bed. And we can cook on the stove. Yes, it takes longer, but if the power’s out, time suddenly returns in abundance.
As for water, beyond our well, we have a small pond at the bottom of our yard. Again, when we first saw the property, all I thought was “mosquito breeding ground,” but I’ve come to see its multiple advantages. No, the water’s not potable (though the minnows, salamanders and frogs don’t seem to mind), but we can boil it if need be. It also serves for irrigation in a drought. Come spring, we’ll be fitting a hand pump to our well-head for water during extended power outages. (I stare at the pond now, this pale February light reducing the scene to white, gray, black, wondering how thick the ice is, how much chipping with an axe to reach the frigid liquid water.)
I record all these details in part because my wife and I spent half an hour yesterday watching clips of the new National Geographic series Doomsday Preppers, premiering next Tues., Feb. 7. While the featured families and individuals carry their preparations to extremes most of us would not, it’s perfectly sensible to maintain a store of several days’ food and drinking water in case of power outages or local natural disasters. Dried, canned and easy-to-prep foods if you have no means of cooking, rice and flour, beans and pasta if you do.
The harshness of local events in the past several months, like the drought in Texas, the severe tornadoes in the Midwest, and hurricane Irene in the Northeast, have persuaded people in ways nothing else could to consider such preparations. If heat isn’t under your control and you live in a temperate (read “cold”) zone, it’s wise to have a fall-back plan. Ditto for cooling, if your home otherwise bakes in the summer. You don’t have to expect “the end of the world as we know it” to use (as my grandmother liked to say) — “the good sense God gave gravel.”
While much is made of Americans’ dependence on electricity and foreign oil, most of us learn pretty quickly, if we have to, how to make do with wind, water, wood and fire. If you grew up in a small town, attended a summer camp, went hiking or just stayed up overnight outside a house, you have a preliminary sense of your abilities and tolerances in the natural world. It’s useful to know these, and build on them. That old sense of self-reliance that’s part of the story we tell ourselves about the “American character” is a good place to begin. And for you readers from other parts of the world, consider the equivalents in your cultures. Make it a game, especially if you have young kids. Think through your options in emergencies and disasters, and if they feel too constraining, work to expand them. We live in such varied circumstances, so no one solution will work for everybody. And that’s as it should be.
Come September, my wife and I will be back in CT, in school housing, with different contingency plans to consider.
A weekend’s reflection and planning will pay off down the road, even if they simply get you through the next minor “inconvenience” more smoothly. As the inconvenience increases, so will the payoff. Live long enough and you know from personal experience that John Lennon spoke true: life is what happens when you’re making other plans.
One of the more useful skills I’m practicing with Druidry (we all learn our lessons from many sources, in different guises and from different teachers, throughout our lives) concerns binary thinking. It’s easier to recognize when we’re not practicing it ourselves. You’re with us or you’re against us. It’s good or it’s bad. You’re young or you’re old. Hot or cold. 1% or 99%. And so on. Next door in New Hampshire, the state license plates famously read “Live free or die.”
We can get distinctly uncomfortable around ambiguity that doesn’t fall into one or the other of two neat categories. Advertisers after all market to categories, and spend time labeling both products and consumers so they can target their products. WordPress asks for tags and categories. If you have something to sell that doesn’t fit under a label, you can have a devil of a time getting it on the shelves or in front of people’s noses. Likewise, if you want to locate something that doesn’t fit a category, it can sometimes be a long challenge to track it down.
Of course, we can see plenty of this dualistic patterning in action now on a large scale in the States, and without needing to look any further than our presidential primaries. Just tune in, and you’re sure to hear some variant of the following, especially across party lines: one candidate’s or party’s ideas and proposals constitute all Goodness and Light and Upright Living, while the other threatens our very way of life. Filled with greed, selfishness, and all signs of true evil, that Evil Other will — if we make the mistake of listening to/believing in/voting for them, deliver us individually and as a nation into the hands of utter darkness, despair and destruction.
Of course the drift into binary or polar thinking doesn’t originate or end with politics. As author, blogger and Druid J. M. Greer notes, “Binaries exert a curious magnetism on the human mind. Once we get caught up in thoughts of yes or no, right or wrong, love or hate, truth or falsehood, or any other binary, it can be hard to realize that the two poles of the binary don’t contain all of reality … Druid philosophy offers a useful tactic in situations of this kind. When you encounter a binary, you simply look for a third factor that is not simply a midpoint between the two poles. Find the third factor and you convert the binary into a ternary, a balanced threefold relationship that allows freedom and flexibility.”*
We all know numerous proverbs and images of three-ness. “Third time’s the charm”; the three parts of a syllogism (thesis, antithesis and synthesis); beginning, middle and end; the Three Blind Mice; Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva; Father, Son and Holy Ghost; the examples are nearly endless. What they amount to is a widespread recognition of the liberating and creative power of Three. As the Tao Te Ching says (Ch. 42), “From the One comes Two, from the Two Three, and from the Three the Ten Thousand Things” of existence in this world. The key is not to stop at two if we want to create. Move on to three.
Greer amplifies the discussion of binary thinking in a post on his weekly blog. He notes that
… the hardwired habit of snap judgments in binary form is always right below the surface. In most cases all it takes is a certain amount of stress to trigger it. Any kind of stress will do, and over the years, practitioners of mass thaumaturgy have gotten very good at finding ways to make people feel stressed so that the binary reaction kicks in and can be manipulated to order.
That’s when thinking in binaries goes haywire, the middle ground becomes invisible, and people think, say, and do resoundingly stupid things because they can only see two extreme alternatives, one of which is charged to the bursting point with desire … or fear … Watch the way that many people on the American right these days insist that anybody to the left of George W. Bush is a socialist, or tfor that matter the way that some people on the American left insist that anybody to the right of Hillary Clinton is a fascist. Equally, and more to the point in our present context, think of the way the peak oil debate was stuck for so long in a binary that insisted that the extremes of continued progress and sudden catastrophic collapse were the only possible shapes of the postpetroleum future.
Binary thinking is evolutionarily useful, Greer notes, because it allows us to make snap judgments that can save our lives in crises. But in situations where more careful thinking is not only possible but necessary, our ancient wiring and programming can leave us stranded at one pole or another, in stalemate, with no sense of the way forward.
Greer continues, observing that (in various kinds of Druid and magical training) “Back in the day, beginning students used to be assigned the homework of picking up the morning paper each day, writing down the first nine binaries they encountered, and finding a third option to each binary.” This bit of training can offer a salutary unlocking and rebalancing of the debates of the day — or of any complex problem handicapped and hampered by sharply polarized thinking.
This useful little exercise [of identifying and expanding binaries] has at least three effects. First of all, it very quickly becomes apparent to the student just how much binary thinking goes on in the average human society. Second, it very quickly becomes at least as apparent to the student how much of an effort it takes, at least at first, to snap out of binary thinking. Third and most crucial is the discovery, which usually comes in short order, that once you find a third option, it’s very easy to find more—a fourth, a ninety-fourth, and so on—and they don’t have to fit between the two ends of the binary, as most beginners assume.
Ternary thinking isn’t just a liberating technique for the person who practices it. It carries with it a desirable ripple effect, for
… when a discussion is mired in reactive binary thinking, it only takes one person resolutely bringing up a third option over and over again, to pop at least some of the participants out of the binary trap, and get them thinking about other options. They may end up staying with the option they originally supported, but they’re more likely to do it in a reasoned way rather than an automatic, unthinking way. They’re also more likely to be able to recognize that the other sides of the debate also have their points, and to be able to find grounds for mutual cooperation, because they aren’t stuck in a mental automatism that loads a torrent of positive emotions onto their side of the balance and an equal and opposite torrent of negative emotions onto the other side.
Given how shrill our political dialog has become, and how intransigent and loath to compromise the principal players remain, we could use a healthy dose of such thinking. As one of the Wise has said, “God is what opposites have in common.” For me that means that the “truth” of a matter is less than likely to lie at either extreme of a binary, but somewhere else — not “in the middle” necessarily, as though God were a moderate or centrist deity. The Tao Te Ching also notes (somewhat wryly, I’ve often felt) that “Extremes do not last long.”
But beyond the political sphere, the ternary in other settings leads us directly to the Ten Thousand Things, the world of possibility and options and freedom. To give just one personal example, after my cancer surgery and the follow-up radiation months later, I was weak and suffering from uncomfortable and chronic internal radiation burns in the lower colon. “I’ve got to get better or I’ll have to quit my job,” I thought. “I can’t work like this,” when almost every bathroom visit brought blood and pain. Binary alert! I was able to arrange a medical leave, during which a change of diet, specific exercise, rest, an inspiring class I audited, and several new activities and spiritual practices have helped with healing.
One of the latter is the subtly powerful principle of “both-and.” Rather than stalling in a binary, embrace the whole. So often I hear people saying, “I’m so upset!” or “I can’t believe it!” or some other incantation. The more often they repeat it, the more forceful their mental and emotional state seems to become for them. (Our most common targets of “black magic” are typically ourselves.)
“Both-and” works like this. “I’m upset and I can also be calm.” Both are true. Rather than denying what may be a very real state or situation, include it and move outward to include more. This avoids the resistance or denial that often plagues affirmations or stubbornness or exertions of the will, as if we could force the universe to do what we’re simultaneously insisting it must not to! (I want to be calm, but “I’m so upset!”)
Whitman, our old American proto-Druid, gets it. “I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.” Both-and, alive and well. And as he also and famously said in “Song of Myself,” “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
The Ten Thousand Things all are moving about on their many and beautiful ways. Come walk with me, and with them.
On first sight (or much later, depending on the particular script we’re following), the world can be a forbidding place. We all go through emotional and psychological winters at times. Nothing seems to provide warmth or comfort, so we hunker down and endure. And we can get so good at this kind of half-life that we mistake merely surviving for full-hearted thriving. Well-meaning friends or family who try to console us with various messages of hope or endurance (“This too shall pass”) can’t budge us from our heaviness.
The hidden changes implicit in the imminent shift of energy and consciousness which Druids symbolize and celebrate in Imbolc also find expression in the starkly beautiful lines of “First Sight” by British poet Philip Larkin.
First Sight
Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.
As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.
For that is how at least some changes arrive — immeasurable, ungraspable, unlike anything that went before, so that we can’t even anticipate or recognize them ahead of time. Nothing of the past prepares us. The new comes on us “utterly unlike” the present. Only long memory serves to recognize them sometimes, and hail and welcome them — memory often consciously denied to us in one human lifetime, but accessible through dream and intuition and the “far memory” that we may call “past lives” or the “collective unconscious” or the “knower behind the thoughts” or “gut instinct.” This is memory as trees know it, the rings of years that grow into the wood, the cell memory we humans also carry with us, the salts of ancient oceans that pulse in the same proportions in our blood.
This is the promise of light renewed, that miracle we often cynically dismiss but deeply long for, the story we are always telling ourselves: maybe this time, maybe next week, one more year. This marriage, that job, this new chance, here, now, finally, at last.
It’s important to note that this event is not “supernatural” or “religious” in the commonly understood sense of “coming from outside our world” or depending on a deity. We don’t need to look that far, though we’re welcome to if we wish. It is earth’s immeasurable surprise, after all, issuing from this world, this land, dirt under our feet, air that surrounds us, sun on our skin. Put another way, the whole world is telling us “Pay attention!”
Another Irish name for Imbolc is Oimelc — “ewe’s milk.” In the agrarian societies all our ancestors came from, the pregnant ewes have been preparing for the lambs to come, their udders swelling with milk. There are signs of change and renewal all around us, but in our rush towards “anywhere but here,” we’ve often lost sight of and contact with the markers that would center and align us with the natural order of balance and harmony we crave.
In North America, the equivalent “secular” holiday is Groundhog’s Day, which one way or another says winter will in fact eventually end. Punxsutawney Phil emerges from the earth and his plump hibernation sleepiness to prophesy renewal, either seeing his shadow on a sunny day, or huddling under February clouds as secular augurs read the omens and declare them to the assembled faithful. (We don’t so much abandon ritual and religion as slip it past the censor of the modern and supposedly irreligious mind, clothing it in other guises less objectionable. If you doubt it, take a look at the grand mythologizing that surrounds Phil on sites like this one.)
Historical novelist Mary Stewart writes vividly of 500 C.E. Britain in her “Merlin Trilogy,” which begins with The Crystal Cave and the childhood and youth of Merlin the enchanter, who will become Arthur’s chief adviser. Here (1970 edition, pp. 174-5) are Merlin and his father Ambrosius discussing the Druids. At this time, in Stewart’s conception, laws are already in place banning Druid gatherings and practices. Merlin has recently discovered that the tutor his father has arranged for him is a Druid.
* * *
I looked up, then nodded. “You know about him.” It was a conclusion, not a question.
“I know he is a priest of the old religion. Yes.”
“You don’t mind this?”
“I cannot yet afford to throw aside valuable tools because I don’t like their design,” he said. “He is useful, so I use him. You will do the same, if you are wise.”
“He wants to take me to the next meeting.”
He raised his brows but said nothing.
“Will you forbid this?” I asked.
“No. Will you go?”
“Yes.” I said slowly, and very seriously, searching for the words: “My lord, when you are looking for … what I am looking for, you have to look in strange places. Men can never look at the sun, except downwards, at his reflection in things of earth. If he is reflected in a dirty puddle, he is still the sun. There is nowhere I will not look, to find him.”
Of course, anyone who followed this noble-sounding principle to even reasonable lengths would have a very interesting and possibly very exhausting time of it. As I mentioned in my post about Open Source religion, when virtually every human practice with any numinous quality about it can be and has been pressed into service as a vehicle for religious encounter and a means to experience a god or God, then sacred sex won’t even top the list of things a person might do “to find him.”
Yet Merlin (and Stewart) have a point. Spiritual inquiry and practice require a kind of courage, if they are to remain fresh and not decline into dead forms and mere gestures of religion. It is these things that the media quite rightly criticize. When I’m in the grip of a quest, I only hope I can continue to be brave enough to follow out conclusions and — if need be — “look in strange places.” It looks like courage to an observer, but I find that ultimately it’s a kind of honesty with oneself. I want to keep looking. Anything less feels suffocating and aggressively pointless, like painting garbage or eating styrofoam. Any self-disgust we feel almost always arises from living a lie, which poisons our hours and toils and pleasures.
“Things of earth” cannot ultimately satisfy the inner hunger we feel, but they are valuable pointers, sacraments in the full sense, vehicles of the sacred. To return to everyone’s favorite numinous topic, pursue sex of any variety, sacred or otherwise, and you’ll prove again for yourself one of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Of course, along the way, as a witty recent post on Yahoo Answers has it, it may often happen that “The road of excess leads to the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet of Gluttony, which leads to the Bordello of Lust, which then leads to the Courthouse of Divorce, the Turnpike of Bankruptcy, the Freeway of Despair, and finally, the Road to Perdition.” Blake did after all call these the Proverbs of Hell.
We just don’t discuss what comes after Hell. Blake says it’s wisdom. Hard-earned, yes. And there are easier ways, which is one good thing that the Wise are here for. Rather than following any prescription (or Prescriber) blindly, I hope to ask why, and when, and under what conditions the strictures or recommendations apply.
So we return and begin (again) with the things of earth, these sacred objects and substances. As sacraments, earth, air, fire and water can show us the holy, the numinous. Their daily embodiments in food and drink and alcohol, precious metals and gems and sex, pleasure and learning and science, music and literature and theater, sports and war and craft, are our earliest teachers. They are part of the democracy of incarnate living, the access points to the divine that all of us meet and know in our own ways.
Drink deep, fellow traveler, and let us trade tales over the fire. And when you depart, here’s an elemental chant by Libana, well-known in Pagan circles, to accompany you on your going.
What makes a language “sacred”? I find that it’s in sacred language that we most clearly hear echoes of the love we are and the love we seek. Much that I write here is an exploration through the channel or “ray” of wisdom and my search for it. But the channel or ray of love is at least as potent, and for many people more accessible.
Here’s an adaptation of a prose-poem by 17th century Anglican writer Thomas Traherne, who lived only to age 38. In his writing he captures something of this love.
The whole world is the theater for our love.
We are made to love, both to satisfy this necessity within us
and also to answer the love of creation around us.
By love our souls are joined and married to the world around us.
If we focus upon only one part of creation,
we are not loving it too much, but the other parts too little.
Never was anything in this world loved too much.
What a treasure is a grain of sand when it is truly understood!
All infinite goodness and wisdom and power are in it.
What a world this would be if everything were loved as it should be.*
This then is one noble and worthwhile task, if we choose to accept it: to love everything in the world as it should be loved. We hear of those who “love too much,” or those who, like Othello, loved “not wisely but too well.” We may recollect, too, those who love their abusers and do not flee them: here’s a needed perspective on their situation. A complete and powerful guide to living, summed up in ten lines.
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*Sections 65-67, “Second Century,” from Centuries of Meditation by 17th century writer and Anglican priest Thomas Traherne, adapted by Higginbotham, Paganism, 149-150. You can find Traherne’s complete original here.
The image is of a stained glass window “by Tom Denny, reflecting the thinking of Traherne, in Audley Chapel, off Lady Chapel, Hereford Cathedral, dedicated in March 2007.”
So if you found my previous post about fear and death (and nerds — yay!) a bit too off-putting, here’s a reprieve. What else might a new “religious operating system” have on offer? In a Huffington Post article from some time ago (Sept. 2010) titled “The God Project: Hinduism as Open Source Faith,” author Josh Schrei asserts that the principal distinction between Hinduism and other more familiar Western faiths is not that the former is polytheistic and the latter are monotheistic, but that “Hinduism is Open Source and most other faiths are Closed Source.” (We’re already increasingly familiar with the open-source approach from computer systems like Linux and community-edited resources like wikis.) In this series on what a more responsive and contemporary religious design might look like (here are previous parts one and two), this perspective can offer useful insight.
If we consider god, the concept of god, the practices that lead one to god, and the ideas, thoughts and philosophies around the nature of the human mind the source code, then India has been the place where the doors have been thrown wide open and the coders have been given free rein to craft, invent, reinvent, refine, imagine, and re-imagine to the point that literally every variety of the spiritual and cognitive experience has been explored, celebrated, and documented. Atheists and goddess worshipers, heretics who’ve sought god through booze, sex, and meat, ash-covered hermits, dualists and non-dualists, nihilists and hedonists, poets and singers, students and saints, children and outcasts … all have contributed their lines of code to the Hindu string. The results of India’s God Project — as I like to refer to Hinduism — have been absolutely staggering. The body of knowledge — scientific, faith-based, and experience-based — that has been accrued on the nature of mind, consciousness, and human behavior, and the number of practical methods that have been specifically identified to work with one’s own mind are without compare. The Sanskrit language itself contains a massive lexicon of words — far more than any other historic or modern language — that deal specifically with states of mental cognition, perception, awareness, and behavioral psychology.
It’s important to note that despite Schrei’s admiration for Hinduism (and its sacred language Sanskrit — more in a coming post), the West has all of these same resources — we just have developed them outside explicitly religious spheres. Instead, psychology, so-called “secular” hard sciences, social experimentation, counter-cultural trends and other sources have contributed to an equally wide spread of understandings. The difference is that far fewer of them would be something we would tag with the label “religion,” especially since the pursuit of things like ecstatic experience — apart from some Charismatic and Pentecostal varieties — generally lies outside what we in the West call or perceive as “religion.”
The underlying principle that drives such a range of activity perceived as “religious” also stands in sharp contrast with religion in the West. (Of course there are exceptions. To name just one from “inside religion,” think of Brother Lawrence and his Practice of the Presence of God.) As Schrei remarks, “At the heart of the Indic source code are the Vedas, which immediately establish the primacy of inquiry in Indic thought.” To put it another way, India and Hinduism didn’t need their own version of the American 60s and its byword “question authority,” because implicit in open-source religion is “authorize questions.” Nor did they need debates over Creation or Evolution, because scientific inquiry could be seen as a religious undertaking. Schrei continues:
In the Rig Veda, the oldest of all Hindu texts (and possibly the oldest of all spiritual texts on the planet), God, or Prajapati, is summarized as one big mysterious question and we the people are basically invited to answer it. “Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?” While the god of the Old Testament was shouting command(ment)s, Prajapati was asking: “Who am I?”
This tendency to inquire restores authority to its rightful place. In an era in the West when so many faux authorities have been revealed as spiritually hollow or actively deceitful, we’ve arrived at a widespread cynical distrust of any claims to authority. But true authorities do still exist. Their hallmark is an invitation to question and find out for ourselves. Jesus says, “Ask and you will know, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you.” These aren’t the words of one who fears inquiry. To paraphrase another of his sayings, when we can learn and know the truth about something, we will meet an increase of freedom regarding it. It will not intimidate us, or lead us to false worship, or mislead us. One identifier of truth is the freedom it conveys to us.
Authorities also benefit us because out of their experience they can guide us toward the most fruitful avenues of inquiry, and spare us much spinning in circles, pursuing wild geese, and squandering the resources of a particular lifetime. Whether we choose to follow good advice is a wholly separate matter. Authorities can point out pitfalls, and save us from reinventing the wheel. At a time when so many look East for wisdom, only recently have we been rediscovering the wisdom of the West hidden on our doorsteps.
Examples abound. The Eastern Orthodox church has preserved a wealth of spiritual practices and living exemplars in places like Mount Athos in Greece. The Pagan resurgence over the last decades has done much useful weeding and culling of overlooked and nearly forgotten traditions rich in valuable methods for addressing deeply the alienation, disruption, dis-ease, physical illness and spiritual starvation so many experience. Individuals within Western monotheisms like Rob Bell and his book Love Wins have served as useful agents for reform and introspection. While it may not be always true, as Dr. Wayne Dyer claims, that “every problem has a spiritual solution,” we’ve only just begun to regain perspectives we discounted and abandoned through the past several centuries, mostly through the seductions of our increasing mastery of a few select processes of the physical plane and their capacity to provide us with comforts, sensations, entertainments and objects unknown until about 75 years ago. We’ve self-identified as “consumers” rather than spiritual beings. Hamlet identified the problem centuries ago: “What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?” Or as another of the Wise asked, “What does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” Let us be soul-finders and soul-nourishers. Otherwise, why bother?
Nerds talk a lot, one way or another. If they don’t speak, they write. That’s annoying, because it’s often hard to get them to shut up. And now, armed as they are with blogs and email and Twitter and Facebook and Myspace and a myriad of other venues — well, you get where I’m going with this. More words than people on the planet, every single day.
But while not all of us are Nerds, or even nerds, one thing we all face, nerd or otherwise, is fear. Since we often do our level best not to talk about fear, why not put the nerd instinct to good use? Resist the flow. Be awkward, that thing nerds excel at, and talk about it. (Along the way I get to include a Youtube link, and references to the plague, Jesus, and a medieval poem. Good stuff — a regular pot-luck entry.)
One big fear, of course, is fear of death. Reader, if you’ve found a sure-fire way around it, get busy marketing. You’re set to make your fortune. And no, I’m not talking about any Afterwards. That’s a separate post. I mean the process, the whole sucky thang of the roof caving in on the house, the ground floor dropping away into the basement, and the walls tumbling down. The Demolition (or Eviction, depending on your take regarding a Landlord). The Snuff, the Blowout, the Final Exit, the Nobody Home of your life.
Have I got you thoroughly depressed, and on your weekend, too? Sorry for that, though I won’t apologize for the topic. If we’re going to be morbid, let’s do it right, with style and flair, and a literary reference. Here’s your serving for the day. There’s a well-known Middle English poem I keep coming across from time to time which partly inspired this post. I read it in college and I’ve taught it in high school in British Lit. Pause here for a digression — just skip the rest of this paragraph, and the next one, if you’re in an impatient mood when you read this.
Still with me? OK. Yes, I get it — unless you’re also a fan, Middle English is next door to Old English and Beowulf and all that other stuff your high school or college English teacher inflicted on you. Or if it wasn’t English, it was something else. Let’s just acknowledge that at one time or another you’ve been on the receiving end of, and made to suffer for, an intellectual enthusiasm or obsession you didn’t share. And no — I’ve never shed the geek/nerd label since it first attached itself sometime in high school — the difference nowadays is that I make my living from it as a teacher. It’s as if I wrote a book called Nerdiness for Fun and Profit. Which might actually sell. So I’ll apologize in advance for whatever my educational peers have put you through — you and my own students.
So here’s an excerpt from approximately the first half of the poem. The spelling’s been modernized, and the few words that haven’t made it through into modern English are clear enough in context that you should be able to catch the gist without me being even more nerdy and annotating the damn thing. But I’ll do it anyway. And one other note: the Latin tag in italics translates as “The fear of death disturbs me.”
In what estate so ever I be Timor mortis conturbat me.
As I went on a merry morning,
I heard a bird both weep and sing.
This was the tenor of her talking: [substance, topic] Timor mortis conturbat me.
I asked that bird what she meant:
“I am a musket both fair and gent; [sparrowhawk/nobly-born]
For dread of death I am all shent: [ashamed, confused] Timor mortis conturbat me.
When I shall die, I know no day;
What country or place I cannot say;
Wherefore this song sing I may: Timor mortis conturbat me.”
In medieval Europe death was everywhere. People died at home, people died young, and people died from — among other things — the series of perfectly nasty plagues that swept Europe and took out a good third of the population. Today we’ve got it easy in many ways. Our life expectancy is twice that of the 1400s, we can usually moderate pain through medication, and many medieval diseases have been eliminated. No, I’m not asking you to be ever so grateful and click on over to EasyDeath.com. But what’s interesting is that the speaker of the poem isn’t concerned with pain but with uncertainty. It’s that sense of being ambushed by an invisible assailant that adds to our fear.
There are several things to say, Druidic and otherwise, in response. First, those who’ve had out-of-body experiences often report that they’ve lost their fear of death. You may be one of those people yourself. To quote Genesis (the band this time–not the book–in their song “Carpet Crawlers”), “You’ve got to get in to get out.” Or in this case, get into other states of reality, see that this one is one among many, and that leaving this one is less of a Big Deal. These kinds of experiences are more common than we’re lead to believe, and those who’ve had them often keep quiet about it because of the general atmosphere of fear, skepticism, and materialism that denies whole facets of human existence. What I’ll say for victims of these mindsets is that they deserve compassion for living on the porch and never venturing into the house, never bothering to find out if there even is a house.
A powerful technique I’ve found is to send love to my fears. I can make it a daily prayer. If we’re worried about a difficult dying, send love to that future self which will die. Break down the patterns of fear that sap and sabotage our present possibilities for joy. As Jesus observed, “Perfect love casts out fear.” And don’t worry if your love isn’t “perfect.” Any love is a good start, an improvement on dread. Most fear is learned.
For those of us who believe in or have had experience of other lives, the sense of deja-vu often replaces fear. Gotta go through it all — again!
I’ll close with another citation, which I find Druidic in sensibility. This one I ran across in school, decades back, and copied down into my journal. The paper I’m reading from as I type this is yellowed and crinkling on the edges. It describes a kind of initiation. The quotation is long but I hope worthwhile for the “tough wisdom” it teaches.
The American Indian’s insistence on direct personal religious experience remains preserved when he comes into contact with Christianity: he finds it difficult to accept experiences of the other world which are said to have happened two millennia ago and which are attested to only by a book.
An empirical attitude toward the other world is a difficult one to put into action. It requires an emptying of the mind and the body, a humbling of the self before all other beings, “even the smallest ant.” It is not as though the Indian [you can substitute Druid here — ADW] is “close to nature” and therefore found such an experience easier to come by than ourselves; he speaks of the journey as carrying him “to the edge of the Deep Canyon,” and he feels it as nothing less than death itself. While he is there he sees a universe where everything is not only animate, but a person, and not only a person but a kinsman. On his return from the journey he is reborn; he is no longer the same person he was before. Having seen for himself the reality of the other world, he now has what William Blake called “the double vision,” as opposed to the single vision of Newton. Alfonso Ortiz describes this double vision in the teachings of his Tewa elders, who “saw the whole of life as consisting of the dual quest for wisdom and divinity.” It is not that the Indian has an older, simpler view of the world, to which we an Newtonian thinkers have added another dimension, but that he has a comprehensive, double view of the world, while we have lost sight of one whole dimension.
The way to his understanding is not found with the road maps of the measurable world. One begins by finding four roads that run side by side and choosing the middle one. The Road, once found, is cut by an impassable ravine that extends to the ends of the world. One must go right through. Then there is an impenetrable thicket. Go right through. Then there are birds making a terrible noise. Just listen. Then there is a place where phlegm rains down. Don’t brush it off. Then there is a place where the earth is burning. Pass right through. Then a great cliff face rises up, without a single foothold. Walk straight through. If you travel as far as this and someone threatens you with death, say, “I have already died.” (Teaching of the American Earth, xx.)
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So there you have it — one of my stranger posts, oddly organized, with weird tonal shifts. Hope you get something useful from it. Thanks for reading.
With energies flowing around us from so many end-of-year holidays and celebrations, it seemed fitting to think and write about initiation. It’s one more piece of a Religious Operating System (ROS), it’s an important key to Druidry and — most importantly — it’s something we all experience. For good reason, then, the subject cuts a large swath through spiritual, religious and magical thought and practice. As author Isaac Bashevis Singer opens his book The Chosen, “Beginnings are difficult times.” That’s one reason New Year’s resolutions often end up on the cutting room floor of the film version of our lives. (Some ways to keep them alive and well and not merely part of the special extended version of our lives that may not see wide release into the “real” world will be the subject of a post upcoming in the next few days.)
Some opportunities for initiation recur each year, and are built into our cultures. Right now the festival holidays of Hanukkah, Christmas, Diwali, Kwanzaa and so on are opportunities for annual initiation — if we let their celebrations reach into us and change us. As breaks from “profane” or ordinary time, holidays take us into altered if not sacred space, and then return us to our lives somehow — ideally, anyway — changed. Of course, specific religions and spiritual paths each offer their own initiations. For Christians, it’s baptism (and for Catholics and some other denominations, confirmation as well). A Jew passes through a bar or bat mitzvah, and so on.
But we needn’t look so far or so formally. First kiss, first love, first sexual experience, first drink (consider the particular sequence of these in your own life). Driver’s license, prom, graduation, military draft. Each transforms as a rite of passage. We “pass through” and come out on the other side, different, in ways others may or may not notice. We ourselves may not fully absorb the changes until much later.
As with the kinds of freedom I considered in a previous post, there seem to be both “transitive” and “intransitive” initiations — initiations which enable or empower the initiate to do something — typically in the future — and initiations which recognize a standard or awareness already attained, and put a “seal of approval” on it. Of course these need not be separate. Both kinds can occur simultaneously. Initiation is a “beginning” (from Latin initio “start, beginning”) both a path or direction that another agency, power or person starts us on, and also something one does or experiences oneself.
Some big initiations are inclusive. Like annual holidays, we all experience them. Though we may not often think of it, death — our own, or that of a loved one, or of a public figure with symbolic power, like a John F. Kennedy or a Princess Diana — can be a powerful, transformative initiation. Through the grief and the inevitable breaks in familiar routine that come with the first shock, the family gatherings, the arrangements and the funeral itself, we’re brought to face loss, change, mortality, and endings and beginnings in ways. We may take on new, unfamiliar roles, like caretaker, mourner, survivor, with all the challenge and growth they can bring. The first death we encounter (apart from pets), given the usual number of years between generations, comes almost like clockwork sometime in our teens, with the passing of a grandparent. In the freshman dorm at the boarding school where I teach and serve as adviser, there are four or five deaths of grandparents each year, and all the myriad changes they carry with them for those involved. It’s a close study in family dynamics (and our capacity as advisers to provide support) to witness how kids and their families deal with it all.
Marriage often seems to occupy a sort of middle ground as far as these categories operate. On the one hand, no one is married in the eyes of either the law or a religious organization until they pass through the requisite ceremony. Yet we all know couples who are already “so married” that the ceremony confers nothing that they don’t already manifest in abundance. In this case, the initiation of marriage simply recognizes and formalizes a connection and a state of relationship that already exists and — if the ritual or ceremony still carries any power — blesses and charges the thing consecrated. My wife and I have two anniversaries, ten days apart, and each conveyed to us different energies. First was a spiritual ceremony by a cleric in our tradition, and second came the state ceremony, performed by a justice of the peace. Interesting, too, who we see as performing or undergoing the initiation. Ideally, to my mind, the one experiencing the initiation should play at least some part, if not an active role, in its enactment. For initiation takes place both outwardly, where it is often witnessed by the state if not also by family, and more importantly inwardly, on the subtle planes (which deserve their own post or series of posts).
“Where is wisdom to be found?” goes the old query. Initiation is one major source. Not all initiations “show” right away, or even ever. What we begin may never end. It can take a lifetime to sort out the effect of even “lesser” initiations, to say nothing of the big ones. Those “long” words, never and always, very much belong with initiations.
One of the appeals of earth-centered religions and spiritualities is their celebration of a world we can see and touch, smell and taste and hear right now. No membership in the right in-group, no attainment of a prerequisite spiritual state, no promised future to wait for. Instead, democratic access to the sacramental gifts of this life: the pleasures of simply being alive, of breathing air (assuming you have decent air to breathe), of eating and touching and loving the things of this world, of caressing the people you cherish, of hearing their voices and enjoying their physical presence. Transient, fragile, time-bound, brief — and all the more dear for that.
At the winter solstice our ancestors knew from studying the sky and watching the sunlight on markers of wood and stone that “when the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen.” My father, a dairy farmer, used to repeat the old saying around this time of year with a kind of grim satisfaction. More frozen pipes in the barn, more days the tractors would start only with difficulty, more days to chip away ice and plow snow. But when I talk with my students, mostly dwellers of suburbia and “urbia,” and learn they don’t know this or many other pieces of earth-wisdom, I realize again that I stand as a member of a transitional generation. My parents and grandparents inherited much of the lore and skill of our agricultural past, and have passed a portion of it on to me. But so many of the rising generation have lost most of it.
Anyone can have that curious sensation of “secondary memory” that outreaches one’s own lifetime, grafted on through relatives and ancestors. The only grandmother I knew well was born in 1894, and so I can recall experiences that did not actually happen to me, but which — through her retelling, and with accompanying photos or other artifacts — have assumed the guise of shadowy half-memory, as if they indeed left their imprint directly on my own life and thought and perception, rather than through telling alone. But in the case of hard-earned knowledge of how to live and anticipate change and thrive on earth, they are not the incidents peculiar to one life only, but part of the lore of the tribe.
Solstice feels something like that to me. It’s the oldest pan-human holiday we can discern, predating those of particular cultures and religions by thousands of years. There’s nothing “pagan” about it — it’s a matter of observable fact, rather than belief, as are the equinoxes. Neolithic monuments and markers attest to the reach of such knowledge around the planet. An essay by scientist and author Arthur C. Clarke, the title of which has drifted out of reach of immediate recall, begins like this: “Behind every person now alive stand one hundred ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.” The first time I read that, I felt a delicious shiver of mortality and awe. Yes, the ratio may have shifted (though I hope never to live on a world where that proportion favors the living over the dead — imagine for an instant the conditions that implies), but the image endures. And of those assembled dead, perhaps half or more knew and celebrated the solstice. For five hundred or a thousand or more generations, people acknowledged the shift of the planet in its relation to the sun. The southern hemisphere of course complements the northern in its seasons — their summer is well-launched, and now the days begin to shorten. The body knows these shifts, while the mind may take its own interval to catch up. We feel such changes in our bones, on our skin. In a couple of weeks, by mid-January, the change shows more clearly. Morning and evening commuters will enjoy more light, and the year turns.
Another of the keys, then, to connect to my previous post on a Religious Operating System, is lore itself: the knowledge of cycles and patterns we can measure and demonstrate for ourselves. No need for the fascination and hysteria surrounding 2012 and the supposed End of the World “predicted” by the Mayan calendars. Does no one remember Y2K?! Or any of half a hundred “prophecies” of the end over the last few millenia? The Maya were simply engrossed in the measure of time, and by their reckoning one major cycle ends and another begins. Their obsession made for precise astronomical reckoning. Changes are coming, certainly. Have they ever not come?
Lore includes some dross and superstition, which can almost always be dispatched by dint of careful observation and experiment. And while some generations may forsake the wisdom which their ancestors long thought worthy of preservation, it is — eventually — recoverable. If the peak- and post-oil folks are right, we face a sharp decline in material wealth and technology powered by a rapidly diminishing supply of cheap energy, and not enough people now know how, or are prepared, to flourish as people did for most of human history: wood fires, gardens and food animals, home remedies, animal and human labor, solar and wind power on a modest scale. But little or no electricity, or any of the hundreds of devices it powers, or petroleum products and technologies. We live with a false sense of security, as if the entire West were one large gated community. All it takes is a power outage of a day or two, as happened with Hurricane Irene for so many, to cast us out of our ease and return us to the human experience of all generations until the last few. We could see the real “99%” as all those who lived before the last century and its admittedly artificial standards of material luxury and abundance for a portion of the planet. But the solstice includes those hundred ghosts and the living, all witnesses of the day that signals the return of light and hope to the world. May it bring those things to you.
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The solstice for the U.S. actually takes place at 12:30 am Eastern Standard Time on Thursday 12/22. So calendars favor the majority — for all but the east coast, the Solstice is indeed today rather than early tomorrow morning.
Persistence, and its twin patience, may be our greatest magic. Sacred writings around the globe praise its powers and practitioners. So it’s hardly surprising, here in the too-often unmagical West, with its suspicion of the imagination, and its demand for the instantaneous, or at least the immediate, that we are impatient, restless, insecure, harried, stressed, whiny, dissatisfied and ungrateful. We bustle from one “experience” to the next, collecting them like beads on a necklace. The ubiquitous verb “have” leaves it mark in our speech, on our tongues: we “have” dinner, we “have” class or a good time, we even “have” another person sexually, and one of the worst sensations is “being had.” We do not know self-possession, so other things and people possess us instead.
The “slow food” movement, the pace appropriate for savoring, craftsmanship, care, reflection, meditation and rumination (slow digestion!) all run counter to the ethos of speed, promptness, acceleration that drive us to a rush to orgasm, speeding tickets, the rat race, stress-related illness, and so on. None of these problems or the observations about them are new, of course. But we remain half-hearted in our efforts or understanding of how to “pursue” their remedy. We chase salvation as much as anything else, as a thing to collect or gather or purchase so we can be about our “real” business, whatever we think that is. Spirituality gets marketed along with orange juice. For a sum, you can be whisked off to a more exotic locale than where you live your life, spend time with a retreat leader or guru or master or guide, and “have” (or “take”) a seminar or class or workshop.
Anyone who has adopted a spiritual practice and stuck with it has seen benefits. Like regular exercise, it grants a resilience and stamina I can acquire in no other way. I sit in contemplation and nothing much happens. A week or a month goes by, and my temper might have subtly improved. Fortunate coincidences increase. My dream life, or a chance conversation, or a newspaper article, nudges me toward choices and options I might not have otherwise considered. But usually these things arrive so naturally that unless I look for them and document them, I perceive no connection between spiritual practice and the increased smoothness of my life. From a slog, it becomes more of a glide. But the very smoothness of the transition makes it too subtle for my dulled perceptions at first. It arrives naturally, like the grass greening in the spring, or that gentle all-day snow that mantles everything.
I abandoned a particular daily practice after many years, for complicated reasons deserving a separate post, and I needed only to read the notebooks I kept from that earlier time to recall vividly what I had lost, if my own life wasn’t enough to show me. My internal climate faced its own El Nino. I was more often short with my wife, mildly depressed, more often sick with colds, less inspired to write, less likely to laugh, more tired and more critical of setbacks and annoyances. Set down in writing this way, the changes sound more dramatic — didn’t I notice them at the time? — but as a gradual shift, they were hardly noticeable at any one point. I still had my share of good days (though I didn’t seem to value them as much), and my life was tolerable and rewarding enough. “But I was making good money!” may be the excuse or apology or justification we make to ourselves, and for a time it was true enough of me. Then came the cancer, the near-breakdown, the stretch of several years where I seemed to move from doctor to doctor, test to test, treatment to treatment. If you or anyone you know has endured this, you get what I’m talking about. It’s distinctly unfun. And while I won’t say lack of practice caused this, it’s an accompanying factor, a “leading indicator,” a constituent factor. Doctors might very profitably begin their diagnoses with the question, “So how’s your spiritual practice?” Our spiritual pulse keeps time with our physical lives. They’re hardly separate things, after all. Why should they be?
In the story of Taliesin I mentioned in my last post, the boy Gwion, so far from the future Taliesin he will become, is set by the goddess Cerridwen to watch a cauldron as it cooks a magical broth meant to transform her son Afagddu, a mother’s gift to her child. A year and a day is the fairy-story time Gwion spends at it. A full cycle. The dailiness of effort and persistence. The “same-old,” much of the time. Gwion’s a servant. The cauldron sits there each morning. The fire beneath it smoulders. Feed the fire, stir the liquid. It cooks, and Gwion “cooks” along with it, the invisible energy of persistence accumulating as surely as the magical liquor boils down and grows in potency. Through the spring and summer, insects and sweat. Through autumn and winter, frost and chill and ice. The cauldron has not changed. Still at it? Yes. The broth slowly thickens as it bubbles and spatters.
One day a few drops (in some versions, three drops) fly out onto one of Gwion’s hands, burning. Instinctively he lifts the hand to his mouth, to lick and soothe it with his tongue. Immediately the magic “meant for another” is now his. He did, after all, put in the time. He sat there daily, through the seasons, tending the cauldron, stirring and keeping up the fire, swatting insects, breathing the smoke, batting sparks away, eyes reddened. Yes, the “accident” of the spattered drops was at least partly the result of “being at the right time in the right place.” It is “luck” as well as “grace,” both operative in his life. Part, too, was the simple animal instinct to lick a burn. And the greater portion was the effort, which catalyzed all the rest into a unified whole. Effort, timing, luck, chance, grace: the “package deal” of spirituality.
And the consequence? For Gwion, his growth has just begun. It is his initiation, his beginning. In his case it distinctly does NOT mean an easier path ahead for him. In fact, just the opposite — more on that in a coming post.
The Hopi of the American Southwest call their ritual ceremonial pipe natwanpi, “instrument of preparing.” The -pi suffix means a vehicle, a means, a tool. Tales like this story of Gwion can become anatwanpi for us, if we choose — part of our preparation and practice, a tool, a way forward.
Those inclined to criticize contemporary Druidry have made much about how the specific practices and beliefs of ancient Druids are forever lost to us simply because they left no written records, and because the references to Druids in the works of classical Greek and Roman authors are mostly based on secondhand accounts and sometimes markedly biased. Without such historical continuity, they claim, it is impossible to be a “real” Druid today, and thus all contemporary Druidry is a kind of whistling in the wind, at best a version of dress-up for adults. But what such writers and speakers often forget is the surviving body of legend, myth, teaching and wisdom in Celtic literature. Here is Druidry in compact and literary form, meant to be preserved as story, a link-up with the perennial wisdom that never dies.
To pick just one example, the stories from the Mabinogion, the Welsh collection of myth, legend and teaching have wonderful relevance and serve as a storehouse of much Druid teaching. Sustained meditation on these stories will reveal much of use and value to the aspirant after a Druidry that is authentic simply because it is grounded in knowledge and practice. As a pragmatist more than a reconstructionist, I’m much more interested in what works than in what may be historically accurate. The former leads one to inner discoveries. The latter is engaging as a worthwhile scholarly endeavor first, and only as a possible source of spiritual insight second. And that is as it should be. History is not spirituality, though it can inform it. But even if we can accurately deduce from an always incomplete archaeological record what a Bronze Age Druid may have done, it’s still not automatically fit and appropriate for a contemporary 21st century person to adopt. That’s a decision we must make apart from the reconstruction, which cannot guide us by itself. Stories, however, though formed in a particular culture, often reach toward universals far better than physical objects and actions.
The story of Taliesin (this link is to a public domain text — more modern and well annotated versions are available) in the Mabinogion moves us into a world of myth and initiation. In the tale, the boy Gwion passes through ordeals and transformations, becoming at length the poet and sage Taliesin, whose name means “shining brow” — one who has a “fire in the head” and is alive with wisdom and poetic inspiration. As with figures from other traditions whose heads are encircled with halos, or shining with an otherworldly brightness, Taliesin belongs to the company of the “twice-born,” who have fulfilled their humanity by making the most of it. In my next post, I’ll talk about the first key in the story — persistence.
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First image is a triskele or triskelion, a pan-European symbol associated with the Celts.
Second image is of Taliesin from Caitlin and John Matthews’ Arthurian Tarot.
“Whenever I get bored or depressed, I do laundry,” said an acquaintance. “Afterwards I may still be bored or depressed, but at least I’ve done something that needed doing. And often enough I feel better.” As a treatment, the success rate of this strategy may or may not equal that of therapy or medication, but as far as clean clothes production goes, it’s got the other two beat hands down. At least I can be depressed and dressed.
How different the quiet of depression and the quiet of peace! (I’m writing about peace and using exclamation points. Hm.) One deadens and stifles, the other ripples outward and invites attention, a kind of relaxed wakefulness. We say we want peace, and the holiday season bombards us with prayers and songs and sermons and wishes for it. There are prayers for peace in the ceremonies of many religious teachings and spiritual practices, Druidry included. But rather than asking somebody else for it, I can begin differently. Peace starts in the center, and that’s where I am — or where I can put myself, with the help of recollection and intent. “Come back to yourself,” my life keeps saying, “and remember who you are and what it is you want.” If I start peace (or anything else) within myself, however small, however tentative, it spreads from there outward. After all, it works for every other state I create, whether positive or negative — and I know this from sometimes painful experience! “Be the change you wish to see in the world” is still some of the best advice ever given. If I want change, who else do I expect to bring it about? And if someone else did, how in the world would such changes be right for me? Gandhi knew the secret lies in the approach.
In my early twenties, Lou Gramm and Foreigner were singing “I want to know what love is. I want you to show me.” It’s a lovely ballad — I’ve got it playing on Youtube the second time through as I write this paragraph, nostalgia back in full force — but it’s precisely backward in the end. As loveless as I can sometimes feel, if I start the flow, jumpstart it if necessary, I prime the pump, and it will launch within me from that point. Do that, and I become more loveable in a human sense, because in the divine sense I’ve made myself another center for love to happen in, and from which it can spread.
But neither love nor peace are things I can hold on to as things. “We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate,” says the German poet Rilke in his poem “To Holderin” (Stephen Mitchell, trans.) “From images that are full, the spirit plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled; there are no lakes till eternity. Here, falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion into the guessed-at, and onward.” Whatever I long for in a world of time and space needs to be re-won every day, though in that process of re-winning, not always successful, it begins to gather around me like a fragrance, a habit. Both the customary behavior, and the clothing a monk or nun wears, have the same name. The connection’s not accidental.
The American “farmer-poet” Wendell Berry captures it in these lines:
Geese appear high over us
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for a new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
So if we’re looking for a “religious operating system,” a ROS, we’ve got some design parameters that poets and others tell us are already in place. “What we need is here.” But try telling that to an unemployed person, or someone dying of a particularly nasty disease. And of course, if I tell someone else these things, I’ve missed the point. What they need is indeed here, but my work is to find out this truth for myself. I can’t do others’ work for them, and it wouldn’t be a good world if I could (though that doesn’t stop me sometimes from trying). I don’t know how their discoveries will change their lives. I only know, after I do the work, how my discoveries will change mine.
A recent article in the New York Times about the rise of the Nones, people who aren’t affiliated with any religion, but who aren’t necessarily atheists, offers this observation, from which I drew the title for this blog entry:
“We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system…
In this single command, Jesus is profoundly Druidic. Catch the moment, he says. Watch the divine as it swirls around and in you. You can witness the marvelous if you simply pay attention. Listen! Look! Seeing and hearing are a good start. Now do more. Put yourself into your attention. Make it purposeful. Don’t just hear — listen. Don’t just see — look.
“If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light” (Matthew 6:22). A wonderful assertion– one to test, to try out, to prove to oneself, not merely to accept passively. A promise. Singleness of vision, the devotion and dedication to witnessing what is really there, as opposed to what we assume or fear, wish or ignore. Some have seen this passage as a reference to the yogic “third eye” chakra, the Hindu Shiv Netra or Sufi Tisra Til. Why not both, and something else besides?
In the second half of her poem “The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver says:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Shouldn’t all attention bring to light more and better questions? Wouldn’t we be bored to tears with a life of all things answered? Give me bigger and deeper questions, give me earth whole again, give me all I already have. Give me birth in this moment. We are constantly being born, arriving at ourselves, a remembering, a finding out of the utter strangeness of being alive, and being human in this moment, our eternity, the only time there is. The past is only memory, and changing. The future is hopes and fears. Take the now with both hands.
“Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” (Matthew 10:16)
A regular menagerie of a sentence! Sheep, wolves, serpents and doves. If inanimate things like stones can testify to divinity (see previous post) and proclaim truth in the face of human delusion, then certainly birds and beasts can do the job, too.
Here Jesus is admonishing his followers, as he commissions them to spread his teaching, that the world is full of wolves. His disciples won’t appear on the scene with an army at their beck and call. They don’t carry letters of introduction, or a case of free product samples to tempt the potential client. No email blast or flurry of tweets precedes their arrival. No, if they’re to succeed, they’ll need specific attributes which he characterizes as the wisdom of serpents and the harmlessness of doves. And note that you can’t transpose those qualities; who would welcome a person “wise as a dove” or “harmless as a serpent”?! Bad advertizing. It’s a recipe for disaster. But more importantly, would serpent-wisdom and dove-harmlessness actually work? Hold that thought.
A persistent tradition in the UK at least eight centuries old has Jesus spending some of the “lost” years — between his appearance in the temple at 12 and the start of his public ministry around age 30 — in Britain, studying with Druids. William Blake, associated with revival Druidry during his lifetime in the 19th century, penned the famous hymn “Jerusalem” (this version hails from the last night of the ’09 Proms, a popular annual summer music series in the U.K.). The lyrics were put to music about a century later, and the piece has become a perennial favorite, a kind of unofficial British national anthem:
And did those feet in ancient times
walk upon England’s mountains green?
and was the holy lamb of God
on England’s pleasant pastures seen?
These lines of the opening stanza seem innocuous enough, if fanciful. A Middle-Easterner would surely have it rough during a British winter — it isn’t always “green.” The tradition continues from there, claiming that after Christ’s death, Joseph of Arimathea (who provided a tomb for the body) either sent part of the Grail to England, or made the journey himself and founded a church in Glastonbury, or planted there a thorn tree long venerated as holy.* Whatever the truth of these events, it makes for a striking symbol and image.
But Blake continues, and this is when his poem turns odd:
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.
As a proto-Druid, Blake gets his ecological digs in here: the “dark Satanic mills” of the early industrial revolution are already at work spewing smoke and ash over London. While most Druids today have no intention of attempting to “build Jerusalem in England’s green & pleasant land,” the song brings divinity one step closer. Who complains if some versions of our ancient history bring with them a delicious shiver of magic or imaginative religious reconstruction? But is the way to achieve divinity on our shores through “mental fight” and metaphorical battle? The sudden shift to the quadruple imperative of “Bring … bring … bring … bring” summons up images of a bronze-age charioteer. But what of the “arrows of desire”? Here the image is of Eros, Cupid, the piercing quality of sudden strong feeling. Is it the poet speaking as “I” in the last stanzas? Or as someone else? Is it Blake’s idea of Jesus?
You may not remember, but I asked you a few paragraphs back to hold the thought of serpent-wisdom and dove-harmlessness. Some of the “wisdom” accrues from the belief that serpents are uncanny beasts, for they are able to shed their skin and achieve a kind of rebirth or immortality. And the serpent in the Garden that haunts the Western pysche tempted Eve not to the Tree of Life (Eve! EVE!! The other tree! Eat from the OTHER tree!!) but the Tree of Knowledge. As I tease my students, “Major mistake. Become immortal first, and then get the knowledge of good and evil.” The harmlessness of doves is less problematic. Though city dwellers may have their foremost associations with pigeons as flocking beggars in parks, or as producers of statue-staining and public-building-defacing birdshit.
But consider again. If you know something — I mean really know something of life-changing power — you need to come across as seriously harmless. Otherwise people have this nasty tendency to string you up, burn you at the stake, remove the supreme discomfort of your ideas and presence at all costs. Your wisdom puts you in mortal danger. So reassure people first, and work your changes quietly, harmlessly. A major piece of strategy! Some devious or disgusting trick you’d expect to discover about that other political party — the one you don‘t belong to and affect to despise as the epitome of all things vile and loathsome. Is that why this year’s political reality-show contestants (I mean presidential candidates) come across as less than competent? (Repeat after me: “All candidates vile and and loathsome, all con-men big or small, all morons foul and putrid, Democrats/Republicans have them all!”**)
So animals embody a divinely-commissioned strategy for survival. The wisdom of the serpent, long despised, is not dead, but sleeps in each of us, waiting the touch of the divine longing to rouse and waken it in the service of life. The son of God (we are all children of the divine) summons it forth from us. It lives, tree of knowledge and tree of life united, identical, twining its way around our hearts, which know — when our heads deny it — which way to go, what we need, where to find answers others say are “forbidden” or “not for mortals to know.” On the contrary — they’re specifically intended for mortals to realize.
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*The Glastonbury thorn has lately made headlines. It (there are actually several in the area, believed to spring from a single parent) was hacked down two years ago this month (with some historical precedent, if you read the article) and then recovered enough by March of 2011 to put forth a new shoot. Another demonstration, as if we needed it, that old things do not just disappear because we hack at them or find them out of place or inconvenient. They have a habit of return, of springing back to life. Another habit from the natural world for us to imitate …
**This uncharacteristically acerbic side-note is not part of the actual blog.
A Druid Way 
