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My Extemporaneous Homily for Christmas Eve

[This extemporaneous homily given today on the Eve of Holy Nativity at The Chapel of St. George is transcribed from an audio recording.]

I often quote St. Eckhart of Hochheim, but I don’t usually read to you directly from his works, so I want to share with you today some excerpts from a couple of his Christmas Eve sermons:

‘Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature….What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters. We shall therefore speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us and be consummated in the virtuous soul, whenever God the Father speaks his eternal Word in the perfect soul….Now observe, as regards this birth, where it takes place: “Where is he who is born?” Now I say, as I have often said before, that this eternal birth occurs in the soul precisely as it does in eternity, no more and no less, for it is one birth, and this birth occurs in the essence and ground of the soul….If anyone were to ask me, “Why do we pray, why do we fast, why do we do all our works, why are we baptized, why (most important of all) did God become man?”—I would answer: In order that God may be born in the soul and the soul be born in God. For that reason all the scriptures were written, for that reason God created the world and all angelic natures: so that God may be born in the soul and the soul be born in God….St. Paul says, “In the fullness of time God sent his Son” (Gal. 4:4). St. Augustine says what this fullness of time is: “Where there is no more time, that is the ‘fullness of time’.” The day is full when there is no more day. That is a necessary truth: all time must be gone when this birth begins, for there is nothing that hinders this birth so much as time and creatures. It is an assured truth that time cannot affect God or the soul by her nature. If the soul could be touched by time, she would not be the soul, and if God could be touched by time, he would not be God. But if it were possible for the soul to be touched by time, then God could never be born in her, and she could never be born in God. For God to be born in the soul, all time must have dropped away from her, or she must have dropped away from time, with will or desire….This, then, is the fullness of time: when the Son of God is born in us.’

So we might ask, along with St. Eckhart, why this birth has taken place—this birth that is invited to continually occur in us. And I think we can answer that very, very simply; St. Athanasius did it very well in the fourth century: he said, ‘God became a human being in order that the human being might become God’—or, translated slightly differently, ‘God become human in order that the human being might be raised up a god.’

As the psalmist says: ‘You are gods.’ Not your personalities; not the egoic self that’s coming and going, that’s fleeting like a transparent image on a screen, but the Divine Ground that Eckhart talks about.

That God has such an infinite love for God’s own creation, which was never separate from God, is the great Mystery behind the Incarnation, behind the Nativity that we celebrate today. Out of that profound, ineffable, immeasurable energy of love, the Light of all Lights comes into the world.

And then we are asked to participate in that coming—not only one time, but again and again and again.

That, I think, is really the Mystery and the meaning of Nativity, in the deepest sense. And at the end of the day, when all of these moving shadows and lights pass away—all of our gestures, all of the symbols that we honor and uphold, all of the songs that we sing, all of the rituals that we enact, all of the relationships that we engage in—when all of these things pass away, the fundamental, essential meaning has to be this birth in us. And I think there is no other meaning, ultimately.

For these words and all that has been offered here this morning, Amen.

[brendanelliswilliams]

My Extemporaneous Homily for Trinity Sunday

[This extemporaneous homily given today on the Feast of the Holy Trinity at The Chapel of St. George is transcribed from an audio recording. I added a few clarifying words to the transcription, but I’ve otherwise preserved the spontaneity of the form in which it arose and was originally shared. Subsequent to the Mass this morning, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the work of the éskhaton (the ‘last things’, the ‘completion’) and its relationship to related notions in other traditions. I will likely do some reflective writing on that to share with all of you soon. But, in the meantime, here’s my little ‘Word of Life’ from this morning’s Mass. May it bless.]

The concept that is really in my heart and mind this year as I reflect on the Feast of the Holy Trinity is ‘participation’. And I’m thinking of this in terms of a particular technical theological framework, which has real application for us, I think. It’s known as ‘participatory eschatology’. ‘Participatory eschatology’ simply means that the way the final or last things, the completion of things, comes about is through our direct participation in the divine work. That’s all it means. Rather than us sitting around waiting for something to come from the sky and magically change everything, we participate in that transformative power of the divine will, as it goes out into the whole of Creation, and, according to an ancient mode of Christian theology I very much embrace, eventually brings all life back into union with itself. That notion is called apokatástasis: the ultimate ‘wholling’ or re-union of all Creation. 

We’re all invited to participate in that movement, in that divine unfoldment. And I think if the doctrine of the Trinity is worth anything, it’s that. It’s a reminder that we’re being invited to participate, not merely to have ideational constructs that sound fancy or that we’ve inherited and assumed as ‘beliefs’ without really understanding what they point to. If we get stuck there, we’re in trouble. And we’ve been stuck there a lot throughout the history of the Church, particularly in the West. We’ve been stuck a lot in ideas and beliefs. And that’s not a good place to be.

I’d like to read you something from the early Church. It’s a wondrous thing to look back at some of this theology—particularly the monastic witnesses from the early Church—and realize that a more expansive, breath-embracing understanding of Christian tradition was present in the beginning. It’s not a trend that we came up with because we wanted to conform the Church to our own modern ideas—it’s not that at all, actually. This expansive, mystical understanding of theology is really present in the early Church. This is from St. Macarius the Great. He says:

‘The soul that is found worthy to participate in the Holy Spirit and be illuminated by Her radiance, and by the ineffable glory of Her beauty, becomes Her throne and Her dwelling place. Such a soul becomes all light, all face, all eye. The soul becomes entirely covered with the spiritual eyes of light; nothing in it is left in shadow.’

Elsewhere St. Macarius also says that ‘God reveals God’s own nature to the soul and is discovered by the soul in direct knowledge (gnōsis), in wisdom, love, and faith….[with] the overseeing guidance of the spiritual intelligence’, so that the soul’s divine participation might blossom. ‘In short,’ he continues, ‘God made the soul like this so that it could be His own bride, that it might have communion with the Divine, to be merged in union with God, and so become as one spirit with God.’

That’s the journey, my friends—nothing less than that. To become merged in totalizing re-union with the Divine Ground: that’s our task. Not just to help a few things in the world here and there—that’s great too, but it’s really this divine re-union or ‘divinization’ (theosis) that we’re called to. In that, we participate directly in the life of the Trinity, in its spiritual economy: we are not looking at it as an object somehow removed from us, outside our direct experience, but we each become a Son or Daughter: we become another ‘Anointed One’, the Divine Child in Trinitarian reckoning, which lives and moves in unceasing communion with the Source, through the power and energy of the Holy Spirit. That’s what it means to be sanctified, to become a Saint.

And I want to say that we don’t have any more time to waste on anything short of this. I think you all have a sense—whether it’s consciously, not fully consciously yet, or whatever stage of processing you happen to be in—that the world is unraveling: the external world that we find ourselves in is unraveling. And we’re rushing head-long into these unprecedented modes and degrees of novelty, of bizarreness, of deconstruction and collapse: in our institutions, in the way we sustain ourselves on and with the Land, and all these other things. 

So, we don’t have time anymore to be stuck in beliefs and strange ideas we don’t fully grasp the application of. That was a luxury of the past. And now it’s incumbent upon us to do what St. Macarius is pointing to: to engage this process of real interior transformation, so that the whole Creation may be helped in its transformation, to come back into union with its Source. 

For these words, and all that has been offered here this morning, Amen.

Fr. B.+

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Sailing toward the Wild Dark: A Short Reflection on My Patronal Feast and Nameday

There wasn’t a lot of institutional bureaucracy yet in the Irish Church in St. Brendan’s time—certainly very little that would affect a monastic founder in the west of the westernmost portion of Europe. The Saint was still very close—temporally, and probably in other ways as well—to the pre-Christian legacy and indigenous sacred traditions of Éire. In a sense, his famous voyage was from the still wild to the deeper wild. 

The context of my own life and ministry as a monastic founder in twenty-first century North America is of course radically different. In fact, I suspect there is very little that St. Brendan would recognize about the Church today—or the world of human affairs generally. When his Feast comes up each year in the sacral calendar, I take it as an opportunity to reflect deeply on the ever evolving shape of my own vocation. And this year I find myself reflecting specifically on questions about the monastic relationship to institution: a fraught and tenuous thing from the advent of Christian monasticism as a movement, during the reign of Constantine.

From the deserts of Egypt to the untamed wilds of ancient Ireland, Christian monasticism was originally an endeavor that by necessity extended itself outside the accepted boundaries of ordinary Church convention and bureaucracy. At its heart, authentic monasticism still moves in this way, and must always do so, even if outwardly its radical witness has been hobbled, diminished, or diluted. In all the religious traditions that contain monastic expressions, it has always had this basic shape, being in essence the courageous journey of bold individuals who are willing to sacrifice everything in order to discover directly for themselves what is ultimate, what is true—and who are willing to walk beyond the safety of the communal firelight to make that discovery.

As with everything wild and prophetic, the Western dominator agenda sought from the start to tame and institutionalize the monasticism that rose up organically from the core archetypal impulse of asceticism, and from the social role and spirit of the rebel truth seeker, a pregnant void of which is left when agendas of control are allowed to reign. To a large extent the dominator force succeeded in its evil works, particularly with contexts like the Benedictine order, which became so institutionalized as to be almost unrecognizable in reference to its own monastic roots. Resultantly, there had to be reform after reform to try to recapture some of the original essence of the ascetical life and witness. Always in the West there has been this tension and pull from the institutional center of gravity, which is ever attempting to tame, to make ‘safe’ and manageable, controllable, and quantifiable the real Mystery which moves in the dark beyond its line of sight.

Of course, this agenda of control is a fool’s errand, ultimately. Yet, sadly, the will and attempt to continually whitewash the Mystery has had a vastly deleterious effect on Western cultures and societies, and, perhaps most markedly, on Western Christianity.

I am convinced that the monastic impulse to go courageously and directly into that which is fearful and unknown carries a special prophetic signature in today’s Church, at this historical moment in the twilight hours of the Church’s structural stability. In short, we monastics have the medicine, even if no one is willing to take it. For my part, I continue to be committed to faithfully calling out invitations for those on the sinking ship to leap toward the life-raft.

True to archetypal monastic form, my own place in the Church is and always has been marginal—and that’s as it must be. I’m somewhat of a relic, it seems: an instantiation of the old untamable ascetic who won’t play institutional games and won’t stop speaking from the shadowy wilderness just beyond its boundaries into the institutional morass, pointing out the failings of the assumed construct, and suggesting radical ways to transcend those failings—much to the chagrin of all those who are committed to institutional hegemony and the comfortable, easy path. By this point I know perfectly well my actual role and vocation, and am totally comfortable and at peace with it. I have even come to find genuine amusement in the troubled, suspicious responses of Church folk who resist or can’t grasp what I’m here to do. 

But what brings me deeply into careful discernment these days, as someone who has spiritual children to guide and feels an immense responsibility to each and every one of them, is the direction in which to point my students with relation to institutional structures. Perhaps it’s less about broad direction, and more about degree.

As a Spiritual Father to monastics (and non-monastics as well), my core aim is always to shepherd and equip those who are ready for the real quest of existential excavation and illumination—and to help guide and point the way in such a manner that all non-essential material, detours, and distractions are completely forgone.

I recently shared with members of our religious order that, when it comes to decisions related to institutional collaboration or development, which would involve us in having to wade further into the swamp of Church bureaucracy, stagnation, and ignorance of the importance of who we are and what we do as vowed religious, I am constantly asking myself: ‘Is this really going to help us as a community? Is it going to further our spiritual aims and our core mission, or is it only going to waste time, cause aggravation, and distract us from what is really essential by sailing us straight into the mire of institutionalized absurdity?’ 

Sometimes the answers to these questions do not come easily. And the questions haunt, because I know full well that our time in this life is too short and unpredictable to fritter away on anything other than what is absolutely essential.

St. Brendan set sail in a wood and leather coracle with fourteen of his monastic disciples—not toward any institutional iteration, but toward the totalizing darkness of the utterly unknown: into the oceanic desert of the Mystery, the shattering, transformative wild, in order to more fully actualize the goal of all ascetical life, which was articulated so beautifully and concisely by St. Macarius the Great: to die to ourselves and to the world, that we may live as one with God.

May our holy Father among the Saints, Brendan of Clonfert, the namesake in whose radiant witness I always feel unworthy, bless me and all monastic shepherds with the wisdom to navigate unflinchingly by the singular star of Truth, to sail clearly and directly toward the only destination that is ultimately worth pursuing: non-dual awakening in and as the Uncreated Light.

Fr. Brendan+

Feast of St. Brendan of Clonfert, 2023

[brendanelliswilliams]

Transcendence of Enshrined Form and the Grave of Initiation

It’s always interesting to me when folks show surprise (or, occasionally, utter shock) at my speaking in terms that point through the transitory nature of religious convention. Recently this arose with a new student, and I subsequently reflected on it in light of my solemn monastic profession. For those who are unfamiliar with that rite in Catholic Christian tradition, it is the final vows that monastics make, often referred to as ‘life vows’. A universal and prominent component of this rite is a ceremonial death-and-burial, in which the candidate for solemn vows lies in full prostration on the ground, is completely covered with a large black funerary shroud and left there for a portion of the ceremony, while the Liturgy goes on without him or her.

In my own experience of this, one of my monastic students, Br. Aidan, placed a traditional Scottish tartan over my body, symbolizing my ancestral inheritance; then an old Eastern Orthodox funeral shroud printed with an icon of the crucifixion (very similar to what is depicted on the ‘Great Schema’ of some Orthodox monastic Elders), which was gifted to me and our community years ago by a dear former seminary professor; and finally the black funeral shroud. Those first two layers were dearly held things that were in one sense an integral part of my ritual death, but at the same time things that, because they were so dearly held, I knew I also had to die to in that process. The essential symbolism of this act of ritual burial is that the monastic is finally, sacramentally, then and there, once and for all, dying to the phenomenal world and to every other possible path of experience that would otherwise be open to him or her in this lifetime. 

In my understanding,—and I’m confident this reflects the understanding of the ancient tradition, too—the fully vowed monastic is, if nothing else, one who is fully immersed in the process of dying absolutely to the false construct of ‘self’, as well as to every phenomenal, worldly attachment, in order to enter non-dual union with the Divine Ground. Obviously, undergoing the symbolic sacramental rituals of a rite like Solemn Profession does not magically make it so—: they don’t suddenly bring one to full awakening in non-dual awareness; rather, the outward dimensions of the rite further the depth of the process toward awakening that has been unfolding throughout many years of previous formation, ascetical and contemplative practice. They also ‘energetically’ close doors that might otherwise have remained open, narrowing one’s focus even further on the authentic aim of the monastic (and, in this case, the contemplative) life.

When I was ordained a Buddhist monk in 2003, the same essential feeling was impressed upon me: a ‘dying’ in pursuit of total freedom by means of renunciation—: real renunciation, which is not a rejection of anything, but a seeing through all things, and a releasing of one’s delusional grasping at phenomena. This is a recurring theme of what might be called the ‘perennial wisdom tradition’.

Fully entering a life of renunciation means inwardly dying to all concepts—about anything and everything, including God, metaphysical dogmas, and all the other elements of cultural-religious convention. Why? Because one has discovered (or must come to discover), in dying to ‘self’ and all phenomena, that all such things are contrivances of the human mind, cultural constructs, and they are not God, or even adequate representations of the ineffable Mystery we point to with that term. As St. Eckhart reminds us, we will have to eventually die to God as well—that is, to all our concepts about God—since we know for certain that nothing we can say about that eternal Mystery is actually true, and no image, idea, belief, or conditioned experience can truly reflect it. (This is also beautifully laid out in St. Dionysius’s treatise, Mystical Theology.) Hence, the jñāna yogīs of Vedāntic tradition commit to perpetually cutting through all thoughts and appearances with the sword of discernment, saying with everything: neti, neti: ‘not this, not this’. Nothing that’s created or conditioned can be the Mystery we’re seeking.

One who has gone down to the grave and touched the depths of self-surrender has effectively died to everything. There’s no holding certain things back or choosing ‘favorite pets’ as exceptions to the rule; that would only mean more attachments and thus more distractions from what is ultimate, from what ancient Hermetists sometimes called the One Thing. This invokes for me a motif found frequently in the sayings of the Desert Mothers and Fathers about not keeping back even a little bit of money in one’s cell as a ‘safety net’. Holding on even to one little thing is not full surrender. (In the present context, the monetary dimension of the motif is metaphorical, of course, pointing to the holding back of certain select attachments, favored ideational constructs, beliefs: whatever we want to continue to imagine can give us ‘security’.) That kind of subtle, devious jockeying against the authentic aim of illumination or awakening only reifies the false duality of the state of delusion and needless suffering—what Hindus and Buddhists call samsāra. Therefore, nothing can be carried over into contemplative life from the life of attachment to phenomena: no contrivance of mind, nothing framed by human thought. And this unequivocally includes even the most ‘sacred’ thoughts and personally prized religious ideations, which are, at the end of the day, still just made of thought—and thought itself isn’t made of anything at all.

There should be no surprise, then, when those of us who have thusly died—not just ceremonially, but in actuality, in the way we live and speak—teach or otherwise express ourselves in language and behavior that reflects the fact of that kenosis. A perennial hope of monasticism in the great religious traditions—and of many non-monastic schools of mystical training as well—is that the sharing of the fruits of this emptying would be for others not a source of fear and unwelcome destabilization, but rather an inspiring witness, to help in some small way in the universal project of apokatástasis, or, in Buddhist terms, bringing all sentient beings to enlightenment, to realization of their own true nature. Without the compassionate intention to create the conditions where that might be so, probably none of us would bother to teach or even remain much in contact with ‘the world’ at all.

Those who say ‘yes’ to this path of emptying—which is to say, legitimate contemplatives of any variety—will have to progressively shed more and more attachments, until finally nothing remains but that which was never created and never dies, cannot be spoken, and cannot be thought. 

So, my friends, a humble invitation: Don’t be shocked by speech or actions from such persons that doesn’t conform to the normative, mainline doctrine of the particular religious context(s) in which they happen to presently reside. Moving beyond those constraints is an expected and hoped for stage of the path toward perfect freedom. There is a golden thread of wisdom running through many of the world’s religious traditions, the essence of which is transcendent of each and all of those traditions. This may be new information for you, and it may threaten some of your dearly held assumptions about reality—and that’s okay. I would simply encourage you to sit with that, explore it further, and be open, rather than rigidify and resist. And it’s sometimes useful also to recall that, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, all of the things we hold most dear are constantly moving, rapidly changing, conditional, and always provisional. This includes, of course, all the culturally constructed artifices of religion we like to imagine are somehow trans-human, magically pure and unaffected by the conditioned vicissitudes of phenomenal existence.

Once upon a time I had a Pāli saying of the Buddha, rendered in Devanāgarī, tattooed on my arm—well, technically I still do, but because the lettering had been put on too small (I was young and didn’t yet know enough about tattooing), it now lives underneath a Pictish motif. This saying is still very significant for me, and I think of it often. It translates roughly to: ‘All conditioned things are impermanent, subject to rise and fall. Once they arise, they must cease. And their stilling is bliss.’ I think that just about summarizes the situation perfectly.

Along the way, provisional reality must have its day, of course, and it must be embraced to the extent that it helps us (somewhat paradoxically) to eventually let go of it. In the realm of the relative, we still need to strive for the goal, we still need self-discipline, we have to have some structure or pattern of life, we need some legitimate wisdom teachings to follow, and, above all, we must practice. But we do well, firstly, to adopt those provisional forms that actually help us rather than hinder us by weighing us down with needless, extraneous dogmas or unhelpful thought-forms; and, secondly, whatever we do embrace and utilize, we do well to simultaneously know it as utterly transparent and ephemeral. Not this, not this…

And if in your travels you happen to hear something that has in it the harmonious notes of wisdom, but challenges your beliefs and assumptions, I encourage you to listen—to listen with the ear of the heart.

Fr. Brendan+  (Ngakpa Palden Dorje)

[brendanelliswilliams]

The Search for Home, and Our Holy Mother the Hearthstone (My Sermon for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe)

On this blessed Fore-Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, I want to share just a little bit with you about how and why La Virgencita has become for me a very dear focus of devotion. I don’t usually share in a very personal way like this from the pulpit, but in this case it’s what the Holy Mother has put on my heart to do, so I’m rolling with it.

During the years I lived and served in the Church in Colorado, I became very acquainted with the Land of Northern New Mexico, and the landscape, the rich history, and heritage quickly became very important parts of my life. On one of my first road trips there, I visited The Chapel of St. Jerome in the indigenous community of the Taos Pueblo. There was no one else around and I stepped inside the little adobe chapel, and was all at once struck very deeply: all around were images of the Holy Mother; all over the altar were images of her: as Corn Mother, Virgin Mother, Earth Mother. There were only a couple of male images I could find in the whole chapel, in fact, and they were small.

I sat there for a long time, in awe, just praying and reflecting and absorbing the implications of this sacred place, this sanctuary of the Mother. And something broke open in me. It was as if the Holy Mother, who has been central in my heart since childhood, was suddenly revealing something new in me: new pathways of devotion, new understandings of religious history—a new vision of her in an ancient form new to me, a new mantle of the one who is always present, but often veiled. And here, at last, in the Western world was a place where I could feel the same spirit of devotion I had for her, expressed in an authentic, deeply rooted, and living sacred space.

And when I walked out of that chapel and continued exploring the region of Northern New Mexico, I realized that this image of the Mother—my own Mother, the one who has guided my whole life, and to whom my whole heart is given over in helpless devotion—she was everywhere. She was suddenly everywhere around me in this form of our Lady of Guadalupe. And I don’t just mean that she was everywhere in a metaphysical sense (I’d already long known that and felt that), but I suddenly found myself in a geographical region where I had the possibility of noticing that outwardly, physically, in name and form, she was everywhere around me. In little roadside shrines; on the sides of buildings; in stores and cafés; in the names of streets and villas. And I found in this a very deep recognition of something so central, so sacred, and so true in my own heart: a mystery I had always lived internally, but now, here, in the United States (surprisingly), where I’d never really felt at home, I was at last seeing that inner reality reflected back in the external world. And that felt like a most tender and welcome taste of home—something my soul had thirsted for.

So of course I kept going back again and again to Northern New Mexico over the years: I didn’t want to leave that place, because the Mother of my heart was everywhere depicted there, in rich, beautiful vibrancy—not suppressed, as she has often been in many times and places, but openly embraced and celebrated. The truth of her presence at last felt fully acknowledged outside my own private space of devotion. As some of you probably know, there are very few, if any, other places where this is so in the Western world—certainly in the United States. Of course, it is this way in many parts of Mexico, in certain parts of India—but in Europe and North America, no. There’s a void, I’ve always felt, an absence of the Mother’s radiance in society and material culture.

My ancestral culture and inheritance is Celtic—mostly Gaelic. And in Gaelic culture, we also have a long tradition of honoring the sacred feminine, going back deep into our history, long before the coming of Christianity. But it has been mostly buried by centuries and centuries of colonialism. Because of this devotional flame that was kindled in me so early on, it’s been a central focus for me since adolescence to explore how my own ancestral culture embodied and expressed the sacred feminine. And, eventually becoming a priest and a monastic in Catholic Christian tradition, here in the Episcopal Church, it became a central focus of mine to locate her in this context, too, excavating the deepest layers of the tradition, finding those ancient precedents and bringing them back into the light of day in our context—hopefully reminding us all that she’s there and always has been there, albeit hidden and often suppressed.

There are many prisms through which each of us can view our personal journeys in this life. One of those prisms for me is this search for a place of resonance and clear reflection where the light and life of the Holy Mother is reflected back to my eyes: a place where that knowing, that deep devotion inside, can find a hospitable home in the outward world. And since that’s a home I’ve always found to be non-existent in the environments I’ve inhabited, I have had to try to make it myself, to shape it from raw earth, as it were. It’s as if there’s something deep in me that can’t rest easy until a lived expression of devotion to her—in any or all of her manifold forms—is present and visible in the world around me.

This would no doubt sound strange to many people. Though at the deepest level this endeavor has been about bringing her love and vibrancy and wisdom back into collective view again in the Western context, in whatever small ways that might be possible. It’s a sort of ‘mission’, I guess you could say, to bring her light back into the world a little bit more. This mission has sometimes been covert, out of necessity; it has sometimes been subversive; and I’ve been known to employ a good old fashioned ‘trojan horse’ here and there to further it. Which I make no apologies for.

There’s a reason the Holy Mother has often been described as the ‘homing star’, the navigating star, ‘star of the sea’, or, ‘the star that saves’: for some, at least, she’s the principal lantern: our guiding light in this world. And without her we are lost. Without her we can’t make a home. Without her no home is really possible.

This issue of home is a difficult one, especially in today’s world, where so many of us are displaced, and have been alienated from our indigenous homelands, from the Earth where our Ancestors’ bones have been laid to rest for century upon century. Many of us today are like cultural orphans. And we all have to struggle with these questions in our own ways: What is ‘home’? Can we even truly have a home on this Earth? Or can we find one in this era of history? Can we build it ourselves, or with a family or small community, or does it take a whole cultural context, a tribe, a village? And, if we don’t have any of those things, how can we at least attempt to build a semblance of it on our own? What are the essential ingredients? Can it last?

I’ve studied quite a bit of religion over many years, in a fairly deep way, and I can tell you that all over the world, in many of the oldest cultures, the traditional cultures, this Mother I speak of, whom we honor today as the Virgin of Guadalupe, is found—wearing different masks, different garments, expressing the hearts of different people—to be the proverbial hearthstone: the foundation that’s needed to build anything remotely resembling a home. And I find myself in strong alignment with that shared conclusion.

I would even go so far as to say that religion has failed where it has lost the Mother. Because the Mother is our life-line, our very blood and bones. Without the Mother, there is no life. The Mother is life. Whatever we name her, this I think we can be sure of. Without the Mother, there can be no home, because without her there is no birth, no generation, and no Mystery.

She uniquely manifests to us here and now, as Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of the Americas. And she appears to her children all over the world in diverse and wondrous forms. Let us be grateful today, with our whole hearts, for this particular form, this particular appearance to us of her infinitely majestic beauty. 

May she always guide and protect us—she who in truth is nearer to us than our own breath. And may we keep the flame of her presence always burning in our hearts and minds. Amen.

[brendanelliswilliams]

A Word for the Feast of Pentecost

Since I now give all my homilies extemporaneously, I cannot share word for word the reflection I gave this morning at the Festal Mass of Pentecost, but this is a brief summary of what I offered, which I thought might be worth revisiting and typing up:

In the general course of things, folks go on debating endlessly about ideologies, trying to reassure themselves or create more of a veneer of whatever they happen to think is right and just in the world, but the core human problem—the decisive error and ‘original sin’, if you will—is and always has been existential. It is, in a word, our ignorance: our lack of gnōsis (i.e., our lack of experiential knowledge about the way things really are).

Without transforming the foundation of the human heart and mind through a direct experience of the inter-relationality of all things, violence, chaos, and confusion will go on ad infinitum. The Divine must be experienced as utterly immanent to the whole of Life. It must be known and felt in our very bones. Holding the mere idea of it is insufficient to the critical task at hand. The same can be said for love. And, in fact, love and the Divine Presence are, in Christian theology, part of one and the same metaphysical Reality.

If the Feast of Pentecost tells us anything worthwhile in our own time and place, it’s that we have to awaken in the purgative fire of Divinity—each one of us, here and now. That Divinity is always already present within and all around us, but if we do not do the work to wake up to it and thereby become clear vessels for its transforming work, then we will remain forever in the fevered dream of ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

Unless we understand this awakening as the core of the Christian invitation to co-create the Kingdom of Heaven—and, indeed, as the core of every expression of religious thought and practice—then our religion is little more than an anachronistic fetish. In this time of profound unravelment, I pray that we all would come to know the ever resounding invitation of Spirit to be unified with the isness of her Life, and take that invitation seriously; and that we would learn to discard all that is incidental or corrosive to that one most needful endeavor.

[brendanelliswilliams]

Here in the Wreckage of Western Civilization

This week I listened to a reflection given by fellow monk and abbot, Ajahn Sona, who is a monastic of the Theravādin Buddhist tradition. In this recent Dharma talk, Ajahn Sona likened the current state of the Western world to the famous Uruguayan plane crash in the high Andes in 1972. I’ve been reflecting on this stark but very fitting metaphor, particularly in relation to my own work over the last number of years focusing on where Christianity (and Western religion generally) presently stands in relation to the missteps and steady collapse of long-standing institutions in the West. As I discussed at some length in my book, Seeds from the Wild Verge, my contention is that the project of so-called Western civilization is now at an end. Ajahn Sona seems to agree with this assessment.

What my brother monastic saliently suggests in his talk is that, as happened with the 1972 Uruguayan rugby team plane crash, so in our present context of cultural and religious dissolution a few brave souls will decide to take the risk of hiking out. They will improvise tools to facilitate their journey, and will overcome their dread in order to step out over the proverbial ledge. And they will do so to find a better way for all of us, in pursuit of life, for to live by fear and remain attached to the wreckage can only be a way of death. Most, however, will unfortunately do the latter: they will cling to the sinking ship in a state of fear and anxiety. This is the pattern I have also observed in assessing our present state of affairs. I’ve often discussed this scenario using some of the poetic imagery and sacred symbolism of my ancestral Gaelic culture, or of the early Christian monastic venture. I love Ajahn Sona’s relatable, contemporary metaphor of the 1972 plane crash—including his rather brilliant analogical connection of the incompetent pilot, who died by suicide shortly after the crash and was unable to provide any information at all to the survivors about their location, with Nietzsche’s deceased God. 

Whatever symbolism we use to describe the present scenario, the fact is that we now stand amidst the wreckage of a several-thousand-year experiment in Western ideologies—socio-cultural, political, economic, and religious—all of which have ended in failure. Every one of the proposed projects of our collective past—noble as at least a few of them were—have come to an end, and have come up short. And so we stand at a pivotal moment in the history of this world. We stand at the end of a massive cultural-religious endeavor, covering thousands of years of time, involving billions of lives and a huge swath of the geography of this planet. From Platonism to post-modernism, from scientism to capitalism and technocratic futurism: in the final estimation, all of it is now readily revealed—at least to those ‘with ears to hear’—as morally, metaphysically, and existentially insufficient.

This is certainly not to say that there aren’t some precious jewels to be smuggled out from the rubble. In fact, a fair amount of my own work to this point has been about articulating and elevating those few precious treasures of oft forgotten or neglected ancestral inheritance. But in terms of providing us with an adequate navigation system to point us toward what is highest, what is true and good and beautiful, toward a harmonious way of understanding ourselves in relation to the rest of life, we have collectively botched the endeavor—and botched it severely.

It’s no wonder, of course, that our era has been called (by Auden and others) the ‘age of anxiety’. It’s no wonder that old social categories are breaking down, that contention, confusion, misinformation, and polarization are now ubiquitous. Above all, the immense discomfort, the pervasive desperation, and the sheer bafflement of the present era are, I contend, a result of the fact that the bottom is falling out of the socio-cultural and religious container, and people feel—whether consciously or unconsciously—that they no longer have ground to stand on, which in this case means especially that they have no immediately discernible way to contextualize themselves and derive meaning for their lives. As institutional dissolution and a rapidly changing climate make material life more and more unbearable, while the constructs that previously provided meaning—e.g., religious dogma and affiliation, social cohesion, a widely shared ethos, and localized human relationship—simultaneously erode, it is natural that many will ask what the point of living at all is. Some will sadly cave under this pressure. (As I’ve written about elsewhere, the American opioid crisis and the pervasive use of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pharmaceuticals seem clearly linked to these factors.)

We can’t move forward in any meaningful way until we admit the devastating fact that the whole excursion of Western thought has essentially terminated in meaninglessness and self-contradiction—in a ‘crisis of meaning’, if you will. It has unraveled itself more or less completely now, and finally revealed that its foundational premises were faulty. And here I don’t mean primarily socio-cultural or political premises, but philosophical assumptions—and metaphysical ones in particular.

For whatever reason, in the diverse cultural-religious milieu of India folks have done a much better job at discovering (experientially) true premises, developing and preserving technologies for the gnōsis of something legitimately transpersonal. This is why so many of us who have chosen the route of discovery, of striking out on our own to pave a new path, have looked to the great spiritual and philosophical legacy of India. The Indic traditions of knowledge and human transformation are, in this sense, ‘the light of the world’. I don’t think that’s a hyperbolic statement at all. And no doubt this will have to be factored into our current and future explorations in the Western world—perhaps as a kind of anchor, a stable metaphysical reference point as we strike out anew, a source of inspiration and invaluable tools.

So what now? 

Here in this fraying world, characterized by chaos and decay, we all have to make a choice about which approach we will take. Will we take the risk of truly engaging the adventure of discovery—not just for ourselves, but for all beings, and for future generations of human life in this world—or will we instead do what seems easiest and attach to the place where we presently stand, clinging desperately to the last remaining threads of former structures that are rapidly dissolving in our hands?

If creative and courageous individuals who care for the collective well-being don’t strike out to find a new path—if the invitation to a new cultural and religious adventure is not taken up—then the forces of entropy and the opportunistic powers of authoritarian control will step in and determine the future for us. That danger is now on full display for all to see. ‘Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.’

To strike out and attempt to unfold a new adventure for the Western world, for Christianity, for the human spirit at large must necessarily lead us into the dangerous and discomforting territory of the unknown. But that is where the initiatory experience must take place: beyond the safety of the communal firelight. Most will not be willing to make the trek, and will feel afraid of, threatened by, or resentful of those who do. Many will inevitably see the adventurers as harbingers of the end of everything they know and love. It has always been that way in historical moments like this one. Those who are called to strike out alone or in small communities to forge a new way through the wilderness must bear the cross of the great Promethean ‘sin’. Christians need look no further than the outline of their own foundational mythos to see this clearly.

I suspect that those of us who are truly called to the pilgrim path of new discovery in this time and place have at some level always known it. We have felt it in our blood and bones since childhood; we perhaps struggled to make sense of it in our adolescence and young adulthood; we have wrestled with understanding the context in and for which this soul-level impulse was burning in us, with the stakes and practicability of that impulse, with how to give it flesh. 

The only time that is real is now. And there is no ‘why’ to be discovered. This is simply the life in which we find ourselves. May we, each and all, meet it with honesty, integrity, and courage.

With love and every blessing for the journey,

Fr. Brendan+

[brendanelliswilliams]

On the Notion of ‘Truth’ (Response to a Reader)

A reader recently asked, in response to my previous article, Fundamentalism, the Rejected Gospel, and the Religious Foundations of the Current Crisis in Ukraine, what my understanding of ‘truth’ was, since I relied to some degree on that notion in the article. The reader mentioned Pilate’s question to Jesus in St. John’s Gospel, ‘What is truth?’, and wondered what I thought about it. I have written and preached at some length on Pilate’s question in the past, but what follows here is just a brief reply to the reader in question, which hopefully summarized in a succinct but satisfying way what I generally refer to when I use the term ‘truth’, and addresses why I used it as I did in that particular article. I hope this is helpful for other readers as well:

Thank you for this question. A few thoughts: If speaking in terms of 'absolute' truth, I would suggest that the question has no answer, as the Master's silence in that scene with Pilate seems to indicate. I have actually argued elsewhere that Pilate's question is the real 'center' of St. John's Gospel. I would say that 'relative' or provisional truth can be quantified (and often must be quantified, in rational pursuit or protection of what is good and beautiful), but absolute truth cannot be grasped or articulated with the discursive mind at all, and thus can ultimately only be addressed with silence, or very provisionally described after-the-fact in metaphorical terms. All we can adequately say is what it is not (hence, the via negativa or apophatic mode of theology). An essential dimension of all the world's great mystical traditions is that ultimate truth can only be known (or at least glimpsed) through direct experience, when the ordinary faculties of mind, worldly conditioning, and the baseline egoic structure have to some meaningful degree been left aside. That being said, the 'perennial tradition' implied in those diverse streams of spiritual exploration does suggest certain universal dimensions to what the direct experience of unveiled Reality ('truth', in an ultimate valence) looks or feels like, or how it moves. I would say this is because such experiences do have common if not universal characteristics that can be gestured toward, however imperfectly. For instance, in Vedānta, this ultimate truth would be referred to as inherently expressing the qualities of Being, Consciousness, and Bliss (Sat-Chitt-Ānanda), and this finds direct resonance in other mystical traditions, including Christianity, Mahāyāna Buddhism, and others. Additionally, we might say that a pervasive sense or experience of unity, universal interconnectivity, and 'common life' is a dimension of such experiential insight, and that is part of what was implied when I used 'truth' as a measure in this article. I hope this sheds a little bit of light on how I tend to approach the question of truth. I am a mystical theologian, so these things are part of the core working assumptions of my own worldview; I certainly understand that not everyone shares these assumptions or has pursued experiences that seek to verify them. The fundamental question of epistemology (What do we really know, and how do we know it?) is of course a massive and imponderable one; perhaps the greatest one there is. I appreciate you raising it here. I think these kinds of questions and investigations are immensely important, and should be pursued critically by all, even into the territory where language inevitably fails.

[brendanelliswilliams]

Fundamentalism, the Rejected Gospel, and the Religious Foundations of the Current Crisis in Ukraine

It seems that many Americans are not aware of the sinister dynamics of fundamentalist religiosity that underlie the current crisis in Ukraine, and I think it is important that those elements are known and expressed. I have often attempted to highlight some of these very dangerous dynamics to folks in the Western Church since I left Eastern Orthodoxy roughly fifteen years ago, and it has been my experience that most Western Christians simply lack the context to understand where these complex dynamics arise from and what they imply. The history of Orthodox Christianity in Russia, Ukraine, and the surrounding countries, and its role in centuries of politics there, is extremely nuanced, and not something I intend to treat of here. But I feel compelled to say a few words about the religious dimensions of this catastrophic scenario.

Firstly, it should be plainly said that the Russian Orthodox Church is a highly problematic institution, which has been corrupted and essentially weaponized by Vladimir Putin. Moreover, American branches of Orthodoxy that derived from the Russian Church are in part complicit in this horrific marriage, by virtue of (a) their upholding of similar hypocritical ideologies, often tied to some pet political obsession or socio-cultural insecurity; (b) their support of the Russian Orthodox Church; and (c) their frequent use of the same violent rhetoric frequently used in the Russian Church to denounce Muslims, Jews, other Christians, and generally anyone who has not found the ‘true faith’. On a personal note, this is in essence why I left the Orthodox Church and joined another Catholic jurisdiction: though I loved (and still love) the beauty of the tradition held by the Eastern Orthodox expressions of Catholic Christianity, I simply could not reconcile the utter dissonance and mind-melting hypocrisy that was so fully and constantly on display in the environment of American Orthodoxy—which is so closely tied to Russian Orthodoxy. Both are rife with toxic religious fundamentalism and reactionary politics, though the Russian Church definitely takes the cake.

What we’re seeing now unfolding in Ukraine is much more indebted to that religious fundamentalism than most would probably guess. As Fr. Giles Fraser put it in his article published earlier today, Putin’s Spiritual Destiny: ‘[Vladimir] Putin regards his spiritual destiny as the rebuilding of Christendom, based in Moscow.’ In my own experience of Orthodoxy, there are many Orthodox Christians, both Russian and American, who would unabashedly celebrate such an aim, and think it a good for the world, a ‘victory for God’—and probably for ‘truth’ and for ‘God’s chosen people’ as well. Much of this sentiment is tied up with culture and politics, of course. Putin’s own rhetoric makes this abundantly clear. On some level, he sees himself as a kind of puritanical, pseudo-theocratic monarch, who will set right all the ‘permissive ills’ of the Western world, which he (and many Orthodox Christians, in my experience) would say has lost its way due to its abandonment of a fundamentalist practice of Christian religiosity in the attendant context of a cultural milieu of social conservatism and authoritarian control.

To my thinking, one of the greatest enemies of authentic spirituality, of self-discovery, and of truth generally, is fundamentalism. In America, the Orthodox have taken advantage of the fundamentalist leanings of Evangelicals (and ex-Evangelicals), and have co-opted many of them into their equally fundamentalist vision, which pretends of uniquely possessing ‘the one true, original faith’. Not coincidentally, the Russian and American Orthodox often use language in common discourse that references coming ‘holy wars’, ‘crusades’, and the restoration of a world-dominating ‘Christian empire’, which is all too familiar to fundamentalist Evangelicals and their fevered dreams of ‘Revelations’ and a ‘Second Coming’. These are all, needless to say, dangerous historical fallacies, as well as self-evidently absurd claims in the eyes of anyone who has experientially tasted anything resembling truth. But they are very tempting bait for the uneducated, the insecure, and the spiritually undeveloped, who desire easy answers and (illusory) absolutes to lean on. They are also low-hanging fruit for political ideologues and reactionaries. Thus the tragic wheel of fundamentalism turns round and round, whether it’s in Christian Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, or anywhere else. As I’ve often said, fundamentalism, in whatever form, provides a ready and convenient narrative—and a very sharp stick—to those who wish to dominate and control.

The thing is, domination and control are precisely the opposite of what the authentic Gospel teaches and invites its adherents into. Fundamentalism and the divine witness of kenotic love are plainly exclusive to one another. Those who cannot see this, and who resultantly commit, condone, or passively support atrocities in the name of religious doctrine, are lost in a dark, thorny thicket of self-obsession, often veiled by false humility, and have not yet even begun to place a foot on the path of real transformation (metanoia) or spiritual awakening (theosis). I say this with genuine compassion for the millions of people trapped in this myopic and dangerous circumstance, and take no pleasure whatsoever in saying it. I know how difficult the authentic spiritual journey is (in whatever context one might endeavor to live it), and, foundationally, my aim is always to inspire and equip as many souls as I in my very limited capacity can, to help them find an authentic spiritual path and walk it sincerely, for the sake of all beings, and for the good of the whole Creation.

Being painfully reminded yet again today of the immense dangers of fundamentalist religiosity, as they are once more writ large on the world stage, I therefore feel moved to offer the following to fellow seekers and religious practitioners, and to fellow Christians especially: 

Fundamentalist religiosity is easy; coming to know truth, or anything ultimately worthwhile, is never easy. The true Way of the Cross cannot be easy: by its very nature it is self-sacrificing—and it is certainly not as easy as accepting a canned set of dogmas, imagining them to be God-breathed truth for all time. 

Beware those who speak often of humility and claim Christ or the Saints (who are the very icons of genuine humility) as their own, yet are eager to condemn others, and to imagine and proclaim themselves as knowing or living the ‘one true way’. In the words of St. Isaac the Syrian: ‘Someone who has actually tasted truth is not contentious for truth. Someone who acts zealous on behalf of truth has not yet learned what truth is really like; for once he has experienced it, he will cease from all zealousness on its behalf.’ 

Beware those who claim to uphold the spirit of the Gospel, and yet are eager to harm or even extinguish life when it suits their own selfish aims and delusions, or their political ideologies and ambitions. Again, consider the wisdom of St. Isaac: ‘The following shall serve for you as a luminous sign of your soul’s attainment: when, on examining yourself, you find yourself filled with compassion for all humanity, and your heart is struck in pain at their afflictions, and burns as if on fire, on behalf of everyone without distinction.’

This is precisely what the Master modeled for humanity, in his life and in his death. ‘Christendom’ is utterly contrary to that vision, and always has been, from the moment it was inaugurated by Constantine and his puppet bishops. Significantly, it was largely in response to this blatant corruption and hypocrisy, this co-opting of the Church by a dominator system of political and military power, that monasticism was born in the Church: the preservation of a Christian path that could actually produce Saints, who, as self-emptied vessels carrying the work of Divine Wisdom into the world, might actually know how to love ‘everyone without distinction’. 

The Buddhists have done a far better job at that than most Christians. In Mahāyana Buddhism, much of the religious doctrine and many of the practices are, in fact, focused precisely on this ideal. That is to say, the ideal of Christ—which they call the Way of the Bodhisattva. I would say that this is not an irony so much as a testament to the fact that Wisdom will find a way to work in the world, in whatever hearts are open to her. As the divine energy and essence of Love, she is obviously no respecter of persons—or of cultures or religious orientations. Lady Wisdom ‘cries out in the streets’, and in the marble halls of the patriarchates; she cries out in front of the Russian Orthodox ‘military cathedral’ in Moscow; she cries out in every place where egotism reigns, where injustices are committed with impunity in the name of some religious ideology or other. The question is—and always has been—: Who will listen?

Fr. Brendan+

[brendanelliswilliams]

'The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.' (St. Eckhart of Hochheim)

This little saying is one of the more direct and profound statements of non-dual perception in the vast storehouse of Catholic Christian wisdom. For me this saying always echoes another of his sayings: 'The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one and the same: one seeing, one knowing, one love.' The 'knowledge' St. Eckhart speaks of in the former saying is gnōsis: direct, experiential knowledge of Truth or Reality. 

In my thinking, it is toward this fundamental view or mode of knowing that all of us, whatever our religious traditions, must turn and toward which we have to apply ourselves if we wish to see and co-create the Beloved Community of conscious interbeing (or, the Kingdom of Heaven within and all around us). For this we need meditation—and, more broadly, a contemplative mode of life. I've just reflected some on what that means in the context of contemporary Catholic Christian monastic and contemplative spirituality in my latest episode of 'Soundings from the Living Earth' (Ep. 9). If you're interested in these topics, I hope you might find that brief reflection helpful and supportive in your journey. Peace and every blessing on the Way. —Fr. B.+

[brendanelliswilliams]

Climate Justice and the Transformed Heart

I am elated to see news of the deforestation agreement coming out of COP26 tonight. Lifting up all the leaders, both secular and religious, who are convening at Glasgow (and virtually), especially my Bishop, and the Episcopal Church delegation to the Summit. If love or compassion is truly our principal watchword, as it should be for all Christians, and for any of the world's great religious traditions in which Holy Wisdom has spoken from time immemorial, then our only option as persons who claim to be religious is to seek life, peace, and wholeness for all creatures on this planet. That is all that the heart which is truly being transformed in God can really accept, seek, or will: perfect love that encompasses all. As one of the great lights of the Christian monastic tradition, St. Isaac of Syria, put it (here in my own imperfect translation):

‘Such is the charitable heart: It is a heart burning with love for the whole Creation: for humans, for birds, for beasts, for demons—for all beings. One who has such a heart cannot see or call to mind any creature without her eyes welling up with tears, by virtue of the immense compassion that seizes her. Such a heart is one that is softened, that is wholly broken open, and can no longer bear to see or learn from others of any suffering—even the smallest pain—inflicted on any creature. That is why such a person never ceases to pray for the animals, that they may be kept whole and protected. Such a one will pray even for the reptiles, moved by the infinite compassion that reigns in the hearts of those who are becoming united with God.’

[brendanelliswilliams]

Becoming All Eye

Lady Wisdom instructs Her children to become 'all eye, like the cherubim and seraphim' (Apophthygmata Patrum); for 'the strongest demon is our own ignorance' (Machig Labdrön).

[brendanelliswilliams]

Foxes Have Dens...

This photo of a lone Fox on Slieve Binnian in Northern Ireland (by photographer Ryan Simpson) feels incredibly resonant right now. As some of you know, Ireland is the place that's felt most like home to me on this Earth; though, ultimately, in my deepest heart, I have always known that I had no real home here in this life, and that intuition remains profoundly true. I'm reminded that my MFA work in 2012 and 2013 all revolved around this motif: exploring it poetically, as fully as I could. At the time, I felt that this discomforting reality was something I needed to creatively exorcise, but I have since come to see that the necessary articulation of the fact was principally for coming to terms with a perennial truism in my field of experience: of moving nearer to a place of real reckoning, and perhaps reconciliation, with a hard truth that has haunted me since birth. The inner verity of this endemic dislocality, this perpetual displacement or lack of home is certainly brought back to the fore in a time like the present, as I step once more into a state of itinerancy. 'Whatever you are attached to, let go of it. Go to the places that frighten you...' These instructions of Pha Dampa Sangye have become a luminous watchword for me: an invitation to keep moving forward into ever deepening levels of renunciation and healthful detachment from self and world: never stopping, never assuming any form of arrival. 'Foxes have dens,' but the true monk, the solitary one ('monachos'), has nowhere to lay his head.

[brendanelliswilliams]

Departures, Embarkments, Mirages

The wandering monk sets out, and the journey winds on: ever changing; never predictable; inviting, with each new step, a deeper death to self and expectation, world and worldly machination. The Homing Star forever guides. Vast, in truth, is the cosmic road, mysterious beyond all calculation. With clear eyes to see, all is a beautiful, transparent reflection. The phrase 'pathless path' has been used by many to describe a variety of things, but this, I would say, is its truest meaning. In the language of the Prajñāparamita-hrdayam Sūtra: 'There is no suffering, no cause of suffering, no end to suffering, no path to follow.' And always, Light is shining. ✨ (Image: 'Pilgrim in a Rocky Valley', by Carl Gustav Carus)

[brendanelliswilliams]

Alchemical Fire

Fire is of course a foundational motif in mystical Christian doctrine, and a central aspect of the inner work I've pursued over many years now, but tonight the fire in this classic alchemical image (the frontispiece of Béroalde de Verville’s Le Tableau des Riches Inventions) resonates with something that came to me as I was waking from sleep this morning. Every once in a while, I awaken with a clear, resonant phrase being spoken in the mind by some seemingly external voice, coming through the ether of the Dreaming. Such a 'hearing' invariably has something potent to offer by way of instruction. On this particular occasion, the phrase was: 'Above all else in this life, the alchemical work must be completed.' When axiomatic statements come to me in this way (perhaps as mnemonic clarion calls from the depths of the unconscious), it usually indicates the need to make a subtle adjustment in my navigational course, not necessarily outwardly, but inwardly: to orient anew to the precise location of the homing star. And what, after all, is the 'alchemical work' if not a total transformation in spiritual fire? While this isn't a concept or a pursuit I could imagine myself losing sight of at this stage, perhaps getting ready to pivot toward a radically different mode of life for a time, as I prepare to relocate to Scotland and enter fully the realm of academia, the heart perceives the need to reassert this central truth, that the resolute call and anchoring personal commitment of this lifetime might not become veiled to any degree by the other demands that are sure to amass around me. I have always felt that the highest teaching of the Christian path was indicated (obliquely, as needs be) by St. Joseph of Panephysis in his response to Abba Lot regarding the higher aims of the spiritual life and where to direct the heart once the preliminary work is done, once the needful sacrifice, self-discipline, healing, integration and moral purity are in place: 'If you will, you can become all flame.' That is the true alchemical work, it seems to me: the 'Great Work' of theosis, the highest aim of all human endeavor. To be sure, that Work does not come easily, and can only be manifest as the participatory fruit of our own spiritual sovereignty, our individual agency, in communion and alignment with divine will, and with the central aims and values of Creation. In the fire of Spirit we are changed, transmuted, made whole and holy: restored to our true nature in the Imago Dei. May that true and sacred alchemy be pole star, refuge, and harbor for each and every one of us. +

[brendanelliswilliams]

Beul-Aithris na Sean-Sluagh: Folkways of the Old Ones

I am feeling grateful tonight to my friend Alexis Douglas, who shared with me a post and resultant chat that brought back into my awareness the perennial necessity for having meaningful recourse to our ancestral folk traditions and their paths of origin in the living Land. It proved a gentle and very welcome reminder to connect back to something that’s intangible but always fundamental for me, albeit sometimes too easily forgotten amidst the more abstract philosophical and theological speculations of the sort I’m presently immersed in: that the folk traditions of our Ancestors (whomever they are) are just as valuable as their most ‘lofty’ philosophical pursuits and insights, and just as beautiful. Of course, these two expressions are by no means mutually exclusive, but we have a deep-seated tendency in Western societies to default to the ‘transcendent’ (which betrays a distinct mode of hubris) and forget the other principal aspect of our nature as embodied souls with ancestral inheritances (both gifts and burdens), made of soil and living waters from the River of Blood. Tonight I’m hearing that little whisper that periodically reappears in my heart when I get too heady and says, ‘Come back to the Earth, put your bare feet on the ground, connect again to the roots, remember the underground streams; don’t get lost floating out in the heavenly spheres.’ 

To be sure, the Holy Mother is everywhere—she is Anima Mundi, the soul of the cosmos: Natura, Shakti, Prakriti, she whose body is the universe, who holds the keys to our liberation, who mediates our access to Ultimate Reality—but in this incarnate human form, we can access her nowhere more readily than in and with the Land, in the forests, caves, and sacred waters, and in the ancestral stories that sprang from those deep instantiations of her divine poesy. It could not be otherwise.

Have you spent time lately with the folk traditions of your own Ancestors, and felt the particular ways they connected with the landscapes from which their bodies arose, and to which they have returned? Have you felt the ways their hands and eyes and memories traced the contours of that ephemeral but ever radiant sacrality?

[brendanelliswilliams]

Misappropriated Language and Outmoded Ideology in the Church, and How We Might Move Beyond Them

A good friend and fellow priest posted this past Sunday on his Facebook page that he had been frustrated in trying to write a sermon, feeling that so much of the language he would normally use had been coopted and tainted by right-wing Evangelical white nationalists. The following was my reply to him (with a few minor points of clarification added here):

‘Fr. Karl Rahner once said that he thought the Church should fast from using the word “God” for at least fifty years, until we can all get clear about what we’re actually doing and saying with a term like that, and get deeply rooted and serious enough in our theological speculations to warrant its use. (Fr. Richard Rohr suggested we take the same approach with the name “Jesus”, and I concur; in fact, I think we are much more in need of fasting from this latter name than from the former.) It seems to me that there’s a great deal of wisdom in this approach. What you point out here is the principal reason why the “Jesus Movement” language so ubiquitous in the Episcopal Church today feels misplaced to me, and in fact really chafes every time I hear it. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Presiding Bishop and the basic elements of his vision, but I find this sort of language to be hitting the wrong chord. To me it feels ill matched with where the Church is at now, and where it should be going—and with where the world is at with regard to the Church. It partakes of precisely the same sorts of dissonances you’re highlighting. In the Western Church today we are always in danger of simply repeating platitudes, or unwittingly furthering falsities by allowing ourselves to remain stuck with misappropriated and imprecise language. Most peoples’ “Christology” in the West (if you can even call it that—maybe we should say “Jesusology” instead) is, in my humble opinion, really lacking the deep roots of the tradition. And that leaves us with a rather small and limited vision. This is one reason (among several) why I almost exclusively use “Christ” in religious discourse, or “Christ-Sophia”. I think we need that sort of lens again, which is both broader and more nuanced, and which, if we’re intelligent about it (rather than merely reactionary or political) can liberate us from all the heinous misunderstanding and misuse that has colored Christianity in the West for so long, and afford us a much more effectual set of linguistic and imagistic tools for legitimate transformation. Rahner also said, “Christians of the future will be mystics or they won’t exist at all.” In my view, that’s where we’re headed now from this particular crossroads, if we have the depth and courage to claim the calling of real religiosity. As I perceive it, that’s the divine invitation. And it can most definitely take us into a truer, more authentic, and more rooted place, away from all the baggage of the language and imagery you’re rightly lamenting.’

I saw a photo today from the Capitol riot on January 6th. In the background of the photo was one of what appears to have been many ‘Jesus Saves’ or similar signs present at that event. No doubt those folks also consider themselves to be part of the (‘true’) ‘Jesus Movement’. To be sure, their coopting of Jesus as a figure who supports their insane fundamentalism, egoic delusions, and desire for power is corrupt and evil, but I wonder how ours really differs, structurally speaking. The (white) progressive Jesus is ‘nicer’, but is our understanding of what such a figure really means and invites us into that much deeper than their reactionary, fundamentalist version of the same? Both expressions are drawn in essence from the same literal-historical trends in hermeneutics; it’s just that they emphasize different elements of received texts and interpretations. Granted, I strongly affirm that the emphases of right-wing Evangelicalism (and Evangelicalism at large, in fact) are objectively destructive and immoral, but fundamentally both interpretations play the same sorts of hermeneutical games: they operate in the same playing field, not only culturally (in a homogeneous container), but also religiously.

In other words, all Christians in the West are at some level responsible for this cancerous appropriation of Christian values. Even in progressive circles, in spite of our best intentions, we partake of the language, the dominator cultural styles and structures that have birthed and perpetuated all this toxicity. Until we face that head-on, how can we go about the real work of healing or ‘wholing’ ourselves into a mode of religiosity that is finally supportive of the values of Life, of Nature, of Divinity, rather than blatantly contrary to them?

One of the many problems we face now as people in the Church who want desperately to lead it in a direction of Life—rather than death, ignominy, political coopting, immorality, and corrosion—is that most Western Christians have a rather surface-level view of Jesus, and of Christ more broadly. So the toolkit we’ve been given to work with to articulate a better vision for ourselves is extremely limited. In the United States particularly, it should now be abundantly clear how tied up with right-wing nationalism, racism, and dominator values this theologically underdeveloped mode of Christian language has become. This means—obviously, I hope—that we need to expand and deepen our toolkit, drawing from the deepest and most life giving roots of the tradition.

The lack of adequate Christological understanding is not the fault of ordinary Christian folk; it’s what has been fed to them by their clergy, and it’s what was taught to most of those clergy in seminary for the last two or three generations. It’s what I call the ‘social Gospel, historical Jesus’ trend, and, in my view, this is a trend that has utterly crippled mainline and progressive Christian denominations, and in many cases created a notion of Christian religiosity as (essentially) little more than social justice work with a veneer of religious language. Of course, the work of justice is crucial, but what happens when we scrub away the Mystery, the experiential, inward transformation that is actually required to give rise to authentic justice, the richness of myth and symbology, leaving only this ‘social Gospel, historical Jesus’ layer of ideation? Well, as I’ve been saying for many years now: I think it is perfectly plain to see what happens in that case, as we now see it playing out all around us: the Church is collapsing, and (ironically) has almost no socio-cultural clout, which is the only thing it seems to have really desired for the last five or six decades.

I pray that people will finally be ready to move beyond all this, into something with real transformative capacity. But, alas, I suspect many, if not most, will not. So many Western Christians, of whatever stripe, seem absolutely determined to cling to all manner of outmoded and unhealthful aspects of Christian religious expression, language, and dogma, simply for the sake of safety, comfort, and security in the ‘known quantity’. And that, we can be sure, will lead us nowhere, both individually and collectively.

Might we not attempt to root our religion in actual religion? In other words, can we not learn once more to base our religious affiliation and practice on a legitimate and appropriately comparative understanding of myth, religious narrative, the ‘perennial philosophy’, and the actual aims of religiosity—namely, the science of spiritual transformation through initiatory, ascetical, liturgical, sacramental, and other modes of productive individual and communal sacred work? Haven’t we had enough of basing our religion on socio-cultural and academic trends in lieu of what actually transforms? Are the disastrous results of that finally clear enough for all to see? Of course, we must evolve with the times—I am by no stretch of the imagination a reactionary, and I am stringently anti-fundamentalist in every possible way—but this current disaster we now inhabit is what happens when, in the rush and distraction of that process of cultural evolution, we lose touch with the real root and purpose of the whole operation in the first place; that is, when we lose our memory and understanding of what religion is actually for and what it’s meant to accomplish in the human person.

I won’t enter here into the many additional issues related to male dominator language and the rest of the attendant cancerous threads that have long plagued Abrahamic religious expression, or their effects on Church and society; if you’re interested in all that, you might find some food for reflection in my book, Seeds from the Wild Verge. But here’s an idea: Let’s focus on the Blessed Mother for a while—very deeply: not just linguistically and imagistically, but theologically and practically as well, in a nuanced and committed fashion, not for purposes of political correctness but out of profound theological curiosity and a spirit of expansive internal exploration. God knows all you Protestant types out there could use a serious (and indefinite) dose of the Mother.

I was reflecting recently on what a truly sad circumstance it is that I often feel I can much more readily find depth and theological nuance in contemporary Hindu discourse on Christ, the Blessed Mother, etc., than I can in contemporary Christian discourse on the same. A terrible irony. It often feels to me as if we need to restore Christianity with inspiration from non-Christian sources—something I’ve done in my work with native Celtic traditions, but which could (and perhaps should) be done with inspiration from other arenas as well; for instance, from Vedanta, which has not only unequivocally maintained a far more refined and mature view of religion and its aims than most Christians have, but in fact often seems to possess a more mature view of Christianity than most Christians presently do.

Writing in 1963, Swami Prabhavananda astutely observed: ‘Of course there are millions of Christians today who attend churches regularly…but of those who do, few seek perfection in God. Most people are satisfied with living a more or less ethical life on earth in hope of being rewarded in an afterlife for any good deeds they may have done. Christ’s ideal of perfection is generally either forgotten or misunderstood. True, many people read the Sermon on the Mount, but few try to live its teachings.’

Now, almost sixty years later, that statement proves to be even more radically true than it was then. We have much work to do, friends, if we wish to restore the Church to something that truly transforms, which is truly relevant in a perennial way, and which is positioned not only to survive but to once more contribute something of inestimable value to the world. This will involve us, should we have the courage take up the task, in reclaiming the profound Mystery in Christian tradition, its ancient spiritual practices, and its expansively symbolic depth. May we set out with open hearts on that next adventure—and may we do so quickly.

Peace and every blessing,

Fr. Brendan+