An end is always a beginning

For two days running, I’ve drawn Trump XX as my Tarot card of the day.  In the Waite-Smith deck and its variants, Trump XX is the Judgment, but in the Crowley-Harris Thoth deck that I’m currently using, it is called The Aeon.  If the Judgment is the end of the world (as we know it) and the beginning of a new era, Crowley said in The Book of Thoth, his Tarot commentary, then the Aeon is the new world, the new age that follows: In Thelemic terms, the Aeon of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child.

I am not a Thelemite, nor do I play one on the Internet.  However, I do think Crowley was right about the twentieth century ushering in a shift in the religious paradigm.  If the Age of Isis, as he called the prehistoric and early historic era (still believed to be universally matriarchal, in Crowley’s day), was one of receiving religious experience from the clan, the tribe, the maternal line, and the Age of Osiris (much of the historical era, up through the ascendancy of Christianity) was one of identifying with a savior deity who would take the devotee through and beyond death, our present age, the Aeon of Horus, is the era of the individual, when one’s spiritual and/or religious path becomes a personal choice worked out and achieved by each person.  ”Every man and every woman is a star.”

For me, the Trump of the new Aeon heralds a change in blogging.  I have decided to close up shop here and blog in a new format, with a slightly shifted focus.  As before, I’ll be making spiritual observations, talking about my personal practice (perhaps a bit more), and responding to what I read, hear, listen to, watch, and learn.  I hope my readers will join me henceforth at A Comfortable Oxymoron.  Thank you for having been present with me.

Eleventh month, eleventh day

I don’t really have a personal connection with Veterans’ Day.  One of the many variable and uncertain stories of my father’s life was whether he had fought in the Second World War; he was of an age to do so, but sometimes he said he hadn’t, and sometimes he said he had.  I’m not sure if my grandfather fought in the First World War; he died when I was only four.

My husband’s piano teacher, who still lives in the neighborhood and is a friend of the family, served in Korea.  He doesn’t talk about it.  I can think of one person I know who fought in Vietnam, but we are not intimate.

I have a number of online friends, all of them women, who have served in the Armed Forces, at least three of them in the field.  They do talk about living with the repercussions of that experience.

It is Veterans’ Day here in the United States, Remembrance Day in Europe.  It is also the feast of St. Martin, the Roman soldier who gave half his red military cloak to a freezing beggar who was actually Christ, and who became a priest, later a bishop.  And it is Cet Samhain, little Samhain, the end of the Samhain festival, when the Otherworldly gates close and things begin to go back to normal.

People are dying now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, who will be remembered on this day for years and decades to come.  I wish that we might say, with St. Martin, “I am a soldier of Christ: I cannot fight.”  In the meantime, what can I do but stand quietly with those who do remember loved ones on this day and give them space to remember and grieve.

 

An oracle for YOU

 

DEFINITION: Pronoia is the antidote for paranoia. It’s the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It’s a mode of retraining your senses and intellect so you’re able to perceive that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.

HYPOTHESES: Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Receptivity is a superpower.

PROCEDURE: Act as if the universe is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination. Assume that secret helpers are working behind the scenes to assist you in turning into the gorgeous masterpiece you were born to be. Join the conspiracy to shower all of creation with blessings.

Rob Brezsny, from his book Pronoia Is the Antidote to Paranoia

 

Too strange and wonderful not to share

Where it all began

My first memories of anything religious are of a Lutheran church. My sister, eleven years older than I, had been confirmed at a Missouri Synod church in the neighborhood with the entertaining name of Martini Lutheran. She was still a church-goer when I was five or six and she was sixteen or seventeen, so I went to church with her. I can’t remember whether we walked there, or whether someone picked us up and drove us. My sister, like me, has never learned to drive. We probably walked; I have a vague memory of not wanting to hold my sister’s hand, but no memories of what houses or streets or cars we walked by.

The emphasis at Martini Lutheran was on Sunday school. All the different classes had a sort of mini-church together and then separated for their lessons. We got lots of handouts with pictures and learned lots of Bible stories, and we sang songs like “Jesus Loves Me”. Even then, I think, I liked the singing part the best, and somehow I had the courage to ask if I could be in the choir. I must have sung for the organist, and I was allowed to join even though I was a year younger than the official minimum. I suppose I had two advantages: My precocious reading ability, which meant I could follow the words of hymns, and the ability to match pitch.

Rehearsals for the choir were regular, but appearances in the liturgy were infrequent. We had cassocks, I think, dark red, with white cottas or surplices over them, and red skullcaps. I remember scurrying across a courtyard or something, from one building to another, to enter the church proper. I have a vague recollection of very dark wood, of a white-haired genial preacher (who may or may not have been the pastor), of not really knowing what was going on. There was little connection between the Sunday school and what the adults did in church, as worship.

When my sister was eighteen, she wanted to get married. Her intended was a Polish Catholic boy she had met doing amateur theatre. For the pastor of Martini Lutheran Church, the Reformation was not over; he sat in our parlor and informed my mother that he was not going to allow a Catholic priest at the altar of his church. “Your church?” said my mother. “I thought it was God’s church.” She threw him out, and my sister and her fiance were married in German Catholic church two blocks away from us, by a very liberal, rather hippie priest who was a friend of the groom.

So I didn’t go back to Martini Lutheran after that. As it happened, there was an Episcopal church barely one block away from our house. My mother had sung in an Episcopal church choir as a young married woman, until she became pregnant with my sister; she sang through the pregnancy, then did not return to the choir. She arranged for an elderly neighbor who was a member at the Episcopal church to walk me there; I suppose I was seven or eight by then. Every Sunday I walked the single block to church with our neighbor, crossing our street and one other, and went into the back door that led to the parish hall of the Church of the Advent.

Advent was different from Martini in several important ways. First of all, my Sunday school class attended the first half of the Sunday Eucharist, which was called Mass. We left after the Liturgy of the Word and before the Liturgy of the Eucharist (although we didn’t call them by those names) because we weren’t allowed to take communion yet. This was the early 1970s, and in our diocese, at least, the sacrament of Confirmation was still regarded as the admission to Communion; consequently, I was confirmed when I was only nine. Nowadays most Episcopal kids, like Roman Catholic kids, have some kind of class to prepare them for First Communion, and are confirmed much later, as teens, when it can be more of a personal decision. Second, the choir at the Advent sang every week. It was a very small amateur choir of women and girls only, but they were up in the chancel leading the communion service and the hymns every week. Pretty soon I wanted to be a part of that and joined the choir for the second time.

Being allowed to attend at least part of the weekly Mass meant that I was exposed to three important influences: The 1928 Book of Common Prayer, the Hymnal 1940, and the Authorised Version of the Bible. I can’t stress enough how much this heritage of literature and music, coupled with the drama of the Mass, laid down the pattern for my spirituality to this day. Every week I saw people wearing cassocks and surplices, doing special things in a special part of the church; every week I put on a vestment of my own, a red skirt, white cotta, and a lace “chapel cap” (think doily-on-my-head), and joined them up there in the chancel; every week I saw our rector in a damasked silk chasuble, a glorious tent of color, standing at the altar and opening the service with the Collect for Purity:

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Every week I sang music that ranged from medieval plainsong through seventeenth and eighteenth-century tunes by Orlando Gibbons, Thomas, Tallis, Henry Purcell, and J.S. Bach, to nineteenth-century Victorian melodies and early twentieth-century composers such as Healy Willan, that great godfather of Anglican liturgical music, whose “Missa de Sancta Maria Magdalena” is known to every Episcopalian I’ve ever met. Every week I saw candles lit, heard stately poetic language, saw ritual gestures made, and partook of sacred food. Nothing can erase the impact of that formation of my spirit. Show me mediocre language, bad music, clumsy ritual, and I will turn you right off. I know how it ought to be done.

The Prayerbook and the King James Bible taught me how to write, how to make subjects and verbs agree, how to handle relative and dependent clauses, how to use the colon and the semicolon as well as the comma and the period. The Hymnal taught me that music was bigger and wider than what came out of the radio, bigger than my sister’s music or even my parents’ music, which was big band and jazz. It taught me how to sing plainsong and harmonies based on the fifth rather than the third and prepared me to discover medieval music, Renaissance polyphony, and the English cathedral repertoire. The architecture of the Church of the Advent taught me how to sing, how to stand, how to hold my music up and sing over it, not into it, and how to define a space with my voice. My whole spiritual journey is built on my encounter with Anglicanism at age eight.

I’ll be coming back to explore my experiences at the Advent, and other parts of my religious history, in more detail. Stay tuned.

A list of things my readers may not know I like

1. Star Trek, especially the Original Series and Deep Space Nine
2. The animated Batman universe created by Paul Dini
3. Ridiculous Britcoms, especially As Time Goes By (not very ridiculous, actually) and Are You Being Served? (probably the lowest point of British humour)
4. Redheads of both sexes
5. Strong black tea with abundant milk and sweetener
6. Early jazz, such as Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Django Reinhardt
7. Big band and swing music
8. Chocolate
9. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels, but no other novels featuring vampires
10. Male Submission Art (you may not want to click here if your boss, your little child, or your mom or dad is hovering around)
11. Diane Duane’s Young Wizards novels
12. Colin Morgan and Bradley James of the BBC’s Merlin
13. Swords

Dharma art

I wish to urge students of the dharma who may have forsaken their creative impulse in favor of practice to realize there is no conflict between creativity and meditation. Creativity can be understood, in essence, to be the practice of our own nature and that nature’s expression. You may find your way in to the nature through creativity; or you may come out from the nature to express creativity. Both have to be appreciated as the best of our mind’s potential.

–Kongtrul Jigme Namgyal

It’s after eleven p.m.

… and I haven’t posted today.  I’m suffering from a glut of ideas, processes, revelations, a dearth of time free at work (where I do a lot of writing), and just a little bit too much indigestion or headache or some other hangover of the day.  How many nights this week have I had a headache after work? through dinner, and despite a pot of tea, and until I went to sleep.

At the moment, I am rather regretting committing myself to NaBloPoMo.  I am not sure how much I can or will be able to say about what’s going on for me right now.

 

This FWA hits even closer to home than usual

When Dante was nine years old, long before he became one of Italy’s supreme poets, he fell in love with Beatrice, an eight-year-old girl he met at a May Day party. They never had a close relationship. In the years after their initial encounter, they met infrequently, and both eventually married other people. But Beatrice played a crucial role throughout Dante’s life, although she died at the age of 24. She was not just his muse, but also his “beatitude, the destroyer of all vices and the queen of virtue, salvation.” Dante even wrote her into his Divine Comedy in the role of a guide. Is there any person or influence in your life equivalent to Beatrice? Any once-upon-a-time blessing that might be ready to give you the fullness of the gifts it has been waiting all this time to deliver?

The shining of the silver screen

Piqued by a reference on Bones, featuring an actual mummy and “Bones” Brennan naming the film as a childhood favorite that sparked her interest in forensic anthropology, we followed our Halloween viewing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! with the original The Mummy with Boris Karloff through Netflix, in glorious black and white. What a great movie, and what a fascinating fellow Karloff was! Despite some hilarious archaeological gaffs in the beginning (people handling fragments of stone and ancient scrolls of papyrus with their bare hands), the film has lots of creep factor, lots of tension, and some fairly authentic-looking reproductions of ancient Egyptian artifacts, plus a nifty Egyptian laborers’ work song that had John and me rocking out. *g* Karloff, who was tall and slim but not freakishly tall or massive, has one of those long, angular faces that lends itself to makeup and prosthesis, rather like Ron Perlman these days. Despite his many gruesome roles, in private life he was a gentle man and a gentleman, too, a hard-working actor who was forty-four when he found his breakout role as James Whale’s monster in Frankenstein, fifty-one before he became a father. I’d like to see Frankenstein now; it’s one of many films I caught bits of on broadcast tv as a child but have probably never watched all the way through.

Watching It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! is a yearly ritual for me, and I never get tired of those alto flute solos, or of the World War I Flying Ace’s battle with the Red Baron and his trek through the French countryside. In my memory that sequence goes on for hours, moody landscapes and the haunting flute part. I said to John that that was probably the first glimpse I had of what the shakuhachi tradition tries to do, the flute as an instrument of spirit, an embodiment of Spirit through the breath.

Our public television station favored us over the past two weekends with the Jeremy Brett version of “The Sign of Four”. I have never been a Holmes fan before, but now I’m completely enthralled with the Brett series, and also with David Suchet’s Poirot. “The Sign of Four” is a more complex story than the usual 45-minute episode, with lots of exterior shots and lots of obvious if beautiful matte paintings for backgrounds, rather like Original Trek. The final exchange of dialogue is just a killer: “What an attractive woman,” says Watson, rather wistfully. (Yes, and young enough to be your daughter, John!) Holmes, collapsed on a narrow bed with limbs sprawled out, replies, “Was she? I hadn’t noticed.” Oh, Sherlock.

Meanwhile, we have finished season four of Deep Space Nine, with Odo’s shocking punishment by his people and Salome Jens’ amazing authority and confidence as the female Founder, and have season five on tap and the first season of the animated series Batman Beyond. We also viewed Mask of the Phantasm again, and yes, I still think it’s an enormously better movie than either of those with Christian Bale, and it’s also the only movie to give Bruce Wayne a compelling love interest–a smart, sexy redhead with some martial arts training. Bruce likes a woman who can trip him over her hip. *g*