wonderingstill

December 21, 2023

Everything changes in Chapter 8. This is the esoteric heart of Mark's gospel. Here, the text confronts the reader like a mystery play. We enter it as a character, and the Christ speaks directly to us from the world of Spirit.

Until now, the impulse of the Gospel has been to hint at Jesus’ nature through demonstrations of power: weather and feeding miracles, supersensible knowledge of his opponents’ thoughts, healings, and, most of all, exorcisms. All these moments share one thing in common: whether wind, or thoughts, or illness, or unclean spirits, Jesus commands spirit forces in the material world. The question everyone keeps asking is “How?”

Finally, alone in a boat with his disciples, Jesus initiates us to the higher reality of what we've been seeing:

Have you eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear? Or do you not remember? - Mk 8:18 (RNJB)

He plays a quick number game: how many baskets of leftovers were there after each feeding miracle? The answer: 12 and 7.

Twelve: the number of months of the celestial year, time and space marked by the procession of the twelve signs of the zodiac rotating slowly through a year of nights. Twelve is the complete turning of the sky, revealing the complete rim of the visible cosmos turning in its creator’s hand.

Seven: the number of the wandering lights, the planets that move erratically against the backdrop of the fixed stars. To many in the ancient world, these were the celestial intelligences governing human fate. To the wise, and certain magi, while they may not have dictated human events, at the very least God makes his wisdom known in their movements.

In these two numbers, Jesus sums up the point of entire gospel thus far: Jesus holds authority over the visible cosmos and every invisible power that moves within it. He is from outside the system. No mere teacher, or prophet, or magician, his power is truly from out of this world.

Chapter 8 is the hinge of this gospel. Now that it's settled “how” Jesus does what he does, the rest of the Gospel pivots to tackle the “so what.”

Notice how deliberately Mark structures this transition. To make sure we're seeing clearly now, Jesus next tests our perception in the figure of a blind man he heals in two steps at Bethsaida.

The man looked up and replied, ‘I can see people; they look like trees as they walk around.’ Then Jesus laid his hands on the man’s eyes again and he saw clearly; he was cured, and he could see everything distinctly. - Mk 8:24-25 (RNJB)

Of the Twelve chosen apostles, Peter is the first to join us in this new revelation. Well, almost.

Then he himself put a further question to them, ‘But you, who do you saw I am?’ In answer Peter said, ‘You are the Messiah.’ - Mk 8:29 (RNJB)

He recognizes Jesus is the Lord Christ, the anointed one prophesied of old as coming to restore God's kingdom, but his vision is limited to the sensible world. Peter imagines a cosmic king coming to restore an earthly throne. Jesus' vision knows no such bounds.

Where Peter's perception is shaped by Daniel’s Son of Man (Daniel 7:13-14), Jesus reveals a suprasensory reality shaped by Isaiah’s Suffering Servant (Isaiah 52-53). Combining the two, he unveils an esoteric mystery: he will open a way of life to those who join themselves to his dying.

For his part, Peter prefers his original, triumphal, temporal view.

And he said all this quite openly. Then taking him aside, Peter began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said to him, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are thinking not as God thinks, but as humans do.’ - Mk 8:32-33 (RNJB)

In scolding him, Jesus reveals his full human Incarnation. Cosmic Son of Man or no, clearly he'd prefer a happier ending for himself. Like Peter. Certainly like us.

He called together the crowd with his disciples and said to them, ‘Anyone who wants to be a follower of mine must renounce self and take up the cross follow me.’ - Mk 8:34 (RNJB)

The rest of the Gospel enacts the Divine reality Jesus reveals here. Now that the mystery has been revealed, do I deny myself? Or do I just stay part of the crowd?

December 17, 2023

Advent is supposed to be apocalyptic, not cozy. The total lack of subtlety and symbolic imagination in the American mind is a deadly impairment to Christian faith.

In the dying of each year, days grow darker, nights grow longer, the sun and the human heart grow colder. That's why the liturgical readings are all from the Prophets and Revelation. Traditionally at this time of the year, Christians look for the return of Christ and the total regeneration of the world. Today, however, Hallmark has trained Christians to look only for the birth of Baby Jesus, and Capitalism the coming of Santa Claus. Talk about confusing the gift with the giver.

The Revelation to St. John lays the cycle of waiting bare. As “the seven angels” wrap up their unmaking of the physical world, a new reality descends to take its place:

And the angel showed me the river of life, rising from the throne of God and of the Lamb and flowing crystal clear down he middle of the city street. On either bank of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit in a year, one in each month, and the leaves of which are the healing for the nations. - Rv 22:1-2 (RNJB)

In any pre-modern text, cycles of seven and twelve are inescapable because, before Industrialization, human awareness was governed by the sky. When we planted. When we reaped. When we bore our children or sent them off to war. Before the light bulb and chronometer, time was a function of the movement of planets (7) against the fixed constellations of the zodiac (12) through which the sun proceeded, month after month, world without end.

Here, John describes the Christian mystery revealed in the night sky, wrapped in all the richness of the Hellenistic symbolic imagination. The seven planetary intelligences governing pagan fate are in actuality seven angels serving God as his demolition team. Rubble cleared from their cosmic construction site, a celestial city descends, through which a river bright as crystal (the Milky Way) runs, straddled by a tree of life, producing twelve kinds of fruit, each in its month (the constellations of the zodiac).

Through John's visionary eyes, we see the dome of the night sky as a great tree bower sheltering us from horizon to horizon. The tree of life and the great river from God's original Paradise are restored, this time at the heart of a new polis instead of a garden.

This is the second coming. This is the new creation: apocastasis, with all the signs of the zodiac reset, balanced, and on equal footing. Now, all the heavenly powers of the night sky (“the leaves of the tree”) serve a benevolent God and the Lamb. Instead of the vagaries of fate, the stars now ray forth “for the healing of the nations.” Christ, the Lamb of God, born into time, permeates the world like yeast in dough, rising.

This is the reality for which we yearn, that the Incarnation makes possible. A world fully, elementally alive:

Let the sea and all within it thunder; the world, and those who dwell in it.

Let the rivers clap their hands, and the hills ring out their joy at the presence of the LORD, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth. - Ps 98:7-9 (RNJB)

As the world and its nights once more approach their darkest, surely, we cry, this is the season everything becomes new at last. Surely this time, it is for real and for always. Surely, surely, the wait is over.

The solstice, and Christmas, comes.

Again.

We hope, we pray it's finally the birth of a new kingdom. Until it is, we hold onto the birth of a new king as the wheel turns once more.

December 10, 2023

The Psalm sings to us from an ancient world steeped in Hermetic philosophy. First, all “that which is above” sings praise to the one God:

Praise the LORD from the heavens; praise him in the heights. - Ps 148:1 (RNJB)

All spirits and celestial elements begin to sing, voices rising upward through each sphere of the Ptolemaic cosmos: first the angelic host governing our sublunary realm, then the wandering planets nearest to mortals (sun and moon), ascending through the zodiac (stars and light), finally reaching beyond the very firmament of fixed stars beneath God's feet (all ye heavens, and ye waters that are above the heavens).

No silent, impartial sky, this. For the psalmist, life unites every layer of the visible universe under God and sets it all in blessed motion.

He established them for ever and ever, gave a law which shall not pass away. - Ps 148:6 (RNJB)

Then, since “that which is below is from that which is above,” all created forms on earth echo the celestial hymn:

Praise the LORD from the earth; sea creatures and all ocean depths… - Ps 148:7 (RNJB)

It spreads down through the elemental worlds (fire, snow, wind) into mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms (mountains, cedars, cattle, fowls). All human institutions and cultures reflect this Wisdom (kings, peoples), and every individual regardless of status or gender (young, old, men, maidens, children). Simply by existing, every one and every thing silently sings to the Lord beyond the sky. Last of all, “the people to whom he is close.” (148:14)

Advent comes in the darkness approaching the Winter solstice to remind us this union of Heaven and Earth is incomplete. What is must pass away before the marriage can be consummated.

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared now, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. - Rv 21:1-2 (RNJB)

The very reality we cling to, “made fast for ever and ever,” is only a reflection of its final form. We await its birth with the coming of the Christ.

December 9, 2023

The Gospel of Mark makes no bones about the world of the Christ. It is a world full of spirit beings: angels who minister to him in the wilderness and unclean spirits infecting human lives whom he silences with a word. Humans who inhabit his world soon divide themselves into two camps: those unfit for sacred worship who receive his authority as divine, and the observant righteous who see him only as a servant of the ruler of demons.

The Lord Christ comes that we may see the world and see it rightly, all things visible and invisible.

He told them, ‘To you is granted the secret of the kingdom of God, but to those who are outside everything comes in parables.’ - Mk 4:11 (RNJB)

He reveals a secret way of seeing – and living in – this world. That it is a world of flesh and spirit. That, for the repentant heart, it is a kingdom near at hand. And that, for those who know his secret, he becomes both gate and key.

Still, even seeing that clearly, I fear his kingdom eludes me. At best I am one who treads the rocky ground, enduring only for a little while. At worst, I live among the thorns, where the cares of the world choke the word so it yields nothing.

I pray the Psalm holds hidden meaning:

Now I know the Lord saves his anointed, and answers from his holy heaven with the mighty victory of his hand. - Ps 20:7 (RNJB)

Here, the Lord's anointed must be more than just the historic heir to the throne. To the observant Jew, perhaps he is the righteous one or even the entire people of Israel. To the traditional Christian, he is Christ himself. To the Christian mystic, he is the Christ in me.

Thanks to my baptism, I share in the fruit of his Incarnation. His mighty victories are against the enemies of God within my own nature. As he falls, I fall with him that, sharing his nature, I too may rise.

December 2, 2023

Thankfully, God has a fundamentally different take on reality than I do.

For you love all that exists, you loathe nothing you have made; if you had hated something, you would not have made it. - Ws 11:24 (RNJB)

I struggle anymore to love the things of this world. The witness of humanity these last eight years has broken that in me which looks for the image of God in other people. Yes, I pray on it. Yes, I have talked with priests I trust about it. Yes, I recognize it is a basic tenet of the faith that humanity is created as a reflection of the Divine, broken now and slowly being repaired by the true icon of the Incarnate Logos. I do not teach otherwise. I just confess that it now defies the evidence of my eyes and heart. The universe whose long moral arc once bent toward justice, now seems only to bend toward doom. Sadly, it is often the witness of the Church itself that strips me of hope.

Beware of false prophets who come to you disguised as sheep, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. - Mt 7:15-16 (RNJB)

Even the best of its leaders often seem devoid of wonder, promoting a temporal belief grounded only in the world of matter and form instead of a spiritual belief grounded in the higher, unseen reality upon which it must rest. Theirs is a faith of received certainties instead of discovered possibilities, of psychological altruism over spiritual desire.

Occasionally some small movement gives me a glimmer of hope only to dash it. Last month, a scandalous, openly partisan, schismatic bishop was finally removed from his seat as the head of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas… but not, seemingly for his scandalous, partisan, schismatic teachings. Like Al Capone, in the end it was just administrative mismanagement that ended his reign. And once again, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (of which the scandalous, partisan, schismatic bishop remains a voting member) trotted out their tired election-year statement of “Faithful Citizenship” reminding American Catholics that the “pre-eminent” moral evil in post-Roe America remains abortion, without uttering a word about electoral integrity as a fundamental requirement for sound government.

That makes the readings this week especially precious, these final days as the Church year dwindles to a close before Advent. Here all the wonder of Wisdom literature and self-critical challenge of the Church finally finds a voice. Any more, I need the Gospel to restore the faith that my Church destroys in me.

Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of Heaven, only the person who does the will of my Father in heaven… Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a sensible person who built a house on rock. Rain came down, floods rose, gales blew and hurled themselves against that house, and it did not fall; it was founded on rock. - Mt 7:21, 24-25 (RNJB)

Before God, I am as scandalous, partisan, and schismatic as my enemy. How, then, am I to act on these words that I hear? I sit here with an angry heart, trying to pray, any Divine awareness drowned out by annoyance at the sound of spattering water overflowing the roof after having just cleaned the gutters.

For your imperishable spirit is in everything! And thus, little by little, you correct those who offend; you admonish by reminding them of how they have sinned so that freed from evil they trust in you, Lord. - Ws 12:1-2 (RNJB)

For as much as I distrust the witness of spirit in matter, how do I look to it for God's correction, little by little, to be freed?

November 28, 2023

But I say this to you, do not swear at all, either by heaven, since that is God’s throne; or by earth, since that is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, since that is the city of the great King. - Mt 5:34-35 (RNJB)

Beyond the moral exhortation, what captivates me in scripture like this is the relationship between Heaven, Earth, and the Holy One. Here Earth and Heaven are connected in the one who rests on them both.

As the throne of God, the invisible realm of Heaven enjoys primacy over God's footstool, the visible earthly realm. Yet both are a manifestation of God's reign and bear his presence each in a way appropriate to its nature.

It echoes the Hermetic Philosophy sounding then from out of Roman Egypt into the whole of the Hellenistic world.

As above, so below. That is the key to all mysteries.

That which is above is like that which is below and that which is below is like that which is above, to achieve the wonders of the one thing. The earth is a reflection of the macrocosm of the universe. – Hermetica, The Emerald Tablet

The eye of faith sees in the physical a reflection of the immaterial. It does not reject the physical, as the gnostics did then. Nor does it worship the material as a statement of God's favor, confusing gift for the giver as American Christians do now. Rather, a Christianity informed by the Hellenistic worldview into which it was born simply learns from the visible world about the invisible Father in order to love him rightly.

What does the turning season say about the nature of the Father? The leaves returning to the soil, do they not speak of the Son? And contemplating both, is it not the work of the Spirit to write the lessons of the Book of Nature onto the tablet of the human soul?

November 26, 2023

By faith we understand that the ages were created by a word from God, so that from the invisible the visible world came to be. - Heb 11:3 (RNJB)

Planets moved through the icy night. Jupiter rose in the East while Uranus hid beneath the moon. Saturn lay low in the South as if biding its time. The November chill swept away all moisture from the air like a curtain, revealing a silent cinema of sky.

Reading esoteric Christianity alongside my Catholic faith, I've gained a new love for the Ptolemaic universe, not as a scientific worldview but as a living metaphor. The cosmos after Copernicus is our teacher, but its subject is limited to the sensory world of movement and matter.

I find it's not only possible but necessary to hold the original worldview alongside it in my imagination: a world of growth and decay, nested lovingly beneath the moon, in the center of concentric spheres of planetary intelligences, beneath the ring of fixed stars, each governed by angelic hierarchies, all descending into visible reality from the invisible Father through the Logos, God the Son. That is the world of the Early Church, the world in which the Incarnation makes sense: the Logos descending into his Creation as the Christ, permeating it like a ferment, distilling it like a spirit to reclaim its true nature and return it to its source.

Original Christians inhabited a pagan cosmos. We can't be moved by the one who moved them without actively imagining the realm in which he moved. The visible world is real and beautiful, yes, because of the invisible world of spirit it reflects.

Where Copernicus and Galileo reveal a cosmology of knowledge, Ptolemy and Hermetic philosophy preserve an anthropology of wisdom. Nights like this deliver the rest of the lesson.

November 21, 2023

In the beginning God made his works by his judgement and as he made them he fixed their portion. He determined his works for all time, from their origins to their distant generations. They know neither hunger nor weariness and they never desert their duties. - Si 16:26-27 (RNJB)

It is Spirit as cause that moves me, not matter as effect. This world of form and change is full of goodness and beauty, despite its human detractors. Still, that beauty is reflection only, its source overlooked by a faithful trained to see in Jesus only guru or teacher or judge before Wisdom or Logos or Lord.

I seek the faith that rests on cosmic things, on unspoken Word woven into the very fabric of matter and cycles of the natural world. When Wisdom, the image of the unseen, is spoken as Word we become incarnate. Wonder is the only prayerful response, the needful precursor to faith.

The song of a sunrise. The cadence of wandering planets. The weeping of tides. The sleep of trees. The Logos, God the Son, moves through all things. Faith, the study of divine motion, studies that book of nature for signs of the same spirit forces at work in the human soul.

God is in the Mind, the Mind in the Soul, the Soul in the Matter, all things by Eternity. – Hermetica 10:36