Hermetic Catholicism

The Transition to www.corjesusacratissimum.org

2009-05-26T13:38:00.000+01:00

Dear Reader,

As mentioned in the post just below, I will mainly be blogging at a new site. Not surprisingly, the address is just above and if you like, you can click on it for a link.

Yet as a way of "transition" to the new project, there are some final things I still want to do at this weblog.

I want to note for example, my not yet honoured promise below to publish the second half of my 2006 "Au Revoir" musings on France and the Sacred Heart. I think this promise will soon be honoured. Yet not here, but rather within the articles section of the new site ...

But there are other things as well.

There is quite a transition from this old weblog to the new project. Clearly it is a transition towards an ever more traditional Catholicism. In fact, I have changed so deeply these last years, that I have wondered if this weblog should be taken down.

For the moment, it remains. It seems to me that it has spoken to a few people of an esoteric Christian persuasion, and that perhaps by leaving it here as a "historical document" as it were, it can serve to illustrate the transition I have made.

And this in turn, could perhaps help others who are called to a similar kind of transition ...

"Called" to this transition. Yes, dear Reader, I believe I have been CALLED to make this transition.

And in time, I may well write more of this calling.

I will not say much for the moment. But I will note in passing, that I felt this call most deeply of all in the little town of Paray-le-Monial in France, the cite where the Sacred Heart revealed Himself to the world, and called for the Cult of the Sacred Heart.

Yes my life has changed forever in Paray ... the most astonishing place on earth I have ever experienced. Yes in the depths of silence in Paray, I have felt a call, I believe ...

Right now, I cannot easily say more of my interior path.

But exterior to that path, there are also the words of Valentin Tomberg, who made a transition from a purely esoteric Christianity to a traditional Catholicism.

Now esoteric Christians of the Anthroposophical kind, often fall into the trap of saying things like: "We KNOW through Anthroposophy that ..." or "Steiner says" ...

I have no wish to fall into a similar trap by saying "Tomberg says".

The deepest reasons for my transition to a traditional Catholicism lie, as I say, in my interior experience, most of all in the profound depths summoned forth in Paray-le-Monial ...

Yet while I have no wish to fall into the trap of "knowing" because "Tomberg says" ...

I nonetheless believe that there is profound value to be had in listening to Valentin Tomberg and pondering deeply these words of his from his final writings collected in Lazarus Come Forth.

(I am inserting some white space in the text that follows, not only because it helps in reading profound material from the internet, but also because I would invite you, dear Reader, if you care to, to read slowly and really breathe in each of these statements below ...

Yes breathe them in ... perhaps consciously noting your responses and reactions as you read ...):

“Let us consider what happened in the fourth century at the time when the Church entered into an alliance with the Roman Empire and the influence of the latter became paramount.

It was as if a dark cloud covered the sky.

It even came to a point when the center of Christianity itself – Christ himself as the Son made flesh – was to a large extent veiled, and Arianism for a time achieved almost complete dominance.

Then a strong fresh wind scattered the clouds and the sun of Christ as the Son of God shone forth again in the heavens as faith.

Not only a Pleiad of great believers (with Saint Athanasius at their head), and holy hermits such as St Anthony of Thebes (the friend of Athanasius) … were the fruit of this spiritual wind but also – and especially – the Council of Nicea with its wonderful creation of the Nicean Creed, which to this day has lost nothing of its inspiring and enlightening force and effect …

The Christianity of the hermits … was no passing phenomenon limited to a few centuries only.

Today it still lives with all the intensity of its youth. Though it may not be deserts and thick forests into which one can retire into an undisturbed solitude nowadays, there are still people who have found or created in the deserts of the great cities and among the thickets of the crowds, a solitude and stillness of life for the spirit.

And as before, their striving is devoted toward becoming a witness for the truth of Christianity.

The way into the depths has not led them to an individualistic brand of belief, but has given them unshakable security in the truth of Christian revelation as transmitted and taught by the Church.

They know the truth of the following: Extra Ecclesiam non est salus ("there is no salvation outside the church"); the Holy Father is not and cannot be the mouthpiece of an ecumenical council; the Holy See alone can make decisions in questions of faith and morals - a majority of the bishops cannot do so and even less can a majority of priests or congregations do so; the Church is hierarchic-theocratic - not democratic, aristocratic or monarchic - and will be so in all future times; the Church is the Civitas Dei ("the City of God") and not a superstructure of the will of the people belonging to the Church; as little as the shepherd follows the will of the herd does the Holy Father merely carry out the collective will of his flock; the shepherd of the Church is St Peter, representing Christ - his pronouncements ex cathedra are infallible, and the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven belongs to him and him alone.

In other words, those who become solitary in order to seek profundity may reach on their path of spiritual experience to the unshakeable insight that the dogmas of the Church are absolutely true.

And so it can happen that, as they did at the time of the Arian darkening of the Church, the "hermits" of today may come again to the assistance of the Holy See, leaving their solitude to appear as witnesses to the truth of Peter's throne and its infallible teaching.

In those times it happened that St Anthony of Thebes left the desert and hurried to Alexandria to support St Athanasius with the weight of his moral authority - St Athanasius who became the standard bearer for the divinity of Christ.

The darkening which today is described as “the present crisis of the Catholic Church” can lead to the necessity for the solitary sons of the Church to hurry to the aid of the Holy Father, the most solitary of solitaries, in order to save the Church from the abyss toward which she is moving. .."

Yes I find these are words to be pondered deeply indeed. I do not believe the author was invoking damnation for those who stay outside the Church in this present life ...

But I do believe he is sounding a call.

These words were written in the wake of the Second Vatican Council ... a subject on which the author has nothing at all good to say in this final book.

Speaking personally, Valentin Tomberg's account of Vatican II disturbed me very deeply for many years. I found his account of the Council more difficult than anything else in his entire writings.

I may well say more of these things in another entry at this weblog. We will see ...

I certainly intend to say more at my new site with my wife. I have an article in preparation there called: Valentin Tomberg - Trojan Horse or True Catholic?

Until I write more, I would just like to append these words from Meditations on the Tarot:

"One is being UNJUST (emphasis mine) towards the Catholic Church, when one sees instead of the Mystical Body of Christ, only its historical phantom, the fox.

In order to see rightly, one has to look rightly.

And to look rightly means to endeavour to see through the mists of the phantoms of things.

This is one of the principal practical precepts of Christian Hermeticism."

New Website: www.corjesusacratissimum.org

2009-05-01T15:18:00.004+01:00

Re-entering cyberspace and the trajectory is a little clunky ...

Yes after years of poor internet access and other trials, I am back.

But I will be blogging at another, more ambitious site now, created with my beloved wife, Kim.

Not surprisingly, the address for the new site is in the headline above - which you can also click on as a link.

The site is not completely finished as I write, but it is ready enough.

And in the next weeks, there should be at least one last posting here, before retiring this site altogether.

My warm memories and greetings to the old readers who interacted with me before and made my experience of this weblog special ...

Roger

Not Yet the Second Installment.

2007-01-06T11:00:00.000Z

Recently, I've had email regarding the promised second installment.

Now concerning this, I had written in the previous post, that "I hope [it] will appear before long. Though I am having difficulties, as I say."

With this, I meant to promise nothing, only to express a hope.

Now I feel I need to say that, concerning this piece, as well as some very long delayed personal replies, that I really do not know when I will be able to manage these.

Deep in prayer, yesterday, I felt something advising me of the wisdom, perhaps necessity, of dropping, even collapsing. Letting all but the most essential things go.

Things are difficult, my friends. Largely, as I said before, due to my own choices. I can also honestly tell you that a great sense of hope and meaning also attends these difficulties. And attends a sense of a work unfolding in France.

But the second installment is nearly finished. It WILL appear. And I will be replying to your e-mail. I just cannot yet say when.

First Installment of Two : - An Extended and Very Personal "Au Revoir", with Musings on the Sacred Heart, France and the Soul of the World

2006-12-03T07:56:00.012Z

(Note: As of June 2009, the entry below has been slightly edited and revised. The second promised installment will not appear at this weblog. But both parts have been combined into a single text and will shortly appear as an article at a new site, Cor Jesu Sacratissimum. Address: http://www.corjesusacratissimum.org.)

First, my apologies again to you my friends, known and unknown.

I have given you the idea that this weblog would be updated more regularly than this. And now I have to say that I really have little clear idea as to the future of this endeavour, beyond this extended "Au Revoir", which will be appearing here in two parts.

This "Au Revoir", which will cover all the themes mentioned in the last entry, and more besides ...

I am now in France, in a situation that is self-chosen, entirely self-chosen, and also very demanding and precarious. And in sometimes overwhelming difficulties, my access to the internet has been very limited.

Now in the past, for the sake of Unknown Friends, I´ve tried to keep strictly personal content to a minimum here.

But for once, I'll allow myself some laxity - and also speak of more intimate things, which may be more of interest to my known friends.

I´ll also allow myself the laxity of writing in a very unstructured, fragmentary way. Some of what follows is not even fragments, but simply scraps, scraps from the contents of my consciousness ...

Yes our situation is very demanding and it also seems to Kim and myself, very, very rich.

2006 has been, at one and the same time, one of the hardest years of my entire life, and I think, perhaps the most profound and rewarding.

Recently, we have been a fifth time to Paray-Le-Monial, where Saint Marguerite Marie began receiving visions of the Sacred Heart of Christ in 1673 ...

Day after day, we have been at Mass there and we have been in the profound stillness, that can be felt in the chapels there.

"Avez vous bu le silence quelquefois?" Or in the English translation, "Have you ever drunk silence?"

This is a question that the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot asked his readers. But which he asked in FRENCH. And this is not unimportant to my theme ...

For why was it that this anonymous author, a Russian, living in England, chose to write his Magnum Opus in French? Some of his reasons, I think, may be, at least a little, intimated further on in this piece ...

But to return to the question of whether one has drunk silence ... In the English translation, the anonymous author goes on to say that, if the answer to that question is "in the affirmative, you know what concentration without effort is."

And concerning this, he says:

"It is the profound silence of desires, of preoccupations, of the imagination, of the memory and of discursive thought. One may say that the entire being becomes like the surface of calm water, reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its indescribable harmony.

And the waters are so deep, they are so deep! And the silence grows ever increasing ... what silence!

Its growth takes place through regular waves which, one after another, pass through your being: One wave of silence followed by another wave of more profound silence, then again, a wave of still more profound silence."

Yes, in Paray I experienced perhaps the deepest and most significance silence of my life. Perhaps.

Now I know well that the waves did not become as profound, as our author suggests they can become. But at least the beginning of profound waves of silence did become present. I trust that.

Yes, in Paray I have experienced perhaps the deepest and most significant silence of my life. Perhaps. Now I do not believe that the waves became as profound as our author suggests they can become. But at least, the beginning of such waves did become present. I trust that.

Yes some of the richest prayers of my life have been spent in silence before the relics of Saint Marguerite Marie and those of her Jesuit confessor, Saint Claude Colombiere in their respective chapels. Also sitting before the Blessed Sacrament in another chapel in Paray, I felt moved to write these words in my journal:

"There is this Sacred Story trying to unfold between Christ and us.

He is trying to heal each and everyone of us.

This is amazing.

Amazing.

Each and every one of us, he is trying to heal.

He is trying to heal ME and billions more like me.

It is amazing.

... He is trying to heal us all.

He is trying to heal me.

That woman behind me.

All of us.

Amazing.

Completely, utterly amazing.

Heal me, and billions, trillions like me.

Each of us."

Yes, sitting before the Blessed Sacrament, I was with the faith that this healing was offered through an individual relationship with each of these uncounted entities ...

He sought to reach out to each of us through individual relationship ... !! ...!

And this has so many corollaries. One corollary I also noted in my journal at the time.

"He can "use" each of us.

(He never wants to "use" any of us!)

But he can extend through each of us.

We can help him. We can help his work."

So, so many things to dwell upon in pondering this question: "How to help his work?" So many answers to that question.

At one level, obedience. Obedience to the deepest matters one is able to discern in one's prayer. Such obedience, I believe, led Kim and me to France, and to Paray-le-Monial.

Such obedience, I believe, led Kim and I to France, and to Paray-Le-Monial ...

Much unfolds for us around a work, a work to be done.

Can I speak yet of this work? Perhaps in halting scraps ...

Recently I replied to Mama Pelican on this weblog about Mother Angelica.

Though I suspect some of what shes sees has more to do with an American species of Catholicism, than Catholicism itself (See footnote to this in comments section).

Mama Pelican also speaks of her discovery of the beauty of pre-Vatican II books ...

Friends, I am also more and more moved by a beauty I find in many writings, images, works of art associated with the immediate pre-Vatican II era.

I, who was first a fully fledged, card-carrying New Ager, then a liberal Anglican, then a liberal Catholic, and then ... Words fail.

And in France, it seems to me, we see more than anywhere else I have lived, a most concerted to BURY the pre-Vatican II church.

The result it would seem are empty churches or a Catholicism my wife calls "zany."

"Zany". What does she mean by "zany?"

Among other things, she means a Mass, wherein the Mystery of the Mass is no longer central.

Where instead, what has so often taken centre stage is singing and "happy-clappy" entertainment, that is neither reverent nor consciously present to the Mystery, but which is animated by something bordering on inane or even manic ...

At a Mass in the Pyrenees, my wife and I are looking up at a MODERN mural of the Resurrected Christ behind the altar. In this image, painted certainly in the 1960's or since, he smiles sweetly down at us ...

But there is no GRAVITAS in this modern face of Christ. Is this an image of the Christ who weeps with us, as well as smiles? No, it is zany.

Again, how to do, to serve the work of Christ?

Again, obedience.

Including obedience to WORK WITH WHAT LIFE PRESENTS ONESELF. Which includes that mural. That is just one small example.

The life that aspires to obedience brings with it, I see now, the recognition that the Spirit is speaking to us, in oh so many, many different ways ...

Another example of working with what life presents oneself, is that of the inspiration, which I believe Kim and I followed, to come to France. And then being presented here with a dying, zany church, in which it seems to us, that Christ is more and more obscured ...

But life presents so much more, besides.

Here is another example.

This summer, life also presented me with the Da Vinci Code at last, and also some comments from Rudolf Steiner ...

Around these two, so much could be said, but I must content myself with noting just a little.

Noting for example, that I am seeing a direct connexion between two statements. First there is the statement that I find on pg 403 of the Da Vinci Code:

"The Priory, like many European secret societies at odds with the Church, had considered English the only European PURE language for centuries. Unlike French, Spanish and Italian, which were rooted in Latin - THE TONGUE OF THE VATICAN - English was linguistically removed from Rome's propaganda machine, and therefore became a sacred, secret tongue for those brotherhoods educated enough to use it [Emphasis in original]."

And then there is the statement, or at very least the implication, that Rudolf Steiner makes - that English is also a tongue which can so easily facilitate the aims of certain secret societies. Certain secret societies, which for decades, he claims, have aimed to promote global capitalist domination, through that language.

Yes, in lectures given in Dornach in October 1920, Rudolf Steiner touches on these societies and on the invisible entities working through the people in them.

He stresses the role that English plays for this endeavour, noting on the other hand, that within peoples speaking Romance tongues (such as French), these same entities "would be extremely constricted."

Yes, I am hearing a connexion between these statements from Dan Brown and Rudolf Steiner, and between these and much more besides ...

For example, I connect all this to a recent cover of The Economist. That cover shows the tricolour of the French flag - blue, white and red - with the bold headline, "What France needs".

And in the middle panel, the white panel, below the headline, there is the image of Margaret Thatcher.

My wife sees this cover and recoils in shock. "Oh my God", escapes her lips.

I ask her why.

She says is struck by paradox: For in one sense, she is already here in France: "Margaret Thatcher" has already conquered France.

And of course, globalised capitalism is everywhere.

But in another way, my wife notes "Margaret Thatcher" really is NOT here yet ...

I nod in agreement. No "Margaret Thatcher" and all she so radically brought to Britain, if not Europe, in 1979 has still not fully engulfed France.

That is why the Economist feels she is needed.

Like myself, The Economist can feel her ABSENCE here.

For of all the European countries I know, in many ways I feel the greatest resistance to capitalist globalisation here in France. In many ways, I feel the greatest need to preserve tradition and SOUL here ...

In many ways, I wish to repeat. Not all. As my wife noted, great contradiction and paradox exists ...

And what then, of Ireland, which I love with all my heart?

Well yes, particularly in the Catholic Ireland of the West, there is also a marked attempt to resist the colonising culture of global capitalism.

But in the East, in the East where I also lived, alas, one feels much more the influence of this colonising influence, brought on a wave of Anglo-American impulses.

That is, impulses that the French call "Anglo-Saxon". And feel they need to resist. In so many cases, at least.

Yes it seems to me that in many ways, the French sense more keenly this loss of SOUL that the so-called Anglo-Saxon colonising impulses bring ...

It is a quality of soul that Margaret Thatcher, it seems to me, did much, so very much to bury in Britain ... bury under a culture, so-called, more and more exclusively dedicated to economic FUNCTIONS ...

A "culture" that is, whose aesthetic, religious, spiritual, as well as political,legal and moral dimensions are more and more dictated by and hence, REDUCED to economic agendas.

Now here is more of what Rudolf Steiner says of the invisible beings working through the English language.

"They have set themselves the task of keeping life as a whole restricted to the mere life of economics. They seek to gradually root everything else ... to root out spiritual life, to chip away the political life and to absorb everything into the life of economics."

Yes eighty years ago, Rudolf Steiner you warned of the threat of reducing all of culture and politics to economic functions.

And now I feel it everywhere.

A successful musician tells me how she left the record industry, because of corporate pressure to make her music more commercial.

University doctors tell me of the crass, commercial ethos that now pervades the academy. (If academy it can still be called, for it has been "dumbed-down" to meet economic agendas).

Artless, graceless buildings arise everywhere, sacrificing Soul for economic ends. And children grow up in built environments of rigid angles and uninspired monotony.

And if individuals nations try to express their unique souls, there is indeed mighty pressure to CONFORM, that is, to MARCH to the global capitalist beat.

And everywhere people's individual lives also become stripped of Soul.

Friends, I receive e-mails which haunt me. Thus a dear known friend expressed to me the stripping of Soul he experiences in his own life in America.

Yes, here is a fragment from a haunting letter that elaborates for me, the soul-destroying trajectory, so well well advanced in America and Asia - but now being summoned forth in Europe too:

"In this fast-paced, busy, time-starved,complex environment we've created, we are forced to compartmentalize our lives.

For example: Up at 6:45, to work by 8, pick up the kids after soccer practice, throw together dinner, pay the bills, do the laundry, go to church at 10 a.m. Sunday, meet the parents for lunch, fix the fawcet in the kitchen...

Church, religion, spirituality, get compartmentalized along with all the other things we do in life. ...

Is it any wonder that the lessons and brotherly love we shared at 10 a.m. Sunday get brushed aside in the boardroom Monday, when we decide to up profits by laying off a thousand people? ...

Connectedness -- we've lost it in America, at least to a great degree. (That makes it easier to lay off people!)

If you look at the European model of community and work, and weeks of vacation each year, and the East Asian model of all work and no play, America long has fallen in between. But we're moving toward the East Asian model; in fact, we've been accelerating in that direction.

Nowadays, [with]greedy business owners and corporations ... there seems to be a mentality spreading that ANYTHING that is good for a company's profits is a good idea.

Lying, stealing, cheating, destroying the environment and exporting jobs overseas ... [We have]an acceleration to the disconnected, dog-eat-dog jungle style of capitalism in East Asia.

In East Asia, where I lived for two years and worked at a business magazine, capitalism is perverted thoroughly in this way ... Japan is woefully ill in spirit, having replaced all their values with the worship of wealth. Korea is far down that track, and China is racing up behind those nations ...

I see a societal illness -- and let's admit that society never has been and never will be perfect -- that results from imbalance, away from spirituality and toward self-centeredness."

Yes dear known friend, how your words strike my soul ... "FORCED to compartmentalise" as you put it. Forced that is, to acquiesce to an increasingly mechanical society that leaves no room for soul.

And without Soul, we move ever more to the self-centred dog-eat-dog horror that you see so clearly ...

Yes all of this, it seems to me, has to do with the Da Vinci Code, and with Rudolf Steiner's warnings more than 80 years ago about the dangers of a society CONQUERED by the forces working through Anglo-American Secret Societies.

To a degree, France resists. And the Economist is NOT happy about it. The Spirit of "Margaret Thatcher" simply must be summoned here as well. But she is still "constricted" here ...

What am I saying here? Am I insinuating?

Or am I just pointing? Stammering and pointing: "Look there. Look there."

Because for the moment, I can do no more than point and stammer. I will, of course, let you friends, decide for yourselves. Perhaps after you have read the second and concluding installment, which I hope will appear before long. Though I am having difficulties, as I say.

In this second installment, I will suggest more on all these themes. I will speak more of both the darkness and the light. The light of the love of Christ that does indeed shine on in the darkness.

In saying this, I am with an image that France gave to the world, or rather that Our Lord gave to the world, through France, in the Seventeenth Century.

"Through France", how the sense of this impressed my soul in Paray-Le-Monial: Through France!

This image then, is that of the blazing Sacred Heart encircled by a crown of thorns.

Yes the encircling is very real, but how much more real are the blazing flames of love on the altar of His heart ...

End of Part One.

Apologies and Forthcoming ...

2006-11-20T10:19:00.000Z

First, my apologies.

Even though I've mentioned it in the comments section (to the last entry), something needs to be said here.

It is this. I am sorry that it has taken so long to post here, when I have clearly indicated that material would be posted here much more often.

It has become clear to me that some people really do care about this weblog, and I am sorry about my long silence.

I am also sorry about not being able to respond to some of you individually yet. But I am NOT forgetting your kindness ... You WILL be responded to.

It is just that, at present, it has become very hard to get sufficient access to the web and maintain this site ...

However, I have been preparing a very, very LONG and personal piece, which I hope will be appearing here quite soon.

I will just note here, that it contains scattered musings on many diverse topics,
including but not limited to:

- Personal Notes on my unfolding time and endeavour in France

- The Sacred Heart

- The Soul of France, and the World

- The Spirit of "Margaret Thatcher"

- Rudolf Steiner and Valentin Tomberg

- The Jesuits and the Counter-Reformation.

And much else, besides. Again, it is only "scattered musings" and very, very long ... I hope it will be up within the week, but it could be a little longer.

Till then, my friends, known and unknown,

May His Sacred Heart have mercy on us ...

Agneau de Dieu, qui effacez les péchés du monde, ayez pitié de nous ...

Roger

A Very LONG and Personal Au Revoir, with Extensive and Diverse Notes on The DaVinci Code, Rudolf Steiner, Valentin Tomberg and much uch more.

2006-11-13T11:19:00.000Z

First, again my apologies to you my friends, known and unknown.

I have given you the idea that this weblog would be updated more regularly than this, and now I have to say that I am sorry and that I really have little clear idea as to the future of this endeavour - and when it will be possible to resume.

I am also very sorry for long delayed personal replies to many of you who have written very kind things to me.

I am now living in France, in a situation that is self-chosen, entirely self-chosen, and also very demanding and precarious.

In sometimes overwhelming difficulties, my access to the internet has been very limited. Still I do not think that that is an excuse, and I am sorry.

Now in the past, for the sake of Unknown Friends, I´ve tried to keep strictly personal content to a minimum here.

But for once, I'll allow myself some laxity - and speak of more intimate things, which may be more of interest to my known friends.

I´ll also allow myself the laxity of writing in a very unstructured, fragmentary way. Some of what follows is not just fragments then, but simply scraps, SCRAPS from the contents of my consciousness ...

Yes our situation is very demanding and it seems to Kim and myself, very profound.

We have been a fifth time to Paray-Le-Monial, where Saint Marguerite Marie began receiving visions of His Sacred Heart in 1673 ...

Day after day, we have been at Mass there and we have been in the profound stillness that can be felt in the chapels there.

"Avez vous bu le silence quelquefois?" Or in the English translation, "Have you ever drunk silence?" This is a question that the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot asks his readers.

"If in the affirmative, you know what concentration without effort is."

And concerning this, he says:

"It is the profound silence of desires, of preoccupations, of the imagination, of the memory and of discursive thought. One may say that the entire being becomes like the surface of calm water, reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its indescribable harmony.

And the waters are so deep, they are so deep! And the silence grows ever increasing ... what silence!

Its growth takes place through regular waves which, one after another, pass through your being: One wave of silence followed by another wave of more profound silence, then again, a wave of still more profound silence."

Yes, in Paray I experienced perhaps the deepest and most significance silence of my life. Perhaps.

Now I do not believe that the waves became as profound as our author suggests they can become. But at least the beginning of profound waves silence did become present. I trust that.

And so much became evident.

Including some of the most well known truths of the Catholic tradition.

Still it is one thing to take a religious teaching on faith. It is another thing entirely to FEEL it penetrating into one's depths.

Thus do a few words from my personal journal express an idea, that has been expressed to saiety - one would think - for nearly two thousand years.

One would think it would be quite mundane by now.

But the experience, my experience, I repeat, sitting in profound stillness before the Blessed Sacrament in Paray-Le-Monial was anything BUT mundane ...

And these words written in the immediate aftermath of that experience, whilst still sitting in that chapel, are for me, not mundane either:

"I felt ... there is this Sacred Story trying to unfold between Christ and us.

He is trying to heal each and everyone of us.

This is - feeling it still now - amazing.

Amazing.

Each and every one of us, he is trying to heal.

He is trying to heal ME and billions more like me.

It is amazing.

... He is trying to heal us all.

He is trying to heal me.

That woman behind me.

All of us.

Amazing.

Completely, utterly amazing.

Heal me, and billions, trillions like me.

Each of us."

And what was implicit in this experience, was an overwhelming sense that this healing was offered through an INDIVIDUAL relationship with each of these UNCOUNTED entities ...

He sought to reach out to each of us through individual relationship ... !

Needless to say, this experience has provided a source for great reflection, ever since.

And it has so many corollaries. Corollaries.

One corollary I noted in my journal at the time.

"He can "use" each of us.

(He never wants to "use" any of us!)

But he can extend through each of us.

We can help him. We can help his work."

So, so many things to dwell upon in pondering this question: "How to help his work?"
How to do his WORK. How to serve his work.

So many answers to that question.

At one level, OBEDIENCE.

OBEDIENCE to what is carried in the deepest layers one struggles to discern in oneself ...

Such obedience, I believe, led Kim and I to France, and to Paray-Le-Monial ...

Much unfolds for us around a work, a work to be done in and through France. I do not know how much more of my writing will be done through my mother tongue.

Can I speak yet of this work? Perhaps in halting fragments or even scraps ...

Recently I replied to Mama Pelican on this weblog about Mother Angelica.

How I share her concern about what she identifies as "conservative Catholicism!"

Though I suspect some of what shes sees has more to do with an American species of Catholicism, than Catholicism itself.

Mama Pelican also speaks of her discovery of the beauty of pre-Vatican II books ...

Friends, I am also more and more moved by a beauty I find in many writings, images, works of art associated with the immediate pre-Vatican II era.

I who was first a fully fledged, card-carrying New Ager, then a liberal Anglican, then a liberal Catholic, and then ... Words fail.

And in France, it seems to me, we see more than anywhere else I have lived, a most concerted to BURY the pre-Vatican II church.

The result it would seem are empty churches or a Catholicism my wife calls "zany."

"Zany". What does she mean by "zany?"

Among other things, she means a Mass, wherein the Mystery of the Mass is no longer central. Where instead, what has taken centre stage is singing and entertainment, that is neither reverent or present, but is animated by something bordering on manic ... Bordering, I say.

At a Mass in the Pyrenees, my wife and I are looking up at a MODERN mural of the Resurrected Christ behind the altar. In this modern image, he smiles sweetly down at us, maybe even starts to grin ...

But there is no GRAVITAS in this modern face of Christ. Is this an image of the Christ who weeps with us, as well as smiles? No, it is zany.

Again, how to do, to serve the work of Christ?

Again, obedience.

Including obedience to WORK WITH WHAT LIFE PRESENTS ONESELF.

The example of Kim and I following an inspiration to come to France is just one example.

And another example is of being presented here in France, with a dying, zany church, in which it seems to us, that Christ is obscured ...

But life presents so much more, besides.

Here is another example.

This summer, life also presented me with the Da Vinci Code at last, and also some comments from Doctor Rudolf Steiner ...

Around these two, so much could be said, but I must content myself with noting just a little.

Noting for example, that I am seeing a direct connexion between two statements. First there is the statement that I find on pg 403 of the Da Vinci Code:

"The Priory, like many European secret societies at odds with the Church, had considered English the only European PURE language for centuries. Unlike French, Spanish and Italian, which were rooted in Latin - THE TONGUE OF THE VATICAN - English was linguistically removed from Rome's propaganda machine, and therefore became a sacred, secret tongue for those brotherhoods educated enough to use it [Emphasis in original]."

And then there is the statement, or at very least the implication, that Doctor Rudolf Steiner seems to make - that English is also a tongue which can so easily facilitate the aims of secret societies, which he claims for decades have aimed to promote global capitalist domination.

Yes, in lectures given in Dornach in October 1920, Rudolf Steiner touches on these societies and on the invisible entities working through the people in them. He emphasises the role that English plays for this endeavour, noting that within peoples speaking Romance tongues (such as French), these same entities 'would be extremely constricted." (Pg '( etc)

Yes, I am hearing a connexion between these statements from Dan Brown and Rudolf Steiner, and between these and much more besides ...

For example, a recent cover of The Economist. That cover shows the tricolour of the French flag - blue, white and red - with the bold headline, "What France needs".

And in the middle panel, the white panel, below the headline, there is the image of Margaret Thatcher.

My wife sees this cover and recoils in shock. "Oh my God", escapes her lips.

I ask her why.

She says because she feels a striking paradox: For in one sense, she is here in France: "Margaret Thatcher" has already conquered France.

And of course, globalised capitalism is everywhere.

But in another way, my wife notes she really is NOT here yet
...

I nod in agreement. No "Margaret Thatcher" and all she so radically brought to Britain, if not Europe, in 1979 has still not fully reached France.

That is why the Economist feels she is needed.

Like myself, The Economist can feel her ABSENCE here.

For of all the European countries I know, I feel the greatest resistance to capitalist globalisation here in France. I still feel SOUL here ...

A quality of soul that Margaret Thatcher, it seems to me, did much, so very much to bury in Britain ... bury under a culture, so-called, more and more exclusively dedicated to economic FUNCTIONS ...

A "culture" dedidicated more and more exclusively to economic functions.

Here is more of what Rudolf Steiner says of the beings working through the English language.

"They have set themselves the task of keeping life as a whole restricted to the mere life of economics. They seek to gradually root everything else ... to root out spiritual life, to chip away the political life and to absorb everything into the life of economics (ibid, pg 36)."

Yes eighty years ago, Rudolf Steiner you warned of the threat of reducing all of culture and politics to economic functions.

And now I feel it everywhere. A successful musician tells me how she left the record industry because of corporate pressure to make her music more commercial. University doctors tell me of the crass, commercial ethos that now pervades the academy, if academy it can still be called, for it has been dumbed-down to meet economic agendas. Artless, graceless buildings arise everywhere, sacrificing Soul for economic ends. And if individuals nations try to express their

And everywhere people's individual lives also become stripped of Soul.

I receive e-mails which haunt my soul. One of my dear known friends, expresses the stripping of Soul he experiences in his own life in America.

Yes here is a fragment from his letter that elaborates something far better than I can, at least right now, something well advanced in Asia and America - but now being summoned forth in Europe:

"In this fast-paced, busy, time-starved,complex environment we've created, we are forced to compartmentalize our lives. For example: Up at 6:45, to work by 8, pick up the kids after soccer practice, throw together dinner, pay the bills, do the laundry, go to church at 10 a.m. Sunday, meet the parents for lunch, fix the fawcet in the kitchen...

Church, religion, spirituality, get compartmentalized along with all the other things we do in life. ... Is it any wonder that the lessons and brotherly love we shared at 10 a.m. Sunday get brushed aside in the boardroom Monday, when we decide to up profits by laying off a thousand people?

... Connectedness -- we've lost it in America, at least to a great degree. (That makes it easier to lay off people!) If you look at the European model of community and work, and weeks of vacation each year, and the East Asian model of all work and no play, America long has fallen in between. But we're moving toward the East Asian model; in fact, we've been accelerating in that direction.

Nowadays, [with]greedy business owners and corporations ... There seems to be a mentality spreading that ANYTHING that is good for a company's profits is a good idea. Lying, stealing, cheating, destroying the environment and exporting jobs overseas ... [We have ]an acceleration to the disconnected, dog-eat-dog jungle style of capitalism in East Asia.

In East Asia, where I lived for two years and worked at a business magazine, capitalism is perverted thoroughly in this way ... Japan is woefully ill in spirit, having replaced all their values with the worship of wealth. Korea is far down that track, and China is racing up behind those nations.

... I see a societal illness -- and let's admit that society never
has been and never will be perfect -- that results from imbalance, away
from spirituality and toward self-centeredness."

Yes dear known friend, how your words strike my soul ... "FORCED to compartmentalise" as you put it.

Forced to acquiece to an increasingly mechanical society that leaves no room for soul.

And without soul, we move ever more to the self centred dog eat dog horror that you see so clearly ...

Yes all of this, it seems to me, has to do with the Da Vinci Code, and with Rudolf Steiner's warnings more than 80 years ago about the dangers of a society CONQUERED by the forces working through Anglo-American Secret Societies.

To a degree, France resists. And the Economist is NOT happy about it. The Spirit of "Margaret Thatcher" simply must be summoned here as well. But she is still "constricted" ...

What am I saying here? Am I insinuating?

Or am I just pointing? Stammering and pointing: "Look there. Look there."

Because for the moment, I can do no more than point and stammer. I will let you decide for yourself.

For again, these are but the contents of my consciousness, as I ponder the question, how am I called to serve the work of Christ?

Again, so, so much more might be said.

Because so much has happened since Kim and I have come to France, via Spain.

Through all of that has come an ever deepening conviction as to the work, the mighty work that is being done "to bypass the Mystery of Golgotha" as Rudolf Steiner has put it.

To obscure, that is, the Mystery of Christ ...

Yes we have the Da Vinci Code which would tell us, as its leading protagonists do, that 'Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false" and that "Nothing in Christianity is original."

Thus millions are led to suspect, if not believe, that almost the entire content of two thousand years of mystical experience, work, thought, prayer and revelation, are nothing but a spurious rehash.

There is nothing then INSPIRED with all these mystics, theologians, philosophers and saints. At best they are dupes. And at worst? Those who would follow Dan Brown can only conclude that everything from the original writers of the Gospels to the Christian mystics and hermeticists of the last centuries, all of these, including Rudolf Steiner, all, all are, at best, deluded.

Thus that which the Church teaches us about the Mystery of Christ has almost nothing to do with the truth ...

But to return to my theme, the true question in my heart is, again, how to HELP, to SERVE his WORK.

Ranting about the DaVinci Code will not achieve that.

Although perhaps what will, perhaps what will, is really allowing myself to WEEP at the immense unfolding tragedy to which those best selling pages say to me: the full scale tragedy of the vast attempt to bury Christ ...

Yes, not to rant, but to weep, to weep and act ...

To act in obedience.

Am I weeping enough? Am I acting enough? These are questions in my soul.

As I ask them answers come. And answers came most particularly in the profound stillness of those chapels in Paray-Le-Monial.

It seems to me that there is a work to be done.

A work that seems to me to involve so much.

It involves it seems to me, the legacy of Rudolf Steiner, who unlike Dan Brown proclaimed the unutterably immense depths of the Mystery enacted by Christ on Golgotha, on Calvary ...

But who it seems to me, lamented the rigidity and materialism he saw in the pre-Vatican II Counter-Reformation Church. And much else besides ... (Again these are fragments, if not scraps, barely elaborated ...)

Rudolf Steiner also lamented the Jesuits who pioneered so much of Counter Reformation, whose work he considered most "dangerous".

And yet this future work in France I see, also draws on the legacy of Valentin Tomberg. And Valentin Tomberg saw something very different in regards to the Jesuits and the Counter-Reformation (and it needs to be said here, I think, that Prokofieff, in a sense, is right).

As he writes in his Covenant of the Heart (pg 95), Valentin Tomberg considers that with "the spiritual exercises [of St Ignatius]it was a matter of awakening the whole human being to the reality of Christianity through inner experience.

Through the meditative training people became MORE than pious; they became witnesses to the truth of Christianity.

Human beings emerged from the meditative training of the spiritual exercises to wholly devote themselves, out of their own deepest knowledge and conscience to the redemptive truths of Christianity.

What was usually experienced - more dreaming than awake - through pious devotion became in this experience of medirtation a matter of burning conscience, a challenge to action and an overwhelming awakening to the reality of redemtion, the Redeemer and the saints."

Is this, of necessity, an unqualified endorsement of Jesuitism? No.

Is the author saying something different from Rudolf Steiner? Yes, I think that he is.

And what is this difference that he indicates? For now? I can only offer a fragment of what I start to see.

But what strikes my heart as I consider the profound disagreement between two profound Christian Hermeticists, is that much that is at issue here, revolves around how we consider, the human, concrete, one can even say material expression of Jesus Christ.

For Rudolf Steiner, the Jesuits were clearly too materialistic.

He tells us thus, "Because Christ had to be incarnated in a physical body, the purely spiritual took part in the physical world; but over against this participation stand the monumental and most significant words of Christ: "My kingdom is not of this world."

But for Steiner, Jesuitism misses all of this. In Jesuitism, he believes "the Jesus principle is exaggerated ..."

Ignatius, Rudolf Steiner also tells us, wanted "to represent everything to do with Jesus in a purely material way."

Now there are also many other objections made by Rudolf Steiner to the Jesuits. This one of materialism is hardly all encompassing.

But I am focussing on this, because it may be at just this point that the Catholic Valentin Tomberg parts company with the Rosicrucian Rudolf Steiner.

For it seems clear to me that what Valentin Tomberg is saying has gone wrong with so much of esoteric Christianity, including Anthroposophy, is that the human, concrete aspect of Christianity has gone missing - in favour of the Logos.

Thus at one point he writes that although LIGHT is present in a Christianity that focusses on the Cosmic Christ, magic, warmth and PERSONALITY and LIFE are so often missing.

Thus in Covenant of the Heart, he speaks of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, noting that "the third aspect of the Way, the Truth, and the Life - namely life - was not given enough attention. For the scientific form into which the logic of the Logos had to be cast, and by which it was LIMITED, left little room for pure mysticism and spiritual magic, that is for LIFE. So there is in Anthroposophy a MAGNIFICENT achievement of thought and will, which is however, unmystical and unmagical, i.e. in want of LIFE. Rudolf Steiner himself was conscious of this essential lack. Therefore it was with a certain amount of hope that he indicated the necessary appearance of a successor (the Bodhisattva) who would remedy this lack and would bring the trinity of the Way, the Truth and the Life to FULL fruition." (Emphasis mine, pg 70).

And he makes it clear that these lacking elements CAN be found in the Catholic tradition ...

Anthroposophy failed perhaps because it did not value highly enough the concrete, the particular, the human and the personal, including the "material".

But if he were with us today, he might tell us that Jesuit Counter Reformation Catholicism did indeed participate in that ...

For unlike Rudolf Steiner, he does affirm the value of the Counter-Reformation, saying that this last "should not be understood as anti reformatory, but as a true reformation.

For the movement toward interiorisation and spiritualisation which arose then in the Church was indeed, in a real sense REFORMATION, and in no sense a process of outer revolt - destroying images and annihilating Church hierarchy, and doing away with the spiritual orders and the three vows.

A monastery, for instance, is not reformed by chasing out the monks, but by bringing in a more interiorised spiritual life ...

The so-called Counter-Reformation and the so-called Reformation stand in the same relationship to one another as the spiritualisation of the monasteries stands in relation to their dissolution.

The first was an impulse toward inner transformation; the second signified "rebellion" and "purge". The one meant "evolution", the other signified "revolution". (Covenant of the Heart, pg 96)"

Yes, yes Mama Pelican, again there is this beauty I sense in the Counter Reformation Catholic Spirituality that is so sidelined in our time. Though this is not the same as denying the "danger" which Rudolf Steiner saw so well.

But every imbalance can be dangerous.

Yes the future work I see in France involves all of this and more.

It involves, for example, the striking fact that an anonymous Russian author who lived in England, nevertheless chose to write his Magnum Opus in FRENCH.

And it involves the immense French legacy of the experiences of Saint Marguerite-Marie who saw His Sacred Heart in 1673 ...

A legacy which seems so very tied up with the Jesuits. A legacy which inspired profound resistance to the Revolution of 1789. A legacy with countless shadows and contradictions. A legacy which may be more profoundly relevant to THE SOUL OF FRANCE, and to the world, than even I dare to imagine yet.

And so much more this work I see involves.

But one more thing I will leave you.

It is a translation of a few lines from a German book by Martin Kriele, who guards Valentin Tomberg's estate, and who knew him during his life. I hope that Doctor Kriele can forgive my taking these brief lines from his book. It seems to me somehow important.

"Occasionally [Tomberg] spoke of evil in which he saw not only a "lack of being", but very real powers manifold and chaotic.

One should not occupy oneself excessively with it but pay attention to evil in the seductive form of seeming good, its method of adopting something beautiful and half-true which deceives us and leads us unwittingly into evil.

He was concerned with the art of the discernment of spirits which was needed particularly also in matters of politics and political philosophy. In this context he held V. Soloviev's writings in high esteem.

If people were afraid of evil occult groups and "conspiracies", this was not principally unjustified - they did in fact exist - but most of the time, one did not understand how to localize them accurately.

Thus the talk of a "Jewish world-conspiracy" had been a fateful lie. But in fact sinister occult forces had worked in Hitler's and Lenin's movement.

To counter these there was a need for a "white" Christian Esotericism of Good which alone was up to this task. It could unfold "magical" effects if the will of man is in perfect harmony with the will of God.

In "Scottish" Masonry, whose center in London had been destroyed during the war and relocated to New York, he saw a dangerous occult counter current.

It would lure man with the promise of humanity - but with the aim of a world without Christ and without death and resurrection.

Beginning from the 21st degree the member which saw through the game could only liberate itself from the entanglement through suicide.

He described to me the methods of working of the sinister counter-occultism, for example its influence on language, manners of speech, ideological forms of thinking and the fostering of all sorts of enemy-polarizations.

He took the occultism without Christ which based itself on the Theosophy of Blavatsky and worked out of the Indian-Tibetan region very seriously.

It was very influential from the background. It was for example partly instrumental in the spread of Bolshevism, in the benevolent neutrality towards it, in the threatening east-west polarization but also in the "esoteric" youth movement of the "New Age" which began to flourish at the time.

History is like a chess board with white and black figures. One could never clearly foresee which moves the enemies prepared from out of the dark.

Therefore no certain prophecy was possible. This also explains why some predictions of Rudolf Steiner for this century have not come to pass.

It could well be useful to reveal what the enemies still wanted to keep hidden. The most effective counter measure though was to turn to Christ, prayer, contemplation, the cultivation of love and kindness of heart.

Everything in Tomberg's thinking revolved around one center: Christ. His greatness and glory he said, full of reverence, was so immeasurable that every attempt to imagine it stayed far behind the reality.

When he spoke of Christ his language took on the tone of gravity and deeply being moved familiar to us, from the Gospels, especially the St John's Gospel. Him he loved with every fibre of his heart. In His service, he placed himself without any reserve and through Him in the service of the Father."

Friends, I am either mad, or I am aspiring to the Hanged Man of which the anonymous Russian author writes that He acts first, then he desires, and lastly he understands

Which is to say, I do not yet understand all that this work in France is about.

But I felt these indications were not only justified, but somehow _warranted_. Again, obedience.

And for the moment, I do not know either the future of this weblog, or of this future work I glimpse in fragments.

In the meantime, I recommend to all Christians who can do so, a pilgrimmage to Paray-le-Monial, where it seems to Kim and his Sacred Heart can STILL be felt ... more than 300 years after 1673 ...

Yes his Sacred Heart, day after day radiating through our bodies, cleansing, stilling, healing us...

In the meantime, I really do not know what can be posted at this weblog.

I DO have the unfinished remainder of my Confessions manuscript.

But so much has changed in these last months, I do not know if it is appropriate to present that old material. Or if it is better to start afresh.

I feel very strongly though, that my future work does involve writing, and that writing will be emerging from myself in both French and English, on the web, and I hope eventually in print ...

I feel also that my future work may involve publishing the thought of others, including perhaps long forgotten mystics and hermeticists of Catholic France.

I also feel that something else will be entailed. A local expression of these impulses in rural France, which will perhaps involve Community.

I feel my effort to be obedient will entail this.

But how these "entailed things" may come to pass, I do not know.

So much more I wish that I could say. But having said this much, it seems that what I must say now, dear Friends, is THANK YOU for all the kind attention you have given this weblog. Thank you for all your kindness, expressed in so, so many ways ...

Again, I do not know the future. New material might appear at this site quite soon, or it might not.

Whatever happens, I trust an extended web presence for my work will be forthcoming at some future point. Though how much it will be in English or in French is not yet clear to me.

However, if you wish to be apprised of my future activities in cyberspace, you can send your e-mail address to me at sophialiebhaber at yahoo dot com. And I will let you know ...

But for now, dear Friends, I must bid you "Au Revoir".

(I find myself thinking of George Weigel's vast biography of John Paul, where nonetheless, nonetheless I wish to repeat, my experience in reading it that almost nothing, almost not one thing critical of John Paul's papacy, was uttered, except under the heading of one category. That single category is where John Paul began to criticise American ideology ... Thus when John Paul was too "left wing", Weigel, it seemed to me, became uncomfortable ...)

Intermission of Fragments IX - Book Review: Mother Angelica

2006-09-13T13:17:00.000+01:00

While I travel in France, seeking to establish myself here and incarnate in this culture, I regret how little time I have been able to devote to internet activity - either to this weblog or to individual responses.

For now, here is another book review written in Ireland, that never quite made it to Amazon, now slightly modified for this weblog.

Mother Angelica - Raymond Arroyo

At the end of this remarkably interesting book, Raymond Arroyo offers two testimonies to the work of Mother Angelica – the founder of EWTN – the Eternal World Television Network, or the ‘world’s largest religious media empire’ as the book’s dustjacket describes it.

The first testimony comes from Father Richard John Neuhaus who said, ‘The greatest thing John Paul II did was constructing and putting in place the authoritative interpretation of Vatican II. And though we are still in a state of confusion and enormous damage, I think one can say the tide has turned, and Mother Angelica played a significant part in that.’

The second is from Arroyo’s own pen, ‘More than preaching at them, Mother gave her flock things to do. She used television to teach and popularize pious devotions thought lost to modernity.

It can be safely said that no one in America, and perhaps in the world[! - R.B.], did more than Mother Angelica to perpetuate and stoke interest in the Rosary, Eucharistic adoration, Latin in the liturgy, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, litanies and traditional prayers.'

Thus, what is apparently bound up with Mother Angelica’s life mission is a remarkable worldwide ‘turning of the tide’, whereby much of the post-Vatican II spirit that threatened to wash away so very, very much of the Catholic Tradition has been perhaps decisively checked.

Mother Angelica’s life mission … this fascinating account, details her remarkable life, from her miserable childhood in an Ohio slum, to the miraculous encounter with a stigmatic, which inexplicably healed her from a severe medical condition and led to her vocation ... and onwards through an intensely dedicated religious life, lived out amidst an ongoing series of seeming miracles - all of which eventually led to founding the ‘world’s largest religious media empire’.

With nothing to her name, but two hundred dollars and faith in God.

Arroyo is a good storyteller, telling a truly riveting story. This is thus a fascinating book that appeals on many levels simultaneously.

But for me, the most important of all these – was the way in which the book testifies to what Neuhaus calls a 'turning of the tide', whereby a post-Vatican II trajectory that seemed headed towards a very largely Protestantised, even secularised Roman Church was halted.

Halted, not so much from heavy-handed Vatican authoritarianism in this case, but from the grassroots, grassroots which testify to the fact that Catholics the world over love and revere the practice and tradition of the Catholic Mystery.

I came to this book, never having seen Mother Angelica or EWTN at all – being a traditional Catholic, but also without being plugged into television for many years.

I also came with a certain caution. Although I consider myself traditional, I make a profound distinction - too often lost, alas! - between traditionalism and fundamentalism.

There is not space here to adequately deal with this distinction. But what I wrote in my Amazon review of Colleen Carroll's The New Faithful, might serve to clarify just a little:

"Fundamentalism focuses on literalism and single-issue ethics - premarital sex, abortion and so forth. Traditionalism is different. John Paul II ... is clearly a traditionalist. "Fidelity to roots" John Paul said, is not "a mechanical copying of the past. Fidelity to roots is always creative."

Thus, John Paul stood for fidelity to the Church's tradition. But he was neither a literalist, nor of a static persuasion."

(And thus, as the last entry in this weblog hopefully demonstrated, John Paul could BOTH uphold tradition AND some of the most radical evolutions of that tradition in the entire history of the Church ...)

A true tradition then, is not dead and static, but living and evolving …

I am a traditionalist therefore, who is cautious about fundamentalism and other aspects of very conservative Catholicism – for example, a lamentable capacity for invective and polemic (which, I hasten to add, is no less tragically evident in the Church’s liberal wing).

Having completed Arroyo’s remarkable tale, I cannot say I am an uncritical admirer of every aspect to Mother’s ministry.

But then, we are all profoundly fallen, filled with shadow and attributing a pure, shadowless quality to any human being, save Our Lady and Our Lord is hardly Catholic.

As with all of us, all-too-human motives seem to be at work with Mother Angelica - along with genuine inspiration and even divine intervention.

In the mixture of shadows and light in Mother’s ministry, I found myself with profound questions, concerning the working of Grace and Providence, through limited human beings and even through sometimes narrow human agendas.

Yet whatever human failings may be at work in the story of EWTN, I find it hard not to conclude that the Angels profoundly recognised Mother Angelica’s tenacity, sincerity and total commitment to her sense of God’s calling.

And also hard not to feel that the spiritual world met her dedication, with a *parallel* response.

And the result of this lifelong story of faith, total commitment, apparent miracles and providence?

The result certainly appears to be exactly what Father Neuhaus has intimated, a profound contribution to John Paul the Great’s campaign to save the Church from the worst, most reductionist excesses of Vatican II.

This book I suspect will mainly be read by the legions of Mother’s adoring fans.

But I wish I could convince some of my more liberally minded friends to *honestly* confront Mother’s story and *honestly* ask themselves: What is ***GOING ON*** behind the appearance of continuous, sustained providence and continuous miracles, that are clearly in evidence here, leading to such dramatic and improbable, yes, ***completely improbable*** success?

Whatever human agendas may be inevitably present here, this book is *also* a testament to Mystery and Miracles, and to a woman very evidently filled with faith, courage, sincerity and tenacity.

For that, and many other reasons besides, it both greatly deserves and rewards careful attention.

Intermission of Fragments VIII - Book Review: The Splendor of Faith

2006-08-12T19:00:00.000+01:00

Some of you friends, know that in addition to this weblog, I also have a number of book reviews, lists and other writings at Amazon.com (Accessible here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A31FLL3YFP8TZL/102-4140495-6733765 for anyone who might be interested).

Now, back in Ireland, I also wrote a number of reviews, that never quite made it to Amazon. Here is one, slightly rejigged for this weblog:

An American friend of mine once remarked to me that most folks impression of John Paul II amounts to little more than ‘pro-life, anti-communist’.

Now if one counts oneself as a traditional Catholic, as I myself do, the above perception indicates nothing less than tragedy on an enormous scale.

Heartbreaking tragedy, I feel, as I consider all the implications involved in millions of people believing in John Paul as representing little else, than being against abortion and communism ...

I will use even stronger language. For me, it indicates not only tragedy, but the presence of supernatural evil – evil that works through disinformation and prejudice and ever seeks to OBSCURE ... evil that saturates our media and culture and would obscure the profound sense that we have just lived through one of the greatest, most overarching and far-reaching papacies of the past two thousand years.

One that can hardly be reduced to ‘pro-life, anti-communist’, but which over twenty- six years addressed and rejuvenated countless dimensions of the Catholic faith.

What is desperately needed then, is literature that testifies to the sweeping scope and enormity of John Paul’s mission.

To this task, Avery Dulles’ book makes a most admirable contribution. Clearly it focuses on John Paul’s thinking and teaching, rather than his vast legacy of decisive, pragmatic ACTION that has had such enormous geopolitical impact – including though not at all limited to, the Gandhi-like pacifist movement begun in 1950´s Poland by the future pope - then a simple priest - which would so alter the world.

(For as Gorbachev said, ´Without the Pope from Poland, the mighty changes in Eastern Europe would have been inconceivable.´ But for that story, one will need books like Weigel’s Catholic hagiography ‘Witness to Hope’ or Kwitney’s non-Catholic, non-hagiography ‘Man of the Century’, which reveals John Paul as a very ***human*** being, with both very human shadows and human greatness ...

But here in Dulles’ book, what we get is not a focus on John Paul’s vast legacy of direct action and initiative, but on his equally vast legacy of ideas.

As Dulles makes clear in highly accessible layperson’s language, the scope of what John Paul addressed was truly staggering.

Truly staggering then – once one gets beyond the media stereotypes - is not only John Paul’s profound and personalist meditation on the Christian Mystery, but also its implications for our contemporary culture in countless regards – from economics to human rights, from ecumenism to the world religions, from war and non-violence, to secularism and epistemology, from gender and the ‘Theology of the Body’ ... to how much else besides? The list goes on ...

(How many people, for example, would credit the man who became John Paul II, with radically arguing for the importance of the female orgasm in ***1950’s Poland***?!).

And running like a golden thread of love through all of his profound thought, there is the dignity, the dignity of the human being, human freedom, human rights and EMBODIED human existence ... the new dignity conferred to all of these through the Mystery of Christ.

There is so much more one can say about John Paul’s epic achievement. But this is a book review and not a book. I will simply leave the reader with a small sampling of the rich panorama, which Dulles’ book details in depth.

In the interest of integrity, I will also note that my very small selection is not without bias on my part.

I am, as I have said, deeply concerned with the inherent tragedy and evil I see in smearing John Paul’s legacy with an ultraconservative, reductionist caricature as ‘pro-life, anti-communist’.

The world deserves the truth and my own selection here is purposely made to balance the one-sided portrayal of the media. That said, here is a sampling of Dulles’ exegesis of John Paul´s thinking (clearly written during the late pontiff’s lifetime).

On matters of social order and economics, Dulles explores not only John Paul’s stringent critique of communism, but also of ‘capitalist neo-liberalism’ which as [John Paul] puts it ‘subordinates the human person to blind market forces and conditions the development of peoples on those forces. From its centres of power, such neo-liberalism often places unbearable burdens upon less favoured countries’.

In explicating John Paul´s social thinking, Dulles himself is worth quoting at length:

’John Paul describes the devastating effects of consumerism in many of his encyclicals ... In the consumerist culture, he says, the market is flooded with luxury goods that are acquired for purposes of amusement or as status symbols.

The rich are surfeited by a superabundance of possessions and ***enslaved*** by the tasks of managing and protecting their wealth. Meanwhile the poor are left in dire misery ...

In accordance with his personalist humanism, John Paul II insists on the priority of labor over capital...

Labor, while it should ideally redound to the benefit of the laborer as individual, has larger purposes.

It is intended also to benefit the family, the nation, and the universal human community.

Opposing the unbridled thirst for profits and power, John Paul II calls for a theology of development that takes account of the whole human person and every person.

Authentic development, he maintains, must respect the cultural, transcendent and religious dimensions of human life.

In light of these broadly humanistic goals, it is possible to correct some of the errors of what the pope calls "ECONOMISM" - a view that elevates enterprises only in terms of productivity and profits [Emphasis mine].’

To turn to another set of issues, there is John Paul´s rejection of authoritarianism in the Church. In this context, Dulles cites the entire legacy of John Paul´s work, including his contribution to Vatican II, made while he was still a bishop from Poland.

The book makes clear then, the future John Paul’s role in Vatican II’s thinking on religious freedom and how that has continued to be expressed in his teaching, quoting him as saying: ‘Religious freedom, an essential requirement of the dignity of every person, is a cornerstone of the structure of human rights …

The Church addresses people with full respect for their freedom. Her mission does not restrict freedom, but rather promotes it. THE CHURCH PROPOSES; SHE IMPOSES NOTHING [Emphasis in original]’.

(Now given the Church’s often-tragic history with human rights, many, of course, will find such a statement all too ironic. I would suggest rather that they take it as evidence of John Paul’s sincere, sustained-over-decades determination to place the post-Vatican II Church firmly on the course of freedom.

Controversies notwithstanding, Dulles´ book can serve to clarify John Paul’s huge role in consolidating that course of freedom.

Had the late Pope been simply the ultraconservative caricature, so often presented by the media, the Vatican II trajectory of freedom would have been negated … rather reinforced.

But as Dulles makes clear to the unprejudiced reader, John Paul´s papacy worked to extend Vatican II´s commitment to human rights and freedom, again certain controversies not withstanding.)

Clearly related to the issue of religious freedom, is the matter of the salvific value of other religions. For it must be admitted that for many centuries, the Catholic Church can be seen as intimidating non-Catholics with fear of hellfire ...

But a radical new thrust has been born in Catholicism, and Dulles documents how much, how very much, the Pope from Poland has had to do with this.

This revolutionary thrust emerged clearly at the Second Vatican Council, where major positive statements about other religions, were made for the first time.

As Dulles makes clear, John Paul continually re-emphasised the new approach of Vatican II in innumerable ways.

At this point, I find myself disagreeing with Dulles somewhat, when he writes that in his treatment of other religions, ’John Paul II ... makes no doctrinal moves that clearly go beyond the council, but he does give an interpretation of the council that, at least in emphasis, is original.’

In other words, John Paul cannot be said to have definitively gone beyond the council - except in his emphasis, his emphatic call that is, to value other religions.

But my own feeling is that John Paul´s teaching on the other religions is definitely more radical than anything offered by Vatican II.

For example, previously in this weblog (on 14 November 2005) I have quoted John Paul to the effect that:

’Normally, it will be in the sincere practice of what is good in their own religious traditions and by following the dictates of their own conscience, that the members of other religions respond positively to God’s invitation and receive salvation in Jesus Christ, even while they do not recognise or acknowledge him as their saviour.’

And as I also wrote before:

’Now here John Paul defends the Glory at the heart of the Church – the Glory that transformed the cosmos on Calvary, since which time, that Glory has become the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

At the same time, the head of 60% of global Christianity, decisively sheds the usual interpretation of Extra Ecclesiam Nullus Sallus (‘Outside the Church, there is no salvation’) by arguing that the **normal** way for non-Christians is through their own religion. And in my view, this is more decisive than anything said by Vatican II.’

In regards to the matter of salvation, Dulles also draws attention to the controversy surrounding what may yet amount to one of the most radical, groundbreaking positions ever held by any Pope, ever.

For although it is not at all clear, there is evidence, that late in his life John Paul may have joined with Origen, John Henry Newman and Hans Urs von Balthasar in questioning eternal hell …

That is, though it is not clear-cut, John Paul may have said: “Eternal damnation remains a real possibility, but we are not granted, without special divine revelation, the knowledge of WHETHER or which human beings are effectively involved in it(Emphasis mine).’

Yes, if John Paul did write these words, it would consolidate the view that may increasingly emerge of John Paul II in future years … a faithful traditionalist, faithful in this case, to the traditional Christian teaching of Hell, yet unwilling to condemn anyone to perdition or even to admit that human beings must necessarily be involved with it.

Coming from a modern secular perspective, this last quote may seem of small moment. Yet coming from a Pope dedicated to tradition, especially a Pope as beloved as John Paul, it could yet prove a momentous and evolutionary point in Catholic teaching …

Finally in speaking of John Paul and universalism, we should not ignore his transcendent Christology, which Dulles details admirably saying:

‘John Paul II takes every opportunity to quote Vatican II to the effect that Christ by his incarnation united himself … with ***every*** human being and in so doing elevated human nature to an incomparable dignity [and] points out ‘the incarnation of God the Son signifies the taking up into unity with God, not only human nature but in this human nature … the ***whole*** of humanity … The incarnation then, has also a cosmic significance [Emphasis mine]’.

Oh, John Paul. My review here is written partly to honour this worthy tome of your Cardinal, Avery Dulles.

He has written an invaluable, clear, accessible and necessary, most necessary book, that I profitably return to again and again.

But I confess that I also write this review to make a contribution to the veneration of your memory.

A world increasingly enthralled in ever more brutal social conditions, needs the unshuttered memory of your passionate, comprehensive and overarching vision of all that humanity ... humanity forever and irrevocably infused by the Christ ... can be and needs to be, if we are not to sink further into the abyss ...

Yes, if we are not to sink further into the social abyss generated by brutal, cold materialism, we need books like that of Dulles, which can open one´s eyes - and above all, one´s HEART - to all you tried to do, our dear and venerated John Paul the Great ...

And to how our Church and World have forever been enriched beyond measure ...

Intermission of Fragments VII - The Strange Joy of Catholicism

2006-07-21T20:39:00.000+01:00

As I´ve said, at the moment I do not have the time I would ideally like to devote to this project.

And thus, this weblog is mainly being ´run on¨ a few previously written fragments. Here is another one, more fragmentary and crude and rough than most ...

Years ago, I attended a lecture by an impressive man, who would later become the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Now although I cannot recall the exact words spoken by this truly impressive speaker, I believe the following to be a faithful representation of something that he said:

“I’m reasonably happy being an Anglican, well ... as reasonably happy as any Anglican can be.”

For me, it was an incredibly striking and telling comment, which has reverberated in my soul ever since.

Reverberated, because of the contrast it made with something I might call: ‘The Strange Joy of Catholicism.’

For it seems to me, that not only have I experienced a profound joy in Catholicity, but that in all I have read, there is recurrent testimony to other Catholics experiencing this strange joy.

For the record, I also imagine something analogous exists in Eastern Orthodoxy. Though I am not well versed enough in Orthodoxy to say.

Now this joy paradoxically seems to exist even when there is great anger and bitterness towards the Catholic Church.

For it seems to me that no matter they may be, Catholics frequently display tremendous attachment to their faith.

It is ***mysteriously important*** to them, no matter if they feel disillusioned with the Church or not.

Thus disillusioned Catholics are frequently asked ‘Why don’t you simply leave the Church?’

Indeed, I find myself mentally putting this question to certain radical Catholics.

For instance, the Catholic theologian Fiorenza proclaims “Ordination is subordination” and advocates doing away with one of the central pillars of traditional Christianity (Orthodox and Catholic) that is, the notion of the ordained hierarchy,

I find myself wanting to ask: ‘Doctor Fiorenza, if you have a vision of the Catholic Church so alternative, so alien to the essential tradition, instead of trying to destroy the essence of the traditional Church, why do you not simply become a Protestant? Join a Christian Church, free of suppressed, subordinated priests?"

But I know or sense already, that even in the angriest Catholics, there is so often this deep aversion to leaving the Church.

It seems there is something holding them there.

We could think of it as a bonding glue. And I suspect that this same glue is the reason why the Catholic Church, along with the Orthodox, have known so comparatively few schisms through the centuries.

By contrast, the Protestant Churches do not seem to me, to have the same glue of attraction.

Hard data I lack. But I think it a fair wager that people move from one Protestant Church to another, far more easily and often, than Catholics or Orthodox move away from their faith.

And I think it can also be wagered that it is this same cohesive force that has kept the Catholic Church comparatively free from schism.

Thus it seems to me that the real answer that people rebel against or seek to reform the Catholic Church, rather than simply leave, is that Catholicism possesses an incredible attraction at its core - however much it may also anger or alienate.

And I suspect this attraction is rooted in a strange, strange joy.

This strange joy that I have felt so deeply since entering the Catholic Church.

And of which I have since heard so much repeated, confirming testimony to among so many other Catholics ...

To all of this I feel more attention should be drawn - because I also suspect that at the root of this strange joy, is the POWER of the Sacraments ...

End of rough, crude fragment ...

I look forward to spending more time at this weblog with you friends, known and unknown, when I can.

Intermission of Fragments VI - Book Review: The Portal of the Mystery of Hope.

2006-07-06T14:15:00.000+01:00

I regret that my promised piece on the Eucharist is still not ready.

In the meantime, a book review of sorts is offered here. Though it is a very different sort of review.

Hardly more than 24 hours ago, as I write these words, I started to read The Portal of the Mystery of Hope.

Started to read, knowing almost nothing about the book or its author, the French Catholic poet Charles Péguy.

Now having finished it, a day later, I am reeling …

What can I say? This is perhaps a book that should not be ´reviewed´ at all, till one has read it ten or even twenty times …

One senses that much, so very much resides within …

The work of years, perhaps to excavate and that one cannot competently comment on, until much more is fathomed.

But still my heart wants to record my first impressions …

My heart wants to proclaim, however inadequate my proclamation …

What do I say of your work, Charles Péguy? A work of profound, profound, profound and noble heart. A work by a man I know almost nothing about, save that he was evidently so very, very human …

A work covering so many varied themes … from the glories of nature to the wisdom of children to the esoteric healing Power of the Night.

Of the Mystery of Mary, Mother of God … Of the Mystery of France, ´the eldest daughter of the Church´ … Of the tenderness of family - wife and husband, parent and child, or of the JOY of being truly NATURAL and CREATURELY …

All of this and much, much more is expressed in the form of long monologue, by which a Franciscan Nun is teaching the young Joan of Arc.

But as meaningful as all these things undoubtedly are, in invoking them, I only scratch the surface of this authentic masterpiece.

How to go deeper, than these surfaces, albeit pregnant surfaces …?

What is underneath them all? What is underneath them all, that stirred me like no book has stirred me for years? That brought wetness to my eyes …?

A stab. I can only take a little stab at it.

Human-ness, profound tender, tender human-ness.

Human, creaturely naturalness. The wonder of the flesh that the angels will never know …

But not only human-ness, but knowing that this humanness is the very humanness of Christ … who learned to FEEL what neither God nor angel had ever felt before.

All these disembodied spiritualities that I have touched on in this weblog … A Course in Miracles … The Power of Now … Alice Bailey ...

Here we have the majestic message that Christ came to bring us something so very, very different to ´spirituality without a body´ (as Richard Moss has called the Course in Miracles).

(Yes, I know that not all these spiritualities so *explicitly* negate the body, as does the Course in Miracles. I know that some indeed pay a certain sort of attention to the body. But to read you, Charles Péguy, is – well, for me, at any rate - to realize how - by comparison - how disembodied, how detached from nature, they truly are. You are so NATURAL, Monsieur Péguy, in the most joyous, wholesome sense of that word).

The Franciscan Nun tells young Joan …

"What those that are carnal lack, as we know, is being pure.
But what we ought to know is that those that are pure lack being carnal.
...

The angels are certainly pure, but they aren´t the least bit carnal.
They have no idea what it is to have a body, TO BE a body.
They have no idea what it is to be a poor creauture.
A carnal creature.
A body kneaded from the clay of the earth.
The carnal earth.
They don´t understand this mysterious bond, this created bond,
Infinitely mysterious,
Between the soul and the body.
...

This my child is what the angels do not understand.
I mean to say, that this is what they haven´t experienced.
What it is to have this body; to have this bond with this body; to be this body,
To have this bond with the earth, with this earth, to be this earth, clay and dust, ash and the mud of the earth,
THE VERY BODY OF JESUS.
...

Jesus Christ did not come to tell us tales.
You see he didn´t make this voyage of coming to the earth,
A great voyage between you and me
(And he was so comfortable where he was.)
(Before coming.
He didn´t have all our worries.)
He didn´t make this voyage of descending to the earth
To come recount anecdotes for us.
...

His incarnation, which is really his assumption of the flesh.
[that is, I believe Péguy is saying, the entire physical world]
His taking on of flesh and of the carnal, his taking on of man and his being placed on the cross and his being placed in the tomb,
His in-carnal-ation and his agony.
...

Because Jesus Christ has become our carnal brother
...

It is to us the weak, that he was given.
He depends on us, weak and carnal,
To bring to life and to nourish and to keep alive in time
...

To keep alive the words of life,
To nourish with our blood, with our flesh, with our heart
The words which without us would collapse fleshless.

To grant (it´s incredible)to grant to the eternal words,
In addition like a second eternity,
A temporal and carnal eternity, an eternity of flesh and of blood
...
A worldly eternity.
...

[Jesus Christ who invented] a new justice. A justice of love. A justice of Hope."

Yes, the Christian Mystery is at the core of all the Nun is teaching Joan.

And does one not find echoes here at least, of what esoteric Christianity has said of the responsibility of the Tenth Hierarchy - Humanity, and of Christ as the New Lord of Karma ... ?

For my part, it is far more than echoes. Far, far more.

Here I am feeling a towering understanding of the Christian Mystery, that towers above the writings of vast numbers of Anthroposophists, Rosicrucians, and other Christian Hermeticists.

The Mystery of the Marriage of the Sun and the Moon, as Valentin Tomberg might have said.

Or the Descent of Buddhi into Manas, as Rudolf Steiner might have said.

Leading to a goal which is not a disembodied eternity, leading to a goal which constitutes no Luciferic short-cut ... but again to:

"a second eternity,
A temporal and carnal eternity, an eternity of flesh and of blood
...
A worldly eternity."

The Conjunction of Opposites!

A Second Kind of Eternity!

Wherein Eternity Marries Nature. (Nature becomes Supernatural, as in the administering of Holy Communion).

Yes, again, the Christian Mystery is at the core of all the Nun is teaching Joan.

But how Péguy delineates not only the core, but so many outer facets to the core, so many expressions of Humanity and Nature, Being Redeemed ...

To take but one single further example, how this nun comprehends the poignancy of human fatherhood:

“Children are never the ones who do the work.
But no one ever works except for children.
It´s never the child who goes to the field, who tills and who sows, and who reaps and who harvests the grapes and who trims the vine and who fells the trees and who cuts the wood.
For winter.
To warm the house in winter.
But would the father have the heart to work if he didn´t have his children?
And in the winter when he works hard in the forest?
With his billhook and his saw and with his felling axe and with his hand axe.
In the icy forest.
In winter when the snakes sleep in the woods because they´re frozen.
And when a bitter North wind blows.
That cuts to his bones.
That passes through each of his limbs.
And he´s completely numb and his teeth are chattering.
And the frost makes icicles in his beard.
All of a sudden he thinks about his wife who stayed at home.
About his wife who is such a good homemaker.
Whose husband he is before God.
And about his children who are peaceful and safe at home
...

They pass before his eyes, in a flash before his mind´s eye, before his soul´s eye.
They live in his memory and in his heart and in his soul and in his soul´s eye.
They live in his gaze.
In a flash he sees his three children playing and laughing in front of the fire.
His three children, two boys and a girl.
Whose father he is before God
...

It´s right that the father die before the children.
He thinks about them, by God´s grace, and immediately the blood rushes to his heart.
And warms him so
...

The bitter north wind in the forest.
Has just now frozen two big tears that fell stupidly upon his cheeks.
In the sunken furrows of his cheeks, and were just swallowed by his bushy beard.
Like two icicles.
There he is laughing and ashamed.
Laughing to himself and ashamed both inwardly and outwardly
And even laughing out loud.
Because it is sweet and it is shameful to cry.
For a man.
So the poor man tries to be discreet.
Pretends that he wasn´t just crying.
People always try to be discreet.”

And that again, was to sample, but a single example of Péguy´s paean to NATURE … including human nature and the natural beauty of things.

Nature in the process of Being Redeemed, of course, and being made whole once more ... Wholesome ...

So many more facets of the Mystery of Christ could still be cited here from The Portal of the Mystery of Hope.

I have chosen Péguy´s paean to fatherhood, again, as but a single instance of the poet´s pierced embrace of Human-ness.

Humanness on course to Christed Wholesomeness ...

True Wholesomeness. Not stuffy pretence of piousness, but the real thing. That real sacred-human quality that enters into us at Holy Communion, for example.

O, spiritual seekers outside religion, how once I understood your concerns!

I understood you Anthroposophists, who felt the Church was bankrupt in revealing the Mystery of Christ.

But here in the twentieth century, is a loyal son of the Church who fathoms the Mystery of Christ and who knows that Christ is Lord of a New Justice ...

No longer do I share your despair in the Church.

O New Age Friends, so taken with spiritualities that fly into the timeless realm; ´in tune with the infinite´; an eternity, that is not ´a worldly eternity´, not a Conjunction of Opposites ... a Conjunction of Opposites that negates neither eternity nor carnal, temporal nature ...

How often you New Age Friends have seemed to me to hold the assumption – conscious or not – that anything really valuable can be found within the Holistic Sphere.

In a really good Holistic bookshop, Watkins in London perhaps, or the Bodhi Tree in California … That there really is not much of spirituality outside this Sphere, which is of real worth…

But I doubt that few if any Holistic shops, have ever stocked The Portal of the Mystery of Hope.

(I might add that I held such assumptions myself, unconsciously for nearly 20 years. The Pope? Catholic Theology? What have they to tell me of anything truly spiritual?)

(Good Lord! What arrogance! I who knew nothing at all about the Catholic Mystery!)

Today I have come to see such vast and great treasures, beyond the Holistic Sphere, never even guessed by so, so many within it.

Sometimes however, these treasures are not so accessible to folk who prefer popular faire.

Thus at times, I hesitate to recommend to friends great modern Christian writings – whether those of Wotyla, Ratzinger, or the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot – because their scholarly style is more demanding than most of the New Age books.

Indeed, I have felt a need for literature that is profoundly revelatory of the Christic Mystery, but which is more accessible, without losing profundity.

Charles Péguy – you are the answer to a prayer. Your book strikes me as truly quite accessible.

How I would like to see your half-forgotten French masterpiece resurrected in the consciousness of the English speaking world.

How I would like to see your book amongst the so-called holistic shelves … but rather than holistic, I fear these very shelves are more SELECTIVE than is commonly appreciated.

O Charles Péguy, I wonder what I might have thought of you twenty years ago, had I discovered you, perhaps on a bookshelf at Findhorn or by word of mouth along the New Age grapevine …

But of course, all that is but to dream.

Because from all my years in New Age circles, I cannot recall one as tender as natural and human as you, who realized the Way of Christ was to lead us evermore into such tender, natural creaturehood … into finite, tender flesh …

O Charles Péguy! All this is but a portion of what you have evoked in me these last hours.

I realize I hardly do you justice at all. For example, I have said nothing at all of what you say of the little girl HOPE, so surprising to God, or the terrible, terrible freedom, awesome freedom and responsibility God has given us …

But if I serve to encourage any who read this weblog to hunt down the English translation of your masterpiece, I will be more than happy …

O Charles Péguy! Who were you? What were you? Noble soul, most noble heart who understood the heart of Christ and Christianity and who communicated them with such unfathomable and tender eloquence of HEART …

Who are you? I must find out.

Intermission of Fragments V – More from Valentin Tomberg on Anthroposophy and Church

2006-06-23T15:53:00.000+01:00

I thought next, that I would be posting more on the Eucharistic themes of the last entry.

But an unexpected impulse has led me to put up more on the former Anthroposophist Valentin Tomberg (including further material previously unavailable in English, as far as I know) regarding Tomberg´s later attitudes to Anthroposophy, as well as to the Catholic Faith.

By way of departure however, I want to focus on how, in the 1960`s, the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot regarded the Anthroposophical movement. There he speaks of the wings of this movement being:

“clipped … which has rendered it, such as it is, since the death of its founder: a movement for cultural reform (art, education, medicine, agriculture) deprived of living esotericism, i.e. without mysticism, without gnosis and without magic.”

In terms of esotericism then, the anonymous author clearly considered the movement lifeless since 1925 – the year in which Rudolf Steiner died.

He goes to say that living esotericism has ´been replaced by lectures, study and intellectual work aiming at establishing a concordance between the writings and stenographed lectures of the master.´

Now all of this does not seem very far removed from the perspective of Valentin Tomberg, twenty years earlier, after he had decisively left Anthroposophy behind and entered the Catholic Church.

Recently, German notes have been published from Bernhard Martin (the author of Von der Anthroposophie zur Kirche, - which in English reads From Anthroposophy to the Church).

They are notes of what Valentin Tomberg is said to have related to Martin during two conversations in the mid-1940´s.

According to the German biography they are drawn from, these notes emerged in a context where Tomberg had unmistakably said: “Die Anthroposophie ist gescheitert.” Anthroposophy has failed.

And this is, I suspect, not unrelated to the fact that Tomberg *decisively* believed his 1930´s Anthroposophical works should not be republished.

More on this another time. For now, I feel that, sparse and fragmentary as they are, these notes offer much food for contemplation, and I publish a translation here, which a German friend of my Heart, gave to me as a personal favour.

" * First comes the test of Faith, only then Vision (about the reappearance of Christ). Knowledge as such is dangerous, also in relation to one's own past incarnations; it is of use only to the one who has stood the test of faith.

* Rudolf Steiner has given truth "on credit". It ought to have been repaid by the corresponding morality. Rudolf Steiner had the courage and the trust that humanity would justify his work.

* To begin with, Valentin Tomberg had joined his own work to this, but then abandoned it to work externally. There was to be no more "credit system". Enough had been said.

* The Catholic Church is an uncompromising force which unites and forgives.

* Confession (....cordis, confessio,satisfactio operum) = Help through self-knowledge and preparation for the meeting with the Dweller on the Threshold.

*Without devotion no progress. The effort is what counts, not the actual status.

* Living in the Tradition! Only the one with genius, ought to (and can) transcend it.

* The transformation in the Mass deeply shakes (erschuettert ihn) him(Tomberg) every time in his innermost being.

* The Mass has to be spoken in formulas; everything personal has to precede in the preparation."

I am hoping to say more on the Eucharist, but it could take me a week or more.

In the meantime, anyone interested in this post might appreciate a thread that ran here from Thursday 15 December to 22 December last year. This six-entry series definitely connects to the issues in the above, and is also one of the things that I feel most happy with in the entire weblog.

Christ be with you, friends.

Intermission of Fragments IV – More on the Eucharist, Valentin Tomberg and The Lady of All Nations …

2006-06-21T17:35:00.000+01:00

As I said last time, I was very grateful for all the responses to my piece on the Eucharist. And rather than post one of my previously written pieces, I thought I would respond here to some of these comments, within the main section of this weblog.

This could take two or three entries – but I thought would begin today with Bruce questioning Valentin Tomberg´s 1930´s statement that "There is nothing in the physical world more holy - more healing in the deepest sense of that word - than the bread of the Communion Service."

Scepticism here is understandable. All over the world, people receive this bread and there seems to be very little in the way of accounts, which would justify Tomberg´s remarkable assertion.

But then, who is to say what the world situation would be, were the Holy Communion to cease all together? For all we know, were humanity to be deprived of this colossal, collective act of Transubstantiation, catastrophic effects would be very much in evidence.

In other words, there are 400,000 Catholic priests in the world, whose principal duty is the Transubstantiation, and in most cases, this is undertaken on a daily basis.

There are also countless acts of such consecration happening in other areas of the Sacramental Church, though, as for example with the Orthodox, the work may not be undertaken daily, but rather weekly.

As you read these lines, dear friend, you might wish to pause and consider how many times, at this very instant, His Body and Blood becomes present in our world … And perhaps what the global results of that continuous coming-into-being, have been over these past centuries?

In any event, I ask myself, who can really say what humanity would be like, were it not to be receiving this continuous RADIATING sustenance - whether directly or indirectly? Personally, I believe the world situation would be far, far worse …

Nonetheless, though I myself am not skeptical of Valentin Tomberg´s dramatic statement, I also cannot help but profoundly resonate with Bruce´s feeling, when he tells us:

“The stature of the priest is so important in the delivery of the Communion. At the Catholic Mass I attended last week … the sermon was mumbled and disjointed. There was hardly any ritual or observable intention in the blessing of the wafer and cup. About six lay people handed out the wafers (which may have been sprinkled beforehand with the contents of the cup). In short it was a shemozzle.”

Yes I am in deep resonance here with Bruce about the present state of the liturgy.

The further I travel with the Church, the greater my sense of the immense tragedy of the post-Vatican II destruction of the liturgy – a liturgy that was still very much intact, of course, in 1930´s Catholicism.

Yet however much I agree with Bruce on this point, I feel the most crucial question has yet to be raised.

That question, it would seem to me, is not so much concerned with the stature of the priest, the sermon, distribution and so forth – as important as all of these undoubtedly are.

But rather, the crucial question is whether a consecration, a Transubstantiation has taken place. Or not.

That is to say, whether the bread and wine has been transformed into that which belongs to the One Whom is most ´holy … healing in the deepest sense of that word.´ ... ?

Now there may well be Catholic Masses, where a consecration has not taken place. Though personally I recall suspecting that only once in my entire experience. That came in a Mass by a priest, whom I, at least, perceived, as being of an ultra-liberal persuasion. And where so many elements of the Mass had been deleted, that I really had to ask myself, if I had been to Mass at all …

I admit I have not been to many Masses in America. Perhaps what I call this ultra-liberal Mass is more the norm there than I fear … Still I tend to doubt it, though am open to correction.

But in the question of whether the Transubstantiation has survived the 1960´s destruction of the liturgy, I want to return to Valentin Tomberg, by way of an unusual departure …

For in later life, Valentin Tomberg took most seriously the apparitions in Holland of ´the Lady of All Nations, who once was Mary´.

From his German biography, I offer the following rough translation (for which, please see my note in the comments section):

“Valentin Tomberg took this appearance of the Holy Virgin very seriously, as he communicated to Ernst von Hippel [in a 1956 letter, after visiting the site of the Marian apparitions in Holland].

´In short: we made sure at this place, that it is a matter of a genuine and real revelation of the Holy Virgin and that the message and reports conveyed there are genuine and true. …

I understand - after everything – this, in such a way that, as at that time in Lourdes the ´Immaculate Conception´ brought a healing source for the individual illnesses of humans to effectiveness, now it is a matter for the development of a healing source for the diseases of the peoples by the “Mother of all peoples” [ie, the Lady of All Nations].

There is much concern around peace in the world, but where is the POWER, the SUBSTANCE of Peace? It concerns not thus political or other measures, but a – how shall I say it? - MAGICAL action of peace, as a direct contrast to Moscow´s measures to bring about peace and everyone, who participates in this action with thought and prayer, helps the flowing spreading-out of its effect.”

Concerning the magical action, which Tomberg speaks of spreading-out, it is perhaps necessary to say that this must certainly involve the central Prayer given by the Lady of all Nations:

'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Father,
Send *now* your Spirit over the earth.
Let the Holy Spirit live in the hearts of *all* nations,
That they may be preserved from degeneration, disaster and war.
May the Lady of All Nations, who once was Mary,
Be our Advocate. Amen.'

(The asterisked words are those which the visionary reported that the Lady asked to be especially emphasised when praying this prayer.)

In this regard, we have also already commented on how the the Catholic author of Meditations on the Tarot regarded these apparitions of Mary. For those who have not seen it, I suggest that further clarification might be found by reading my weblog entry for 1 December 2005:'Woe to me if I tell and woe to me if I do not tell!'

Now in 1981, there was another apparition in Holland of the Lady of All Nations to the same Dutch visionary encountered by the anonymous Catholic author.

The Lady of All Nations is recorded as saying:

“The Moral decline in the Church and in the World are coming about, and the Wars are still going on. My Lord sent Me to warn them of all of this, but they did not listen.”

But according to the report, the Lady went on to offer hope.

The visionary reports that “the Lady turned towards the Tabernacle and pointed to it with Her right hand saying … “The Eucharist still exists.”

Now this is taken from the book Eucharistic Experiences – where the entire book offers this visionaries´ongoing revelation of the disastrous contemporary state of the Catholic Church ...

One can justifiably interpret these words of the Virgin then, as pointing to a definite ray of hope and consolation in a dire context: The Eucharist still exists!

But to return to Bruce´s comments, one certainly does not need the experiences of a Dutch visionary, however deeply trusted by Valentin Tomberg, to confirm for us, the tragic state of much of the Church.

For we can certainly feel it for ourselves.

The Catholic Church is in trouble.

And as far as I am concerned, much of the trouble of the Church is the trouble with the Novus Ordo – the new Mass initiated in the 1960´s after the Second Vatican Council. (A Council which also certainly succeeded in many ways, perhaps as much as it failed in this one.)

Now Bruce suggests “Perhaps if one was looking for tradition, the Orthodox churches are the way to go. As Rudolf Steiner observed, when folk were running off to India for enlightenment, it would have been better if they had headed off to Mt. Athos.”

Such a direction is certainly appropriate for some.

For myself, I prefer to contemplate Valentin Tomberg´s counsel, when he said in his Covenant of the Heart:

"The darkening which today is described as ´the present crisis of the Catholic Church´ can lead to the necessity for the solitary sons of the Church to hurry to the aid of the Holy Father, the most solitary of solitaries, in order to save the Church from the abyss toward which she is moving."

Yes I spend my life contemplating what he meant by these words, ´darkening´, ábyss´ and the NECESSITY to hurry ... As I also do his many, many other indications of profound support for the Catholic Mystery.

And I also prefer to take heart from the message that the Lady of All Nations sought to give us – that in the Catholic Church, “The Eucharist still exists.”

Yes this is my conviction – based on this and countless personal experiences - that there still exists at the heart of the Church, the life-transforming encounter with Jesus Christ.

Thus while I would certainly agree that the Novus Ordo liturgy has tragically served to OBSCURE this ENCOUNTER in innumerable cases, it has not succeeded in destroying it ...

But the obscuration can indeed be so great, that it is necessary to develop a special form of attention in order to perceive what underlies it, and to HELP DISPERSE it, if one is to go beyond the clouds of fog generated by what Bruce so aptly calls a `shemozzle´.

And I will be shortly turning to what I mean by this special form of attention ... and I hope to other comments made here on the Eucharist.

Intermission of Fragments III - The Spirituality and Politics of the Heart

2006-06-12T14:40:00.000+01:00

First, a personal note.

I regret that it has taken so, so long to return. The obstacles were much more significant than I anticipated. And while significant problems remain, I can now say that this blog will definitely be appearing more frequently - though a full return to the old pattern is not quite possible yet.

Due to the same obstacles, both my e-mail responses and those on the comments pages will also be limited for a little while longer.

But I want to express my deep gratitude in particular, for all the loving, thoughtful and insightful remarks that followed my previous post on the Eucharist. I WILL be attempting a response to these, when I can do some justice to them.

And now a piece on a popular New Age text, that I know will be highly controversial in some quarters at least ...

One of the most successful books of the New Age phenomenon in recent years must be Eckhart Tolle´s The Power of Now.

Since its first publication in 1997, it has been translated into thirty languages, reached millions of people and made the Number One spot on the New York Times Bestseller List.

All of this constitutes a phenomenon which - incidentally but *significantly* I think - would seem unimaginable thirty years ago.

On the back of this book, there is a recommendation by Oprah Winfrey, which exclaims "The Power of Now can transform your thinking ... The result? More joy - right now! "

The back cover blurb then goes onto inform us that:

"To make the journey into the Power of Now, we will need to leave our analytical mind and ego behind ... We can find our way out of psychological pain.

Authentic human power is to be found by surrender to the Now ... the present moment where problems do not exist.

... It is here that we discover that we are already complete and perfect."

Now this book I feel contains a profound depth of authentic experience, and summing up a profound book by its blurb is admittedly fraught with pitfalls.

But within the limits of a short space, I feel this blurb can and does suffice to give an accurate reflection of the book´s content - at least to a degree.

The author, I believe, has had a rare, deep and life-transforming experience of transcendant peace, which allows him to recommend to others an approach of transcending the mind and ego, in order to reach this peace.

I do not dispute the authenticity and profundity of his experience.

But I do take issue with the New Age ideology, it is unfortunately muddled-up with.

To take but a single example, after speaking of his transformational experience, Tolle confidently asserts:

"It wasn´t until several years later, after I had read spiritual texts and spent time with spiritual teachers, that I realized that what EVERYBODY WAS LOOKING FOR had already happened to me (Emphasis mine, pg 5)."

***Implicit*** here is a splendid example of New Age ideology, repeated so, so, so many times, that it has become axiomatic, and therefore unquestioned and unchallenged.

The implicit ideology here then, is the claim that there is ONE spiritual goal that we are ALL seeking - and as the author goes on to elaborate, that this single goal involves a transcendance of suffering.

Throughout my long New Age years, the implicit assumption Tolle is making might have washed over me ... completely unnoticed ...

Unnoticed, because I had never paid serious attention - as I strongly suspect Tolle has also never paid serious attention - to the fact that there is another profound school of spirituality, which does NOT involve what Tolle asserts ´everybody´is ´looking for´ ...

In time, I hope to expand considerably. For now, suffice it to say that Christianity - both esoteric and traditional - seeks not the transcendance of suffering, but the EMBRACE of suffering.

And that such Christianity is not about seeking 'More joy, right now´.

Rather it concerns a compassionate identification with world suffering, that may not lead at all to relieving oneself of suffering, though it will lead to tremendous depth, strength, meaning and riches, ***within*** the experience of that suffering ...

And having come to a point in my life where I now DO pay serious attention to Christian approaches beyond the New Age ideology of a single, spiritual path, I cannot help but feel that Tolle has missed a great deal. To say the very least.

That is, I cannot help but feel, that even if we turn simply to the last century alone, we will find great representatives of Christianity - from Rudolf Steiner to John Paul II - who not only do NOT go in search of what Tolle and "everybody was looking for" - but who, were they to find it, would decisively reject it.

And after my own long journey, I personally have more confidence in this approach, than that of Tolles´letting of mind and ego, for a peace that transcends suffering.

Again, I hope in time to enlarge ...

For now I will just say I am deeply concerned about the widespread popularity of a spirituality in the West with Tolle´s apparent objectives.

For these are objectives I feel, which can STUNT the heart.

That is to say, in more esoteric language, I am not at all convinced that this kind of spirituality serves the full, mature awakening of the heart chakra.

But I do believe that a collective awakening of the heart chakra, is desperately needed at this time.

Effective social, political and ecological action depends on it.

But I do not believe that Tolle´s spiritual agenda is sufficient to this awakening.

That is - to repeat for emphasis - a spiritual agenda which asks that we "leave our analytical mind and ego behind [to] find our way out of psychological pain. ... by surrender to the Now ... where problems do not exist [and where] we discover that we are already complete and perfect."

Much, much more can and must be said, I feel.

But for now I simply close this fragment with my own conviction that both Rudolf Steiner and John Paul II profoundly knew that an approach very, very different to Tolle´s was needed - for effective social, political and ecological action.

And I follow, though far, far behind them, in saying that a very different Spirituality and Politics of the Heart is needed - now more than ever.

Intermission of Fragments II - On the Experience of the Eucharist

2006-05-15T10:05:00.000+01:00

First my apologies. Although I made no commitments, I certainly gave you friends the expectation that this blog would be updated before this. This was my own sincere intention, but my recent massive upheaval has been attended by a lot of unexpected illness, making trips to local internet stations all-but-impossible till now.

Anyway, herewith a fragment regarding the Eucharist:

Recently in an Irish newspaper a letter appeared by a priest and psychotherapist. Within it, there was, for me at least, a single, most tantalising line:

"As a practicising psychoanalyst, I can tell you that the inner spiritual experience, for that is what happens as we take in the body and blood of Christ, is that something mysterious has just occurred spiritually."

And then unfortunately, the writer says nothing more on what the nature of that experience might be.

I find this unfortunate, because I find so very, very little in print as to what the quality of this EXPERIENCE of the Eucharist might be.

True, throughout the Christian tradition, we have a great deal of testimony as to what the Eucharist DOES, beginning with the words of Christ Jesus:

"For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him (John 6:56).

And then there is a great deal of testimony from the Church Fathers to the same effect.

Maximus the Confessor for example, says: "The Eucharist transforms the faithful into itself." That is, into the Body of Christ.

And St John Damascene writes: "The Bread of the Communion is not mere bread, but bread united with the Godhead."

For those Christians suspicious of ecclesial tradition, there is also the testimony of modern esoteric Christians. Though generally opposed to the Church, Rudolf Steiner for example, repeatedly emphasised the awesome nature of the transubtantiation of the bread and the wine.

And circa 1936, Valentin Tomberg wrote: "There is nothing in the physical world more holy - more healing in the deepest sense of that word - than the bread of the Communion Service."

But again, all of this speaks to what the Eucharist ***does*** - not how it is experienced.

Now we live in an era of psychotherapy and New Age pursuits, where spiritual and inner ***experience*** is addressed and expressed more than ever.

A great deal of the enormous appeal of the New Age movement, I believe, is that is engaged with the realm of the EXPERIENTIAL - rather than that of simply doctrine and belief.

And personally, I believe this New Age interest in experience, reflects the modern need of the human soul. That we have arrived at an epoch in human evolution, where this is now more necessary than ever.

This is not to negate the tremendous wealth and riches to be found in Christian tradition and doctrine. Regular readers will know I have little belief in the New Age tendency to throw out the tradition ...

Still, I feel that we Christians do need to speak more in terms of experience, in *addition* to doctrine.

Thus, I am sadly struck by how very little I see in print, about how we FEEL and SENSE the Holy Eucharist.

That single line from the psychotherapist-priest quoted above tantalises me, precisely because it speaks, again, to an "inner spiritual experience something mysterious has just occurred spiritually."

And such indications of the inner experience seem to me all too rare.

Tentatively then, I will simply try to voice my own experience.

What accompanies Holy Communion for me is a set of familiar and precious sensations, that are admittedly very hard to record.

Part of this difficulty lies in the fact that it is an experience, unlike any other that I have known outside of the Church.

If one has never tasted an apple, how to relate the sensation of "appleness"? We may say that the apple is sweet, we might describe a texture that crunches, but nothing we can say will really suffice to explain the true experience of the apple.

Something similar though far, far more profound might be said about Holy Communion.

Those who regularly receive it, or at least those who really pay sufficient attention to their experience, will know whereof I speak.

For those who do not, my words may seem next to useless.

Nonetheless, I will use such words as "wholesomeness" and "cleansing". I feel something very, very wholesome in receiving the Eucharist - wholesome in the most beautiful sense of that word.

And I feel something cleansing me and helping to keep my soul clean from darkness.

I also feel an element of union - a sense that I am joining or rejoining something far larger tham myself, something very, very rich.

And the sense of joining or rejoining belongs to one of the greatest riches of my life.

I go to Holy Communion as often as I can. Recently I nevertheless asked myself WHY I go as often as I do.

Clearly, all of the above came before my soul. Simply the sheer depth of joy and richness and meaning, I receive in participating in the Mass.

But something else came as well.

I said to myself: "I go to Mass, because it HUMANISES me".

What is this sense that I am humanised by the Mass? Is it simply a structure of belief, inasmuch as I believe that I have taken in a holy substance, or I believe that Christ is now abiding in me?

For me, it is much more than that.

As I observe my spiritual path over the years, I feel that, by the Grace of God, I become a more feeling, more conscientious, more humane and HUMAN being.

And as I look at this trajectory of grace, I cannot escape the deeply held sense, that trajectory is directly related to regularly receiving the grace of Holy Communion. Holy Communion IS Holy Communion. It is Communion with that which makes me ever more human ...

For me, this is not mere belief based on doctrine. It is a deeply felt conviction that I cannot shake ...

Here ends this fragment. So, so much more I want to say in time about the Eucharist in not only its individual, but also social and even political dimensions.

But this must wait.

At the moment, as I sit in an internet cafe in Southern Spain, I am still ill. And it is impossible for me to say when fragments at least, will start to reappear. I hope it will not be so long this time. But again, I cannot say.

Au Revoir, my friends,

Roger

An Intermission of Fragments (After Which These Confessions Will Resume …)

2006-04-18T19:07:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

It has not been my habit to use this space to report on personal events in my life, at least not those which are unrelated to the themes of this weblog.

Today, I make an exception. Today the weblog must pause awhile, while the computer is packed away and I leave beloved Ireland behind - not without real grief - to go to Spain.

But for reasons far beyond the scope of this site - this relocation, difficult though it is, seems right at levels, which appear profound to both myself and to Kim, wise and cherished wife, friend and compass.

Where we are headed, internet connection will not be easy to have – at least not at first. The future of this weblog would thus seem uncertain.

Nonetheless, I feel that I must find a way to continue. Thus sooner or later, these Confessions will resume.

In the meantime, some other small pieces should appear first. I have a few fragmentary pieces already written, as well as some book reviews that never quite made it to Amazon. These will be stored with my Blogger account. And although the weeks ahead will be defined by upheaval, I may well here and there have access to the internet and upload one of these previously written pieces.

Thus this space should not go completely dead – and perhaps even a post a week might be managed. Though I make no commitments to such a schedule.

The quality and consistency of these fragmentary pieces however, may be quite different from the usual pattern here. However, I hope these fragments may still be of interest to some, and thus worth posting.

After an ‘Intermission’ of such fragments, I plan to continue and conclude my series of ‘Confessions’.

I should also note that while ‘on the move’, I will likely not have opportunity to interact as I have done in the comments section. Nonetheless I greatly appreciate any comments that are left – and in time will respond.

Here is the point perhaps to underscore my appreciation of these comments.

For the truth is, not only do I seek to continue this weblog, but in time, I am considering other related activities on the web.

These might include a more informal forum or group, where perhaps people interested in these themes might interact more easily, than in simply responding to the entries I put up.

I am also considering a website for a number of my longer writings, plus those of others.

But it is hard to gauge interest for these ideas. Another thing I have failed to do is to promote this weblog in any significant way.

Yet when I can gain a good internet connection, I may be pursuing all of these goals.

In the meantime, I would appreciate any feedback at all – either in response to this weblog, or to what I have just intimated, if not proposed. I also appreciate any attempt made by anyone, to make this weblog more known or accessible.

For it seems to me – obviously – that there is some kind of call for what I am attempting here, however inadequately. An attempt which includes at least an aspiration to a Christian Hermetic understanding of world currents – which is not divorced from the Traditional Church, but which instead seeks to cherish her and guard her.

Cherish and guard her, as she works so unceasingly to cherish and guard the World in this time of real danger ...

Yes, I regret that so many of a Christian Hermetic persuasion fail to cherish and guard the Church … And I return to the ideal of the anonymous genius, who has given us Meditations on the Tarot:

“John who submitted himself voluntarily to Peter as leader or prince of the apostles did not become his successor after his death, although he outlived Peter by many years. John [is] not called upon to succeed Peter…

Hermeticism, the living Hermetic tradition guards … the life and communal soul of religion, science and art. [Hermeticists] do not have any privilege in any of these domains; saints, true scientists and artists of genius are their superiors.

But they live for the mystery of the communal heart, which beats within all religions, all philosophies, all arts and sciences – past, present and future. And inspired by the example of John the beloved disciple, they do not pretend, and never will pretend, to play a directing role in religion, science, art, in social or political life, but they are constantly attentive so as not to miss any occasion to **serve** religion, philosophy, science, art, the social and political life of humanity ….’

To GUARD and to SERVE, and thus – as I said once before at this weblog – ‘not to succumb to the currents of destruction of tradition manifest in the New Age culture, secularism, ‘political correctness’ and so on …’

And to make effort to not let the world be overwhelmed by the voracious capitalist globalism, that is predicated on the lack of values which result from the destruction of tradition.

Yes, yes … I know that there are Christian Hermeticists, who feel the age of being carried by tradition has past. But given the failure of efforts as Anthroposophy and its like; given the tendency to become ensconced in alternative tradition (eg. ‘Steiner says …’) without further reflection; given the massive DEFLECTION of Western spirituality into channels where the Mystery of Golgotha is entirely obscured, I feel we must turn to she would guards the Mystery of Christ, not as slaves or robots, but as ones affirming tradition, and seeking collectively to aid the work of deepening it.

Yes … as I stare at the horror of the world, as I feel the Sacraments deepening my communion with the Mystery that is Christ, I know that the Church is needed, now as before. To say the very least.

And if my activities in cyberspace, can play but the tiniest part, however miniscule, in guarding and serving … perhaps they need to be not only maintained – but expanded.

In this, I would welcome any response at all.

Finally for those of you who may not have noticed, and might wish further clarification of this weblog, there is a very, very long piece I have written which might be of interest while this weblog goes more quiet.

The piece is called Hermetic Catholicism: A Letter to My Friends and was originally written mainly to a number of known friends. Many of them from my past in the New Age subculture in the UK - for whom the idea that Catholicism had anything meaningful to offer the world, could often seem sublimely ridiculous.

Yes, the walls of mistrust, ignorance, prejudice are high indeed … as they once utterly obscured my own view. And a loving effort to overcome these walls seems necessary to me.

Be that as it may, this lengthy piece is now available in two places.

Either to be read off the screen in a very basic 'bare bones' format:

http://www.graphicmath.com/roger/Hermetic_Catholicism.html

Or as a pdf file in an easier to read, more attractive format, if you wish to download and print:

http://www.graphicmath.com/roger/Hermetic_Catholicism.pdf

I should also say this piece is very personal and autobiographical in parts.

Dear Friends, it will likely be more than a week before anything further appears here. But not long after, I hope irregular fragments will appear during this Intermission from my Confessions.

With heartfelt streaming of gratitude and warmth to you all.

God be with you,

Roger

Confessions XVI (The Demolition of Christianity and the Myth of ‘Holism’)

2006-04-14T13:56:00.000+01:00

Good Friday

Dear Friends Known and Unknown,

Yesterday we further considered how the Course in Miracles serves to negate vast tracts of Christianity.

Yet the Course in Miracles in my experience, is usually embraced in groups and settings, which consider themselves ‘holistic’.

What does the word holistic mean? Clearly it means to do with honouring the whole. And in New Age contexts, this has often been to do with not surrendering to scientific reductionism, but to a healthy honouring of the whole of the person. The common New Age rubric Mind-Body-Spirit is another way this admirable aspiration to wholeness is expressed.

However, there are other New Age aspirations to honouring the whole. The New Age milieu has a commonly repeated mantram, that it seeks to embrace all religions, that it endeavours to honour then, the whole of humanity’s religious and spiritual experience - without discrimination.

At least, I encountered this aspiration repeatedly throughout my New Age years. What made the New Age different it was claimed, is that it was not sectarian or anti- other religions. In this sense, it was holistic.

Now this aspiration, I know, was sincerely believed. But I fear so many in the movement are not thinking clearly enough. They are sincere – but not sufficiently rigorous.

As I write, I recall a leading shaper of holistic culture in Britain. He writes with deep and genuine conviction that the holistic movement is constituted on warmly embracing all spiritual paths.

Yet I also heard him endorse the Course in Miracles over many years, as one of the most important documents of the new ‘dispensation’.

In my youth, I never questioned his sincere convictions. But I no longer believe that such a position holds up to scrutiny.

For one can accept the Course’s demolition of Christianity – or not. But what one cannot do, is have one’s cake and eat it too.

I speak as someone who in fact, tried to do precisely that, throughout my ‘esoteric youth’. The sublime power behind the Course in Miracles could not be false, I reasoned. It must be pointing to the same esoteric truth as that given by other esotericists – including Rudolf Steiner.

Thus I clung to the words of Bohr I often quote: ‘The opposite of a fact is surely a falsehood. But the opposite of one great truth may well be another great truth.’

Surely I felt, the universe is of such a vast, multifaceted nature, and so utterly beyond the limited human mind’s capacity to comprehend, that all the 'great teachings’ are actually in agreement at a deeper level.

And I believe many New-Agers cling to similar notions. In fact, as I write these very lines, another memory floats back of a man at Findhorn, who was a serious admirer of both the Course and Steiner ...

But eventually I had to face the fact that the two worlds were irreconcilable.

And the Course was in fact, CLEARLY pointing to this irreconcilability. It was clearly saying that other versions of Christianity – from Steiner’s to Catholicism – were wrong.

Today, it now seems to clear to me, that the Course is really a demolition course, in regards to traditional Christianity.

Truly, it is saying that so, so much of Christianity has got it WRONG.

I believe that I have intimated but a little of this in these last days. I believe there is far more to it, than what I have indicated about the Course rejecting prayers which ‘make the error real’ or the Crucifixion as only pointing to ‘the unreality of assault’ …

No, I think the Course goes much further in its efforts to dismantle the Christian Tradition.

It is now time, I think, to look at the source of authority the Course indicates for its teaching. Until now, I have not mentioned this.

But much of its apparent authority would appear to lie in nothing other than the fact the Course claims to originate from Jesus. In the Course, it is taken as the voice of Jesus, which tells us:

“I elected for your sake and *mine*, to demonstrate that the most outrageous assault, as judged by the ego, does not matter. As the world judges these things, but not as God knows them, I was betrayed, abandoned, beaten, torn and finally killed …

You are not persecuted, nor was I … I undertook to show this [truth] in an extreme case, ***merely*** because it would serve as a good teaching aid to those whose temptation to give in to anger and assault would not be so extreme. I will with God that none of his Sons should suffer…

The apostles often misunderstood [the crucifixion].

[Had they understood it they could not] have described my reactions to Judas as they did … I could not have said “Betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?” unless I believed in betrayal. The ***whole*** message of the Crucifixion was simply that I did not [Emphasis mine, here and above]."

All of this appears in a section in the Course entitled 'The Message of the Crucifixion', wherein we also find:

“The crucifixion is ***nothing more*** than an extreme example [Emphasis mine] ...

The real meaning of the crucifixion lies in the ***apparent*** intensity of the assault … This, of course, is impossible … destruction itself is impossible, anything that is destructible cannot be real [Emphasis in original].”

Many a Christian may read these words and wonder how could one possibly even begin to think that this was reconcilable with Christianity, even the esoteric Christianity of Rudolf Steiner, who believed that the Mystery of the Crucifixion of Golgotha was not ‘merely … a good teaching aid’, but an unfathomable cosmic mystery, of which two thousand years of Christian tradition had only begun to scratch the surface.

Yes, Rudolf Steiner profoundly affirmed the essence of the tradition, from the earliest writings of St Paul to nearly two millennia of further inspiration and genius. (My entry for 22-12-05 may be helpful in this context).

How could I even begin to imagine reconciling such massive discrepancies?

Friends, I wish to repeat, the Course has tremendous, tremendous sophistication and power. It identifies the psychological games of ‘the ego’ with stunning acuity. Its call to forgiveness appears absolutely genuine. It is not devoid of the sublime.

Moreover, while many people of a New Age persuasion turn to less demanding - yes, less intelligent -New Age channellings, some of the most dedicated, bright and reflective folk I have known, held the Course in Miracles in high regard.

Yes, the Course is a VAST teaching. And not all of the ideas I have here selected, necessarily leap out at first acquaintance.

Indeed, I admit that I am indebted to Kenneth Wapnick, for understanding how anti-Christian, the Course actually is. Wapnick, who is perhaps the Course’s leading apologist and commentator, writes:

“Many passages in the Course are subtly aimed at the sacraments and teachings found in the Roman Catholic Church.”

In support of this, Wapnick goes on to quote ‘Jesus’ speaking in a section of the channelled material, which did not make the final edited text of the Course and which Wapnick now presents for the first time. Here ‘Jesus’ deconstructs the Mass saying:

‘I do not want to share my body in communion, because this is to share nothing. Would I try to share an illusion with the most holy children of a most holy Father … would I offer you my body, you whom I love, knowing its littleness?

It is the morning of Good Friday as I write these lines. Last night I went to the Holy Mass commemorating His Last Supper. And after it was over, I felt that strange, solemn beauty descend, that I have felt descend in every Holy Week since my confirmation in the Catholic Church.

Yes I felt that strange, solemn, eternal, haunting beauty … I believe that many Christians will know whereof I speak. It is a beauty which was entirely inaccessible to me before I entered the Church.

The Course teaches us – rightly I believe - that every belief we take on, we inevitably represent to others. We cannot help but teach that belief to others.

We can teach therefore, that the principles of the Course are real. That in reality, there is no body, there is no sin, and that the Crucifixion exists solely to demonstrate such things.

Or we can teach that the world has reality, that there is sin and suffering and tragedy and that the Crucifixion is a tremendous Mystery of the Love of God in response to all of this.

And now I have made my choice and according to the Course, I am now teaching -in my words and in my actions- that which I have chosen.

I recognise the reality of the suffering of the world - a suffering we each of us contribute to by sin. And in this weblog, I am elaborating and will continue to elaborate, why I believe that to affirm otherwise has far from desirable consequences ... in terms of both personal and political consequences. A heart numbed by negation of tragedy cannot ACT ...

And I have faith that the Crucifixion is a Mystery of Unfathomable Depth, and not to do with a personal quest to prove the world unreal (underttaken by a 'Jesus' ... 'for your sake and mine').

And so I teach my affirmation of the Mystery of Christ and of his Church, which has represented it to the world for nearly two millennia.

And I know well, that if some friends from my New Age past should read these lines, they well may shake their heads in sad disbelief.

They will imagine, perhaps, that I who had such promise, have become a reactionary in my middle age, opposed to progress. That in supporting the traditional teaching, I am now working against the new revelation of the ‘Master Jesus’ …

What can I say? We must make a choice. But I counsel that we make the choice as **consciously** as we can.

If we should choose the Course, let us be conscious that we are rejecting two thousand years of Christian tradition.

We are rejecting the testimony of the apostles that Jesus himself chose.

We are rejecting the dedication and inspiration of the early Fathers of the Church.

We are rejecting as uninspired and unimportant the testimony of countless brilliant Christian theologians and philosophers.

We are rejecting the testimony of countless Christian mystics and visionaries, whose vision of Christ contradicts the teaching of the Course. And the list continues …

And if we are of an esoteric persuasion, not trusting the exoteric Church, let us also be conscious that we are rejecting the traditions of the original Rosicrucians and of Rudolf Steiner, who gave his life’s blood to preserve the Mystery of Golgotha.

Yes, we live in a universe of free will and we are free to choose. But if we choose the Course or similar Aquarian demolitions of Christianity, let us proclaim ourselves, in all honesty, as opposed to Christian tradition.

Let us be rigorous, follow through the consequences of our thinking, and not dare to call ourselves ‘holistic’.

For my part, I now choose differently. Perhaps old friends may feel I have been captured by the power of the Church.

For my part, I confess I am concerned in turn, that they may have been captured by the power of ‘Aquarian architects of demolition’.

For my part, I feel I have been caught by a truth preserved in two thousand years of tradition, wherein a Mystery is revealed.

Today I feel the solemn beauty of Good Friday in a land,which still honours this Mystery.

As in Ireland Noon approaches, how many tens, if not hundreds of thousands in this nation of four million, will be at the Stations of the Cross? How many more will kiss the Crucifix, at the three o’clock commemoration of the Mystery of Calvary?

In Ireland, a solemn beauty descends this day, among a people still honouring the Christian Mystery. A solemn beauty descends as the Mystery of the Passion becomes present once again.

And my heart, my heart is now open to this solemn beauty in a way that the New Age and the Course in Miracles never provided for. Years ago at Findhorn, I knew a psychological path of practical love – but I did not know at all the Mystery of the Word Made Flesh …

And Ireland, holy Island, I honour you for preserving the Mystery that ‘Aquarius’ would destroy …

I wish you Friends a Holy Easter. This weblog will recommence, albeit only briefly, by WEDNESDAY.

Confessions XV (Sin Regarded as Illusion)

2006-04-13T18:25:00.000+01:00

Holy Thursday

Dear Friends Known and Unknown,

Yesterday I spoke of A Course in Miracles as an immensely sophisticated text, whose influence I repeatedly encountered in many New Age venues.

Often this influence might not be particularly visible. I am thinking now, for instance, of a prominent author in the holistic milieu, who I knew and who had deeply worked with the Course, though I think that this was scarcely mentioned in his erudite writings …

Now I am not saying that A Course in Miracles is secretly at work behind the scenes in every corner of the sprawling holistic movement. I am saying I experienced it as a very popular text – and with a staying-power over the years, which other texts did not necessarily enjoy.

And even where the Course was not being studied, mention of its name frequently evoked affirmation. It would be regularly met with nods of respect.

Yes, as I look back on my New Age years, I find it easy to imagine a student of the Course being greeted with nods of respect in New Age circles everywhere.

But if I imagine myself now, as a Catholic, moving through those same circles and saying that I preferred the dogmas of Catholicism to the Course, I cannot so easily imagine those same approving nods.

I imagine rather bewilderment – and indeed I have experienced such bewilderment continuously, as I have encountered folk of a holistic persuasion in recent years.

Yes, I experience my conversion to Catholicism as bewildering for such people. I have who tasted Findhorn and the New Age to now prefer Roman Catholicism …!? The mind boggles. But that is the reaction both my wife and I have frequently met since we chose the Church.

And although the New Age milieu is commonly considered as a place without doctrines, I now believe this bewildered reaction points to a set of commonly held (though often unconscious) beliefs.

Among these is a definite sense that new teachings are superior to old. For do I not realise that texts like A Course in Miracles belong to a new ‘dispensation’ and are to be preferred to Old Age ‘dogma’?

Thus even in truth, the Course in Miracles is only studied by a very small fraction of the New Age movement, I believe that this pattern of general respect I describe is true and that behind this, there lies a tale to be told …

It is a tale of respecting 'New Revelations' – or rather a certain KIND of 'New Revelations'. These are of a kind I think, which accord-more or less-to a general New Age pattern.

Now I believe that the Course does accord –again more or less – to such a pattern. And to return to a theme in these confessions, it is a pattern which tends to dismiss the notions which attend a Fall into sin, suffering,tragedy and evil.

But to illustrate this, I need to focus on the Course more deeply.

Yesterday I spoke of how the Course’s message is that no harm has ever been done to anyone – in reality.

From this same perspective then, it naturally follows that we ourselves never can or do harm anyone. Guilt and sin are thus regarded by the Course as unhealthy ideas – as indeed is the case elsewhere in New Age thought.

Thus the Course preaches against the concept of sin:

“To sin would be to violate reality and to succeed [which according to the Course’s concept of reality is impossible.]

Sin is the proclamation that attack is real and guilt is justified … Sin is the grand illusion underlying all the ego’s grandiosity [One’s true self] cannot sin. There is nothing [the true self] can do that would really change his reality in any way, nor make him really guilty”

The Course advises us to stop JUDGING AS REAL any harm at all in our actions. It describes such a judgment as ‘Making the error real’ – the 'error' that is, that we can do *real* harm, that we thus are GUILTY of *real* harm or that we can commit what a Christian would commonly call sin.

Now if one holds such a view, a vast host of Christian prayers become meaningless. ‘Forgive us our sins’ … ‘Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.‘ These are examples of what the Course calls: 'Making the Error real".

In a similar vein, I will note that, as my heart ponders the prospects of my 11 year old daughter living out her years in a burning greenhouse, I turn to another prayer, which I believe has been given by Our Lady, and which includes the following supplication:

Let the Holy Spirit live in the hearts of all nations,
That they may be preserved from degeneration, disaster and war.
(For more on this prayer, See my entry for 1-12-05)

Yet from the perspective of the Course, in reality there is no ‘degeneration, disaster and war’.

But whether I turn to the prayer of the Lady of All Nations or not, the fact remains that the Course is claiming that a vast amount of Christian prayer and inspiration is founded on false ideas.

The Course in Miracles then, is fundamentally opposed to vast aspects of Christian teaching and practice.

But this Course finds respect in a general milieu, in which these very same ideas underlying Christianity are also opposed – to one degree or another. That is, it finds widespread respect in the milieu I call New Age.

I wish to repeat 'to one degree or another'. These aspects of Christianity are not always as **radically and consistently** opposed in the New Age culture, as they are in the Course.

But still, this milieu has in my experience, a definite tendency to oppose the so-called ‘Piscean’ notions of a Fall into sin, suffering, tragedy and evil … among other Christian conceptions.

And all of this is to do with why I believe that many New Age folk can scarcely believe that I could now prefer a ‘retrograde’ Catholicism, after tasting the fruits of the New Aquarian dispensation …

Confessions XIV (Suffering Regarded As Illusion)

2006-04-12T20:10:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

I have been suggesting that the New Age milieu can be characterised by a frequent tendency to either minimise suffering and tragedy or even deny it outright as illusory. Again I want to emphasise that this tendency is only 'frequent' - it is not consistent. There are significant exceptions.

But today I am going to focus on a book, which I believe exemplifies this frequent pattern – and which has gathered wide respect indeed within the holistic orbit.

The book is called A Course in Miracles – and it impossible for me to deny that it is a work of Genius. First, a word of what I mean by that term.

I recall when I first met Shakespeare. I met Shakespeare, when first I realised, what it was to stand in awe of Genius.

Stunned, I realised there was so, so, SO much in his tragedies, operating on so many levels, simultaneously. Layer upon layer of characterisation, penetrating psychological insight, spiritual wisdom, pathos, irony, social commentary and more – all woven together in a way which far surpassed any literature I had ever come across.

To top it all off, Shakespeare had managed to express his vast, complex vision in **poetry**. All was in iambic pentameter and included some of the most beautiful and memorable lines ever committed to English.

I actually feel something like that in response to A Course in Miracles.

Now one may wish to call it a towering work of ANTI-CHRISTIAN Genius, if one likes.

But I defy any thoughtful person to spend much time with this book, and not conclude that its author possesses an extroadinarily – I want to repeat EXTROADINARILY - sophisticated mind.

A vast and consistent vision of the nature of reality is presented, laden with **brilliant** insights into the dynamics of human psychology. And like Shakespeare, an immense amount of the text is in poetry – in fact, the same iambic pentameter employed by the bard. At many points, the language is very beautiful indeed.

As it happens, this is a 'channelled' text. The woman who received it, could not have possibly authored it in her normal every day consciousness.

But when it comes to the Course -unlike 99.8 % of New Age channelled texts - I must confess to feeling awe.

Now, the basic thrust of the Course’s message is that the world we see is illusory.

The Course posits two orders of perception. One order is real. The other is unreal.

At the outset, the Course itself states that its message can be "summed up very simply in this way:

Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God."

Thus, the course has definite similarities to Platonism, Gnosticism, Vedanta – and so on. All of which posit that we experience a world of shadow or Maya – illusion.

This thinking is not even completely foreign to Christianity – inasmuch as Christianity is not dualist. Unlike certain Gnostics, Christians do not propose two equal, opposed orders of darkness and light. The world of Darkness does not have the same, ultimate eternal validity as that of God …

But the implications the Course draws from its position are radical indeed.

Now I must confess that I have never studied the Course in its 1,200 page entirety. Nonetheless I have substantially engaged with it over the years – also through the writings of its leading commentators.

Although one must be wary indeed of reducing a vast system to a simple summary, for my part I truly believe the following words represent the message that the Course is giving. Friends, I have struggled, really struggled to do justice to the Course, and this is what I believe its message necessarily **entails**:

In reality – Hitler never murdered the Jews. The genocide committed by Stalin, Mao, the European conquerors of the indigenous Americans and so forth, in reality never happened.

Similarity – in reality – global warming, the ravages of poverty, third world sweatshops, child abuse … the list goes on – all of these are not happening. Threats are unreal and what is unreal does not exist.

And it is only through understanding this basic unreality behind all suffering, that forgiveness is even possible.

The Course is a call to forgiveness at every level. Forgiveness for the Course is THE means of salvation.

But forgiveness **only** becomes possible for the Course, when we realise that every wrong done - from the most minor insult to the most sadistic torture - has not been done – in reality.

‘In reality’ is the key here. Whatever is precisely meant by these two words ‘in reality’. I am struggling to do justice here, and in that spirit, I ask you to focus on these two words I am repeatedly stressing as the key …

Now, on this basis, the Course goes on to deconstruct a vast, vast amount of Christianity.

According to the Course, the ONLY meaning of the Crucifixion was ‘to demonstrate that the most outrageous assault, as judged by the ego, does not matter’ – again, because ‘in reality’ it never happened. The Course amplifies its message about the Crucifixion by saying ‘destruction itself is impossible, anything that is destructible cannot be real’.

Thus two millennia of Christian (traditional and esoteric) understandings of the Crucifixion, which stand in the most profound contrast to this idea, are repeatedly dismissed by the Course as misunderstandings.

Tomorrow, I shall continue with the Course’s deconstruction of Christianity.

But in doing so, I hope never to get too far away from my main theme – which is that of New Age teachings, which serve to efface tragedy and suffering.

For I believe the Course, which met with deep respect wherever I ventured in the New Age milieu, is but an outstandingly developed example of a general New Age tendency of thought.

Confessions XIII (A Jew, a Catholic and a New-Ager go to Hell...)

2006-04-07T19:24:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

Two days ago, I spoke of a distinct New Age motif that ‘either suffering is illusory or it is unimportant compared to a transcendent joy at the heart of the universe.’ And I had hoped to go further into that territory by now.

But I confess that I need more time to revise and reflect.

Strange as it may seem, much of what I have for you today, is the memory of a joke. Only the memory, for I cannot even fully recall it:

A Jew, a Catholic and a New-Ager go to Hell. The intensity of the flames is searing. And they are each of them asked: ‘How do you cope with the HEAT?'

The Jew responds perhaps with a certain lamentation, but the specific form I no longer recall.

The Catholic says: ‘I’m offering it up.’

The New Ager – who is positively drenched in perspiration - replies: ‘Heat? What heat?’

Now my partial recollection of this joke may or may not bring a smile to your face.

But I feel my entire life experience of the New Age and Catholic Christianity, points to the fact there is far more here than just a silly joke.

For Catholic spirituality, suffering is not something to be denied. It is to be taken seriously, and transformed with the Grace of God. This theme powerfully informs the entire Catholic sensibility.

But after many, many years in the holistic milieu, I can testify that the New Age is often, if not always, powerfully informed by a relativising, minimising or denial of suffering and its value.

Now it needs to be said this is far from the entire picture. There are many ways in which this New Age tendency is powerfully counteracted within the movement. Among these is an often fine PRAXIS of really engaging with another human being - truly making space for and listening to her or his inner world.

But as much as I admire the real health of this **praxis**, it nonetheless remains true that I am concerned about the **thinking** imparted by so much New Age teaching.

For what we think is not without effect upon our lives. And the presence of such a powerful spiritual teaching about suffering, will not be without its practical consequences.

As I have said, I am concerned that among these is a certain weakening of the personality and nonchalance in the face of social injustice.

Now if this is true, it is not without consquence for civilisation.

For in the Protestant countries in Europe especially, the Christian Mystery is severely weakened. In places like Ireland, Italy and Poland, the picture is rather different. But in Protestant Europe, few participate in the Church.

I think it may be fair to surmise that the dominant form of spirituality in such countries is now of a New Age variety. In such places then, one’s main options may seem to consist of either the soulless materialism of secularist capitalism or the New Age culture.

Certainly, twenty-six years ago in Britain these were the only options I personally saw. And I think this is much more likely to be the case for many today.

But I fear neither secularism nor New Age spirituality are proving sufficient to meet the situation of the planet.

The failures of secularism are clear to many of a Hermetic persuasion. But the failures of the so-called holistic panoply are often not so clear.

And so I hope to return to this theme on WEDNESDAY. But here I will also say that due to many pressing concerns, this weblog will either soon need to become more sporadic for awhile or take yet another hiatus.

As Passion Sunday and Holy Week approach, may Christ be ever with you, friends.

Confessions XII (Communion and Atomisation)

2006-04-06T23:00:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

Yesterday I have spoken of the need for a spirituality not blind to tragedy and a spirituality which recognises that, in our broken-ness, we cannot make it by ourselves.

We need Grace – and all my experience has pointed me to the power of the Grace, which flows through the early structures and traditions of the Church (still preserved in Orthodoxy and Catholicism).

It is moreover a Grace, I believe, which emphasises communion and co-operation.

Now in time, I hope to say more on this. For now, I will only say that I believe there is a particular communitarian sensibility to Catholicism – linked to a sense of God as mediated through the community (i.e. the Church) and which many writers have remarked on.

(This subject is often addressed vis-à-vis the more individual sensibility of Protestantism, with its stress on a unique, unmediated relation with a God, who has often been emphasised as more transcendent or radically ‘other’).

Thus, the Catholic sociologist Andrew Greeley speaks of a distinct Catholic Imagination. He argues that Catholics are socialised to see reality differently – with God’s sacramental presence running like a thread through family and community. He argues that Catholics bond more tightly as a result – though not always with healthy results.

Personally I feel Greeley’s analysis depends too much on ideas such as socialisation – and not nearly enough on the Mystery of the Sacraments. I was not socialised as a child to be Catholic – but I do think the Sacraments are changing me in the precise directions he indicates. For example. very human ties become ever more precious …

Whatever the origins of the Catholic communitarian ethos however, I believe there is much else to indicate that the traditional forms of the Church promote communion. The comparatively few schisms within the two millennia of Orthodoxy and Catholicism, also point to this, for example.

Now I believe that the Protestant emphasis on the individual also has tremendous value and necessity.

But as I consider Time magazine’s simple chilling headline ‘Earth at the TIPPING point’, I fear we have tipped too far into **atomisation**. And now more than ever, human co-operation and community is needed …

Here sitting at my computer in Ireland, my heart and mind are reeling at the world situation.

Here in Ireland … which still has far and away the most amazing communitarian ethos, I ever encountered among the various countries in which I lived.

Ireland which until only recently, never spawned a true right-wing party – having rejected such for decades. Ireland, where in even small cities, one can find churches with several daily masses and astonishing numbers participating in each.

Yes, Ireland for so long you rejected the secularist capitalism of the West. You were even described in tones that shivered many a spine, as ‘the greatest Theocracy West of Tehran’.

Was all of this simply Catholic socialisation – or was the Mystery of the Sacraments also a factor?

Personally, I believe it was. And when I consider the rupture from Tradition in the last centuries and the atomising trajectory, which followed in its wake, I feel my heart crying out ever more that something fundamental has been lost.

That there is something fundamentally flawed in this trajectory. A trajectory that is, that begins in the Renaissance, with the dismantling of Tradition.

Whether it is the Rationalism of Descartes, who needs to subject everything to **doubt**, in order to start building afresh.

Or whether it is the Reformation of those noble souls sincerely indignant at the very real abuses of the Church – yes, the terrible abuses, which nonetheless did not justify casting aspersions on vast masses of Christian inspiration – simply because they are not to be found in sola scriptura (i.e. the Bible alone).

Yes more and more troubled, I confess that my heart looks to that pre-Reformation tradition, and it wonders and wonders.

O Holy Mother Church, are you holding far more than we can ever see – far, far more that is directly relevant to addressing the ravaging of people and planet?

As I enter your Sacraments ever more deeply, I feel that I see, or I begin to see, something far more vital and needed within you than I ever imagined …

Now do not mistake me, dear friend. I do not wish for one moment to suggest that the Sacraments –as powerful as I experience them to be - are the only way that Christ’s Grace is available.

No, I certainly share John Paul II’s faith that this Grace comes through other religions and other paths (see my entry for 14-11-05). Personally, I become more keenly appreciative of all religious paths, which seek to honour and engage the roots of their tradition.

But the point I am stumbling towards, is that instead of a trajectory which moves ever more towards an atomised spirituality, where each of us simply does ‘our own thing’; instead of a spirituality divorced from the collective insight of a community across time (though often, it must be said, filled with fawning approbation towards the latest spiritual fad) – instead of all this, is it now more urgent than ever, that we look to what we have lost?

Is it time to realise that neither the Rationalism initiated (in a sense) by Descartes, and which underpins the secular capitalist world, nor atomised spirituality can cope with what is to come ?

O Holy Mother Church, is that what you whisper in my heart, as almost daily I join you in your Sacraments, and feel that I hear your loving, tender voice ever more vividly?

Yes I hear your voice, your Grace – and for this reason I have hope. We are not alone. Christ, Mary, the Angels and the Saints are ever with us …

Confessions XI (Christian and New Age Responses to Suffering)

2006-04-05T23:25:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

Today I will say more of why I now feel the New Age Model is flawed in its ability to respond to the demands of social and environmental justice.

But first, a further word on Catholicism. For again, these are my personal confessions, as I look back on my New Age past, through the lens of my Catholic Christian experience.

Now, this experience included a growing astonishment - an astonishment as to how very, very rich the Catholic tradition truly was.

I, who all my New Age life, had simply assumed it was anachronistic and largely irrelevant to the future. O monstrous presumption! The barefaced arrogance of youth to dismiss an immense tradition - of which I was almost entirely ignorant.

But enough of personal regret. What I would focus on now, is that among many other aspects of the Catholic tradition, I was slowly amazed to discover its extensive **engagement** with the suffering and social conditions of the modern world.

Now this happens **practically** through countless Catholic initiatives to render aid throughout the globe. But there is also a highly developed **theoretical** work proceeding apace – which is popularly called Catholic Social Teaching.

Yes, while the media would focus us on little else but Catholic positions on gender and sexuality, the Catholic Church has been quietly amassing reams of acute, penetrating social analysis -including papal, episcopal and conciliar thinking -most of which is very challenging to the kind of corporate libertarianism now devastating the world.

Though this is not the place to detail it, I simply wish to offer my view, that here is a formidable and penetrating teaching, relating to the abuses of capitalism and consumerism and oriented towards more humane systems of society.

And for me, it is a vastly more convincing effort than anything I encountered through the New Age. Yes here and there, I found New Agers with critiques of social injustice – which were sometimes moving and acute.

And many in the New Age movement also have a developed environmental awareness – at least at a level of individual or local action. Findhorn where I lived, is building an inspiring eco-village, for example. Yes when I look at Findhorn, with its wind-energy, its living sewage system (sewage purified by living organisms, not chemicals) eco-buildings and so forth – I must deeply honour its Green commitment and awareness.

Yet for a sustained critical analysis as to the causes and many of the costs of capitalist globalisation, I confess I find much more hope in Catholic Social Teaching. As also direct Catholic social action inspires me with hope.

And by contrast, it seems to me that so much of the New Age movement is all-too-accommodating to commercialist capitalism.

And I confess that I see a link between this frequent myopia to social injustice and the New Age Stripping of Tradition.

As I have said, I am concerned the New Age Stripping of Tradition can lead to losing a sense of the Fall, of Tragedy, of Evil.

But it may be that it is **precisely** these qualities which are NEEDED to awaken the heart to social justice. And which strengthen our **resolve** to address the suffering of the world.

Yes, for this reason, the traditional teaching of the Church may be more necessary than ever … to address the suffering of the world.

For as I shall come to express more fully, I am disturbed by another feature of New Age thought, which I experienced in many forms over the years.

It involves a denial of suffering. It is a denial in the affirmation that either suffering is illusory or it is unimportant, compared to a transcendent light and joy at the heart of the universe.

Now I do not deny that what is ultimately most real is God and God is love. And to love involves the profoundest of joys. But to love is also to feel the depth of compassion and to suffer in that compassion.

Thus the God of the Christian Tradition embodies profound opposites – the most Unfathomable Joy of Love and the most Unfathomable Suffering of Love. The God I believe in, is not remote, but is suffering with us.

But this God is lost in so, so much New Age teaching ...

More will be said. For now, I simply emphasise that a spirituality of excessive optimism can shade into denial. And a soul in denial is not equipped to bear or address suffering. On the contrary, this soul must inevitably become **weakened **.

Thus, when I look out on the challenges of the New Millennium, I see a need for spirituality which **strengthens** us. Yet this it seems to me, is not a spirituality of excess light, but rather one that also confronts the fact that we are fallen. We are broken and weak. The condition of the planet testifies all too painfully to our brokenness and our weakness ...

But we are not alone and and we are not unaided. And thus I also see a need for a spirituality, which acknowledges that Supernatural Grace is there to help us. There is the Grace of Christ. There is the Grace flowing through the Angelic Hierarchies and through the Communion of Saints. And there is the Grace flowing through the Sacraments …

Confessions X (Global Warming, ‘Soft’ Totalitarianism and the New Age)

2006-04-04T22:22:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

This last weekend I have perused the latest copy of a magazine I dislike. The magazine is Time, and the reason I dislike it, is its tone of subtle, ‘soft’ TOTALITARIANISM.

By this I mean that time and again, Time presents its readers with the image that there is no alternative available to the world, other than capitalist globalisation.

One can feel this image, for example, in Time’s attitude towards France. At least, in reading Time's 'reportage', I myself find a continuous, editorialising tone, which runs something like this – when will the elements of French culture opposed to capitalist globalisation, finally get **real**, realise there is no alternative, and ‘get with the beat’?

Get with the global capitalist beat. ‘Resistance is futile’ – to borrow the chilling words of the Borg from Star Trek … It is futile for France or anyone else to mark out a different path.

Never mind that many French feel an alien ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ideology is being imposed on them – now is the time for the French to embrace unhesitatingly the values espoused by Time magazine. Or suffer the consequences.

This is what I mean by 'soft' totalitarianism. Margaret Thatcher’s brutal devastation of Britain’s social patrimony was founded on a similar principle. A famous speech she gave in the 1980’s was nicknamed by the acronym TINA: There Is No Alternative. All of this strikes me as little other than totalitarian – subtle or not.

Be that as it may, I have spent more time with Time this weekend, because of its issue (on sale now) devoted to Global Warming. A poignant picture of a Polar Bear walking on breaking ice adorns a cover with the headlines: 'Be Worried. Be VERY Worried. … Earth at the TIPPING point'.

The magazine then offers further heart-breaking imagery of droughts, flooded communities, forest fires, endangered species and more.

But nowhere do I see much sense of any alternative to the capitalist consumerist lifestyle, that is bringing this horror and suffering. Time it seems, can only hope that capitalism will find a technological fix.

Yes cleaner energy is a necessary goal, but I fear the only REAL solution involves addressing a vast, collective addiction to materialism, lived in a hyper-individual context. We will need to live more collectively, less atomised, and more simply.

All of this may seem far removed from the theme of these confessions. But for me, it is not.

The suffering of humanity, animals and nature depicted by Time is very real. And if our problem is addiction to such an extent that the media forces which guide and shape us, cannot even *begin* to imagine another alternative, we will need to deal with that addiction.

And it seems to me that, more than ever, we will need a different spiritual framework, with which to engage it. The framework of Time, its sponsors, priests and teachers will not do.

Now hardly surprisingly, I no longer believe that the ascending, even dominant New Age spirituality is up to the task. In fact, after living nearly two decades with New Age spirituality, I suspect that there are basic flaws in its model, which may even weaken people in terms of their capacity to address the suffering of the world.

Yes, I am concerned that the practical consequences of much New Age spirituality may involve both a slumbering of the heart in certain regards, as well as a certain inability to accommodate the demands of a suffering world, and of social justice.

And why I fear this, I shall expand upon tomorrow. In time, I also hope to draw out elements of Catholicism, which seem to me, far more genuinely counter-cultural and less accommodating to secularist capitalism, than much of the New Age.

I also hope to suggest that this counter-cultural stance naturally flows from a spirituality oriented to both the tragic realities of suffering and to the **supernatural** Grace of Redemption …

Confessions IX (To ENGAGE the Tradition)

2006-03-30T22:00:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

I have been testifying to nearly two decades of experience in a New Age cultural pattern, in which there was either utter ignorance or dismissal of the Catholic Tradition.

Then slowly, I began to approach the Catholic Church. And here I discovered an entirely different pattern for Sacred Culture – one wherein two thousand years of profound inspiration regarding the Christian Mystery was neither ignored, nor dismantled.

And where, as I shall explain, this was not merely honoured at an **intellectual** level – but far more **holistically**, appealing to body and soul.

I entered a pattern of culture, then, shaped on **every level** by Tradition. One where not only first-century Christian scripture was honoured, but also two millennia of further vision and genius. And one where the Sacraments of the Church were honoured in their original entirety.

This is to speak of a context then, in which there was not merely a ‘service with bread and wine’ as still happens in many Protestant Churches – but wherein the Real Presence of Christ was honoured.

And wherein this Real Presence was not limited to the Mass, but also acknowledged in six further Sacraments - for example, the Sacrament of Confession.

Here, we are not dealing with a psychological claim, such as ‘confession is good for the soul’. No, we are dealing with the Mystery of a Sacrament, with Transcendent Grace sanctifying the soul, as transmitted by a Priest.

And although the Transcendent Grace of Christic Absolution via the Priest is central here - I do not want to ignore the fact that the sincere practice of this Sacrament also TEACHES. And it is a teaching that is not merely imparted intellectually – but which is **experienced** on widely different levels.

At least, this is how it seems to me, as I approach a mere man and say: ‘Bless me father, for I have sinned’. Where, kneeling in confession, I acknowledge the reality of the Fall in the most personal, immediate way that I can – because I am acknowledging that my psyche is inextricably caught in it. And that the result of this, is that I inevitably bring real and continuing hurt to real and suffering beings.

Yes, the Reality of the Fall becomes present to me - and not as an abstract concept.

And then I consciously turn to the Reality of Christ, as the answer the God of Love has given to our Fallen Psyches in a Fallen World.

And all of this I do traditionally - kneeling - acknowledging in body, as well as in mind, that I must bow before the Grace of Christ.

And the Christic Absolution which I receive is not without an accompanying sensation. Time and again, there is a distinct sense, often palpable hours later, of what I have called a peculiar wholesomeness. There is also a joyous sense of being more deeply united to the Body of Christ. A small tearing or rupture with the Mystici Corporis feels as though it has been healed.

It is not easy to describe these subtle, yet for me, immensely meaningful sensations. Yet more and more, I feel that it is necessary that we Catholics try. Perhaps I should even mention briefly how on one occasion, the immediate aftermath of receiving Absolution was not this subtle joy - but astonishingly and viscerally profound. Yes, the Mystery of the Sacraments must not be hidden away.

Even if we are not consciously with the subtle sensations I try to capture here, I think it may be helpful to ask – what is it that keeps bringing us back to these Sacraments? Does it not involve a sense - not only of profound meaning, but also of a joy in being with the Mystical Body?

Though I rarely hear people utter such things, I am convinced I am not alone. Even with Catholics alienated from the Tradition, I often sense this mysterious sense of meaning, even joy. There are Catholics who have even come to hate the Church – but often they find the final break difficult indeed. Implicated here I suspect, is a peculiar experience of meaning and joy still buried in their hearts …

Whatever the truth of the matter may be, I testify that in entering the Catholic Church, I entered a world wherein the tradition was not only not dismantled, nor only imparted intellectually through sermons or study, but was a world in which I now live and experience the Tradition in varied manners. From kneeling in confession to receiving the presence of Christ on my tongue ...

And with all of this, I feel I enter ever more deeply into a Mystery, a two-thousand year Mystery that is progressively **humanising** me.

In the comments to these confessions, Sun Warrior has left testimony to the notion that there is a modern longing for a spiritual experience that the Tradition cannot supply.

I concur with his strongly felt sense for this modern hunger. And for years, I would have concurred that the reason lay in the insufficiency of the old traditions.

But now I can only say that the whole 26 years of my spiritual journey has pointed me to the opposite conclusion:
That it is not so much that the tradition is insufficient. It is that the tradition – the entire tradition - is not taken seriously enough. It is not sufficiently ENGAGED.

Now within approximately 70% of world Christianity – Orthodox and Catholic- there does exists a continued effort to take the entirety of the tradition seriously, including the Seven Sacraments.

But how often is this effort entirely obscured and unknown in those countries, dominated by a Protestant and now Secular heritage! Those countries, that is to say, which include the entire English-speaking world, save Ireland. Ireland ... beloved land, where I have had the joy of engaging the Tradition more deeply than ever before.

My experience at least, is that so many in the other Anglophone cultures, have no idea at all about the fullness of the Orthodox and Catholic engagement with the Tradition.

As I had no idea of that engagement, growing up in a Protestant and Secular America and England.

And I confess that I am increasingly disquieted by this ignorance concerning the other 70% of global Christianity, this sheer ignorance that I participated in **completely** for 34 years ...

And I find myself asking, how many thousands pay vast sums for New Age workshops, where for no sum at all the Orthodox and Catholic traditions make present the Reality of Christ, in countless churches throughout the world?

And what difference would it make, if only it were only more widely realised - in the Anglo-American sphere especially - what this 70% of Christanity is still standing for? That it is still standing for a fullness of Mystery in a world hungry for Mystery - as the New Age movement clearly testifies to.

Friends, such questions haunt my soul. And now that I have attempted to render a slightly fuller picture of my experience of two spiritual cultures, I hope to say more about the PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES which, it seems to me, spring from these two very different milieus, based on two very different ideas about the nature of Reality, which ideas are then embodied in very different spiritual practices ...

I regret to say though, that this will need to wait until next TUESDAY. Until then, I pray that Christ Jesus be with you all.

Confessions VIII (More on the New Age Pattern for a Sacred Culture … )

2006-03-29T23:45:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

Yesterday I spoke of my destiny leading me to drink deeply from two very different **patterns** of spiritual culture. In more recent years, I have explored the ‘pattern’ offered by Catholicism. But before that, I experienced intensively a new pattern of spiritual culture now emerging throughout countless ‘holistic venues’ in the West.

How many examples of this New Age cultural pattern have I experienced since 1980? I both visited and lived at the Findhorn community in Scotland over many years. I participated in countless holistic seminars and workshops, wherein people of a New Age persuasion assembled for a weekend, or even a week or two.

And in that short space of time, ‘New Age Culture’ was created in a miniature sphere - wherein the participants could leave behind the mainstream world to live and breath the New Age air.

I even co-founded a holistic educational charity in Cambridge, which offered such seminars regularly and was actively dedicated to expressing what we all believed was ‘the new spiritual culture’.

Thus, at this charity we had a room called a Sanctuary. The Sanctuary was intended as a place of meditation, and was consciously devoid of imagery. Chairs were arranged in circles and a sign hung on the door, with words from my own pen:

‘This sanctuary is dedicated to the idea that there are no words or forms that can express the ultimately REAL without also limiting it, and that no religion or belief may be said to be the TRUTH but only a refraction among many such refractions that serve to guide the way.

This room is therefore dedicated to silence and simplicity that every seeker may feel welcomed there to find within the SACRED REALITY for which no words suffice but from which healing, inspiration and renewal FLOW’.

I relate all of this, because I want to provide a clearer picture of what I mean by ‘an emerging New Age model of Sacred Culture’.

Now that my path is decisively Catholic, I have been asked if I still stand by the words I wrote for that sign. The answer is both yes and no.

Yes, inasmuch as I believe that spiritual reality does indeed transcend the forms human beings use to express it.

No, inasmuch as the words on this door have an agenda I no longer aspire to. That agenda is one of relativising or even dismissing the value of these forms.

For it does not follow - ipso facto – that because the forms necessarily limit the ‘ultimately real’, they are as dispensable as I once believed.

In fact, although the words I wrote suggest the forms are limiting, I now ask whether it is a far greater privation to have no forms at all.

That is to say, whether these limited forms may not serve to open the heart and mind to the limitlessness far, far more than could ever be the case by simply dispensing with them.

Yes, this sign that once hung upon a door to a New Age Sanctuary in Cambridge expresses the New Age Agenda: Drop the Forms which Limit Us and Enter Herein …

Without ever asking whether these limited forms might yet offer far, far more than we New Agers ever imagined.

These days I meditate on the ‘limited forms’ of the Catholic religion. And how my heart and mind have been opened by them, in ways incomprehensible to my New Age experience.

Recently I have been speaking of the universal tragedy of the Fall. This is indeed perceived through a limited form. But how much richer my own life is for having perceived it.

And how much more open, how much more **human** my HEART has become by standing before what the Judaeo-Christian teaches of the Fall …

And how impoverished my previous life appears by comparison. And yes - less **human**. Herein lies more of my pained concern regarding the New Age project for Stripping the Tradition …

So much for these morsels of New Age autobiography. Tomorrow I hope to elucidate the themes of these confessions, by drawing more on my Catholic experience.

Confessions VII (Two Patterns for Culture; Two Models of the Sacred)

2006-03-28T23:59:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

At the heart of these confessions, is my attempt to voice my ever-growing sense, that the Stripping of Tradition is costing our culture far, far more than is commonly appreciated.

But before continuing to ponder the consequences of the New Age Dismantling of Tradition, I am going to ‘backtrack’ in time. It is not easy to articulate my concerns and I have decided that a little more personal background to these confessions may help to elucidate them.

Thus, once upon a time, I ran a small New Age project in Cambridge, England - which published a little magazine called ‘Sacred Culture’.

That simple phrase is filled with meaning for me – and these confessions are written, looking back on more than twenty five years of my search for a ‘Sacred Culture’.

That is to say, my quest for a Culture in which the Sacred and the Truly Human would be honoured – in contradistinction to so much of the mainstream secular and increasingly brutal capitalist culture.

And in these decades of searching for ‘Sacred Culture’, I have experienced two major PATTERNS for forming such a culture. I will call these two models:The New Age pattern and the Catholic Christian pattern.

There is the New Age pattern, wherein the Christian Tradition of the West is dismantled, to be replaced - in the best instances - by a rich psychological awareness and often-rich human to human contact.

It is filled with certain **contemporary** insights into the human condition – but as I have at least suggested, so often at the cost of psychologising and relativising tremendous insights from the **past**.

Again Matthew Fox, to take a single example, seems to me to dismissive of so, so many of the insights and visions of the tradition. Not least of all, those of that author, who began his Gospel saying “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God … and the Word became Flesh and dwelt amongst us” ...

Then there is the Catholic pattern in which so, so much tradition of the West, including not only the Gospel, but also the preceding Greek and Judaic traditions is honoured. And not only sola scriptura - the Bible alone - but also two thousand years of insight into the Christian Mystery ...

These confessions are formed then, from my intimate experiences of very **different** spiritual milieus. (I have also experienced a rather different, but nonetheless Christian Anthroposophical ‘pattern for a Sacred Culture’ – but I leave this aside for the moment.)

My confessions are formed also from my experience of the ultimate inadequacy of the New Age vision, and also of the utterly unexpected riches I discovered within the Church. Profound riches I had not the slightest inkling of in the New Age world. Riches which even in my darkest times, bring me a joy, consolation and peculiar sense of wholeness and wholesomeness I never experienced in my New Age past.

Yes especially in the Sacraments, I feel this rich and peculiar sense of cleansing wholesomeness. Deep, deep, deep.

And all of these are Christian riches, which I now think the New Age ignores or strips to its peril. And I confess, I think to the peril of the world.

For it seems to me that the unexpected riches cast aside by both secularism and New Age-ism, may actually be critical to the future of humanity. By this, I mean not necessarily the survival of the species, homo sapiens – but certainly to the survival of HUMAN culture.

To me it seems inescapable. The last twenty five years or so since I first entered the New Age world, have seen the rise and rise of the New Age cafeteria. And the last twenty five years have seen an ongoing brutalisation of human culture.

Yes, these confessions are formed by very different experiences of very different patterns for a ‘Sacred Culture’. And before I proceed much further with my thoughts about the New Age Stripping of Tradition, I will delve a little further into my autobiography to try to convey better what I experience and see in these two patterns ...

Confessions VI (Dismantling the Tradition — and its Consequences)

2006-03-24T22:53:00.000Z

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

I have been speaking of a hidden unity I see in the New Age movement, inasmuch as its apparent holistic, all-embracing spiritual cafeteria does in fact, seem to me much more narrow and selective, than is commonly acknowledged.

That is, it seems to me to involve a ***certain definite complex of related ideas and practices***. These are often important and beautiful in themselves. They often include, for example, the need to be self-watchful, ‘centred’, and not reactive. There is also a marked call for authenticity, optimism, hope – and other important virtues. All of this is frequently expressed in life, I want to add, with genuine and moving beauty.

Clearly no Christian can have concern with any of this – as far as it goes.

However, it also seems to me that the New Age smorgasbord is focussed on this coherent complex, to an often-subtle, but active exclusion of other spiritual ideas and ideals. In this, I see a hidden unity.

And in this connection, I mentioned the former Catholic and now Episcopalian priest, Matthew Fox.

Now as I have said, these confessions are written at a stressed and pained time in my life. And Matthew Fox’s thinking has a significant depth and complexity that I am not sure I can do full justice to now.

I just want to be very personal. I want to confess an internal dialogue with you, Reverend Fox or at least with what I hear you say. What I hear you say - I repeat for emphasis.

I confess I have made a real attempt to listen to you, Reverend Fox, and what I hear you say fits all too well with the New Age pattern I see of dismantling the Christian Tradition.

Yes Reverend Fox, I know that you have done a great deal of heartfelt, careful work with the Christian Tradition. I do not place you amongst those mindlessly throwing aside the tradition, with no attempt to engage it.

But at the same time, what I am hearing involves a continuous reduction or ***relativisation*** , bordering on complete ***dismissal*** of vast amounts of the Christian tradition.

In seeking to establish your theology of ‘Creation Spirituality’ and ‘Original Blessing’, I hear you relativising to the point of negating a vast dimension - which you call ‘Fall/Redemption’.

As though the central Christian ideas of the Fall and the Redemption often amounted to little more than a pathological expression of morbid psychology, power-politics and ‘patriarchy’.

When I hear what I hear, it seems to me that there is no faith in the tradition of the Mystics over the millennia, testifying to a ***vision*** of the Fall of humanity and of God-become-human to redeem humanity.

No I hear only – rightly or wrongly – a ***hermeneutic of suspicion***, in regard to so much of the Christian Mystical Tradition.

Now I often hear penetrating psychological insight in your words, even rich human wisdom and heart.

But for my own ears at least, I hear far too little Mystery and Faith. The Christian Mystery is reduced to … almost nothing.

Yes, occasionally you seem to concede that just possibly the massive over –emphasis, as you see it, on the Fall and Redemption, had limited value in a previous age.

And I confess when I hear these things, I am reminded of New-Agers conceding that Piscean ideas, perhaps, had some value in the age of Pisces.

In what I hear, I feel a link between your view of Fall/Redemption, and the New Age mystics, who honour and embrace you. And who you honour in turn (cf. Original Blessing pg 314).

I hear your concern that Fall/Redemption theology is ‘Christolatrous’. By which you seem to mean ‘idolatrous of Christ’ inasmuch as it is actually too Christ-centred - at the expense of honouring the Creator-Father and the Spirit.

You would also appear to mean at the expense of a low Christology of Jesus, as a prophet ‘who calls others to their divinity’ (see my comment to this entry).

If I understand you correctly, I can only say that I fear your attempt to dismantle what the Church considers the core of Christianity, betrays –I repeat - a deep reductionism, bordering on utter negation of the Transcendent Mystery of Calvary.

The Transcendent Mystery that countless Christian mystics, within and without the Church, endeavoured for centuries to understand, honour and preserve …

Within and without the Church … I confess I have in mind here Rudolf Steiner and his words I have quoted here before: ‘Was heute zu retten ist, das ist das Mysterium von Golgotha’ - What is to be saved today is the Mystery of Golgotha.

A Mystery of Redemption that makes no sense at all, without a profound regard for the nature of the Fall …

I suspect that you might consider both Rudolf Steiner and myself as ‘Christolatrous’ in emphasising the tremendous importance that the tradition gives to the Fall, to the nature of Evil, and to the central role of Jesus Christ in the Redemption …

Now, dear friends, even if I am mistaken in my real efforts to understand Matthew Fox’s writing, I am nonetheless convinced that both within the Church and without, there is an effort to reduce the central Christian ideas.

Often to reduce them to nothing but psychology and power … To be ***replaced*** perhaps by a ‘Creator Theology of the Original Blessing of the Father’? Who knows?

For thinkers in this vein, this kind of replacement will be largely, if not entirely wholly good. To throw out ‘Fall/Redemption’ will mean to throw out a great source of pathology, intolerance, despair and more.

And replacing it by a new spirituality of great ecumenism, hope and non-judgment.

But are there no dangers in this dismantling of the Tradition, I ask myself. Is there nothing to be LOST in what I think Fox is recommending us - that Fall/Redemption theology be jettisoned in favour of a ‘Christianity’ that conforms so very much to the ‘New Aquarian Spirituality’?

Is there nothing of consequence to be lost? I am afraid that not only are great worlds of essential Christian meaning to be lost – but that I also fear the consequence of this loss for HUMAN civilisation may be vast indeed. And I suspect that this is what Rudolf Steiner among others, saw quite clearly.

Without acknowledging the Fall, we can easily lose the sense of universal tragedy. We are more prone to an individualistic New Age doctrine, that each of us ‘creates our own reality’ – as the New Age mantra has it. And that any tragedy that exists is simply an individual tragedy of one’s own making.

Thus is the teaching of the tradition obscured - that not only is there a fallen humanity, with outstanding representatives from age to age - from Caligula to Attila to Mao - but that there are also fallen angels. There are fallen angels of incomprehensible power, who actively seek to bring ruin.

Yes I confess it appears to me that a radical de-emphasis of the Fall has profound consequences for the spirituality which it shapes. For the ideas that shapes one’s spirituality ARE important, and to exchange one set of ideas for another, is not ***without consequence***. As Matthew Fox and other writers of a New Age cast are definitely aware.

And it seems to me that there may be many ***further*** consequences of exchanging a so-called ‘Christolatrous’ Fall/Redemption theology, for one wherein the Mystery of Christ is radically diluted. If not altogether decimated.

I confess that in my soul, there lives deep concern that among these consequences is a diminishing of human FEELING, of human heart and an all-too-cosy accommodation with the secularist capitalism ravaging the world. And why I feel this, I will soon be attempting to voice …

These confessions will continue on TUESDAY, instead of Monday. May your weekend be blessed, my friends.

Confessions V (Naming the New Age)

2006-03-23T20:27:00.000Z

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

In speaking of the New Age movement, I am occasionally questioned as to what I mean by this term. I suspect that some reading these confessions may even question whether it is possible to speak of a New Age movement, as I do, as a unified phenomenon.

All of this is understandable. The New Age culture is absolutely sprawling, appears greatly diversified, diffuse and not easy to capture in words.

However, the fact that a phenomenon is not easily distillable, does not mean that it does not exist. In other words, there may well be a distinctive, unified form, beyond the level that words can easily capture.

Personally, after many years experience with this culture, this is what I believe. I believe that we are witnessing the rise of a spiritual movement that is much more uniform than many commentators accept.

Even if words for that unity are elusive, that unity can be suggested rather than defined. Suggested rather defined … this, at least, is all I know how to manage in these present confessions.

I believe we have witnessed over the last decades, a vast movement toward a spirituality that is either without formal religion, or else, if it is tenuously tied to formal religion, often dismisses or relativises vast amounts of that religion.

For me, a good example of this latter tendency is Matthew Fox, the former Catholic priest, proponent of ‘Creation Spirituality’ - at the expense of a vast amount of the Catholic tradition. And despite his undoubtedly sincere and noble intentions, I now believe that the **cost** of this sort of dismantling of tradition to be very expensive indeed. I will shortly be returning to Fox.

For now, I simply want to stress that although it can be hard to see a unity to the New Age movement, I believe that one way its unity becomes visible, is in its dismantling or rejection of tradition and particularly the Christian tradition.

Despite many variations, the New Age idea often appears something like this … There is a new spirituality arising in the world, free of sectarianism and dogma. This spirituality is destined to be the paradigm for a New Age. It is in fact, often linked to the zodiac sign of Aquarius.

In this idea of the Aquarian paradigm, qualities of the previous paradigm of Pisces – including many Christian notions of sin, evil, devotion and so forth, are now no longer seen as appropriate or so appropriate as they once were, in the ‘previous age of Pisces’.

And very definitely, in the Aquarian ideal, the notions of formal codes and institutions to embody spiritual values are frequently seen as suspect.

The New Age movement tends by its very nature to repudiate **formal** definition – and this only amplifies the image of highly diversified, heterogeneous phenomena.

But I confess to you, all my experience leads me to believe that there is an underlying unity - whether repudiated or not. And it is a unity that needs to be named.

Yet I am well aware that even the name ‘New Age’ has many pitfalls. For although in the early days of this movement- the 1960’s and 1970’s - the term 'New Age' was common parlance for this movement of spirituality at the expense of religion, later in the 1980’s, the term came to be associated with commercialism and a vast array of bizarre phenomena.

And many people who had identified with term, became embarrassed to use it. Not just embarrassed – for these were often noble souls on a sincere quest. They were not seeking to make a quick buck. And they were not necessarily enamoured by strange phenomena. They were sincere seekers, with rich insights and warm hearts …

Thus, I am uncomfortably aware that what I call a New Age movement embodies a vast number of people who do not even identify with a movement by that name! I am aware that other names surface, ‘holistic’, ‘alternative spirituality’, ‘Mind-Body-Spirit’ …

Still I believe my forty two years have led me to see the unity behind these different names, a unity I will attempt to suggest ever more as we proceed.

And for this unity which I see, some sort of name must be chosen and used. And I use the name New Age. It is the name I grew up with and it is still the most recognisable name. However adequate it is or not.

And I use the name New Age in deep respect for many, many people within this movement. Please do not interpret me as adversarial to the New Age culture. I mean what I say about the rich insight and heart, one frequently finds there.

Yes, there is often a depth of love within the New Age movement that would and should put many of us Catholics to shame ...

But with real pain, I confess that I also believe that in divorcing itself from tradition and in dismantling tradition, this rich holistic insight and heart is **less effective** in the world than it might be. Far less effective … while the world suffers and burns.

Yes, I confess I see a unity to the New Age movement, unified among other things, under a suspicion and sometimes even hostility towards the Christian tradition in particular - and that the COST of dispensing with that tradition is far, far greater than is commonly appreciated …

Confessions Part IV (The Real Danger of the Holistic Cafeteria)

2006-03-22T22:42:00.000Z

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

In these confessions, I have been sharing how, for many years I was convinced the New Age movement offered great hope for humanity - and how Christianity remained utterly opaque to me.

Now for years, I would hear Christians criticise the holistic movement, because of what they called ‘pick and mix’ or ‘cafeteria spirituality’. There was this insistent refrain – which irritated me - about why one shouldn’t just pick and choose from a tradition, but honour the whole of it.

I was very suspicious: **Why** on earth was this such a big deal to these Christians?

And strangely enough, even though I become ever more traditional, I am **still** suspicious, when I hear certain Christians bemoan ‘pick and mix’ …

And why? I confess it is because I cannot help but feel that many do not really know **why** they are critical of ‘pick and mix’. It is something they regurgitate reflexively, but they are not always able to give a good REASON for their concern.

At least, in all my New Age years of listening to Christians lament ‘pick and mix’, I never heard a reason which spoke to me. I simply did not get it.

And now that I **do** get it – it seems to me essential that traditionalists find ways to clearly articulate **why** tradition matters and **why** ‘cafeteria religion’ has its pitfalls. (To say the least).

Here then, is only one such attempt to articulate why I am now concerned about ‘pick and mix’ – the New Age smorgasbord …

I am concerned that without honouring the tradition, vital qualities for the development of human spirituality and human evolution are being LOST.

Now it will take the rest of these confessions for me to explain what I mean by these ‘vital qualities for the development of human spirituality and human evolution’ …

But today, I will just say that although New Age thinking appears to be a vast, sprawling, highly diversified and heterogeneous movement - again, embracing a wide spectrum from from wacky phenomena to rich psychological insight – I believe that there is more uniformity to it than is often supposed.

I believe that the New Age smorgasbord of ‘pick and mix’ does not necessarily offer the vast range of diversified options, which many would claim it does.

And that in fact, its options are limited by an often subtle and elusive, but definitely positive disregard for many elements of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

This is also to do with what I meant two days ago by ‘Common Factors … relativised, dismissed or not very present in' much New Age thought.

These common factors I will say now, have much to do with what the Tradition tells us about the Fall, the nature of Evil and sin, universal tragedy, the Redemption ...

Yes, these things in my experience are not much on offer in the New Age smorgasbord. For definite reasons, I think.

Such that in my experience, even when I am speaking to highly educated and deeply thoughtful people of a holistic persuasion who deeply impress me (and there are many such people), the fact that I express such ideas often seems radical, startling, foreign to them.

They simply have not come across these ideas in their often-long journeys through a movement that is supposedly holistic and all-embracing. As I had not come across them, in my nearly twenty years of imbibing all kinds of holistic thinking, so-called.

And yet for reasons which I hope to make clearer, it is hardly without consequence for the West, that the holistic and New Age approach may perhaps be its dominant form of spirituality now – at least in much of Europe.

This is why I confess I struggle with these issues, every day of my life. Because I believe there are indeed very significant consequences to the rise of the New Age cafeteria. And the consequences may be, as I stress again, of vital import, not only for human evolution, but for preserving a truly human and humane culture.

I struggle, I struggle and why I struggle, I hope to make clearer as we proceed.

Confessions Part III (What Was Not on My Radar Screen)

2006-03-21T19:38:00.000Z

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

I am – as I have been confessing to you – haunted, haunted by the idea of humanity not developing the requisite spiritual maturity to meet the crises of our age.

Now in my youth, I hardly saw everything that such 'requisite spiritual maturity' would involve – including not only rich psychological Feeling and awareness (which I did experience at Findhorn in certain ways ) but also rigorous Thinking and Will.

Thus the all-too-common New Age dismissal of the intellect (implied in‘head-tripping’, ‘mind-f******’ etc) did not especially bother me.

I did not appreciate how much our collective need for spiritual development, mandated not **dismissal** of the mind – but its deep regeneration.

But the profound Christian esoteric thinker, Rudolf Steiner saw this all too clearly. And how often over my years in the New Age, did I hear Rudolf Steiner written-off as ‘too heady’ or ‘too Christian’.

But Rudolf Steiner knew, Rudolf Steiner knew that the ENTIRE trinity of Feeling-Thinking-Will had to be regenerated, if humanity or at least humanness were to survive ...

But Christianity, neither esoteric nor exoteric, was not on the horizon of my New Age youth. In my American adolescence, I had known hardly anything but a caricature of Protestant Christianity, with its strong taint of **individualism**: ‘Jesus is **your** personal saviour; if **you** believe in him –and the Bible (literally) - **you** will not go to hell'.

And I knew nothing of the Catholic Mass celebrated every hour of the day, in nearly every corner of humanity, which seeks to ‘advance the peace and salvation of all the world’ …

And so, as with many New Age folk in the Protestant countries, Catholic Christianity was not on my 'radar screen' at all. Catholic Christianity with its hour-by-hour Communion with the Heart of the World.

And if someone were to have suggested to me, that this holy intermingling with the Sacred Heart, had anything significant to offer to the planetary crisis – for example, in rousing the stone-cold heart of neo-liberal economics - I would probably have smiled indulgently.

But looking out at the heart of flint of modern capitalism, and at the increasing social and environmental suffering, real **suffering** it brings, looking out at Lovelock’s vision of a planet **burnt** …

I confess, I confess to you, dear friends, that I no longer smile at the ‘irrelevance’ of what it now seems to me – tragically - is the Catholic Church’s ‘best kept secret’. (A near secret, at least in the secular Protestant West).

That is to say, the communion, the interpenetration, the intermingling with the Sacred Heart and the cleansing, healing and strength it brings, when entered into sincerely and regularly.

No I no longer smile, because I feel the radiance of the Sacred Heart of Humanity making me ever more human, as I regularly receive it in the Sacraments.

Yes, I admired and still admire many qualities of psychological sensitivity in the New Age movement. At the same time, I have come to feel how traditional Christianity (Catholic and Orthodox) with its ongoing Sacraments of Communion with the Sacred Heart, has done still more to deepen my human FEELING.

Yes, none of this was on my ‘radar screen’ at all before.

I looked out at the world, with a certain upbringing. I was raised in secular and Protestant countries in which I saw a Christianity that made no sense.

I saw a psychologically acute New Age movement that appeared far more vital to me. And I saw modern humanity’s need for the Spirit in living and accessible ways.

I did not know the Catholic Sacraments, healing the human heart.

I also did not know the vastness of the Catholic intellectual effort over the centuries. I did not know, for example, Catholic Social Teaching and its radical and extensive challenge to modern capitalism, articulated on many fronts. (For more on this, see my comment to this entry.)

I did not see the Will that had built countless hospitals, fed countless hungry people, brought the living Sacraments to countless more ...

But I now agree with Rudolf Steiner that the entire trinity of human Feeling, Thinking and Will must be addressed more than ever at this time …

And my entire spiritual journey, it seems to me - with many arduous trials and struggles to clarify my perception - has brought me to this point of truly beginning to SEE the Church at this hour of humanity's need.

Confessions Part II (My New Age Dream)

2006-03-20T21:37:00.000Z

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

As I have said, these confessions are based on my own looking-out at the soul of the world and the suffering of the world. They are based on many years of searching for ways to a more humane culture.

How many years have I been with this and how many years did I believe that the rapidly ascending New Age culture held the key …

For as I look out on the new millennium, it seems incontestable to me, that the challenges we face will require the greatest degree of spiritual maturity and spiritual strength that humanity has ever marshalled.

The challenges are just SO great. And as I have written here before, I have never been able to muster faith in solutions solely of a political nature – a new economic system, a new set of laws, a new kind of government …

All my adult life, I felt that **by themselves** these could amount to nothing but a superficial panacea, a quick fix, a band-aid for a far deeper and more structural problem. The only real answer I could imagine was not in essence political, but spiritual.

Now as ludicrous as it will no doubt sound to many Christians reading this, for years my greatest hope for developing the requisite degree of spiritual strength and maturity was the New Age or holistic movement.

This may sound ludicrous in part, because of the popular image of the New Age: one of channelling, crystals, UFO’s, astral travelling, pyramid power …

And God knows what else besides. Here is the place to clarify that this is NOT the New Age movement I knew in my nearly two decades involvement with it.

No. Starting with my life-changing visit at age 16 to Findhorn in Scotland – a major centre of holistic culture in the world – I knew a very different New Age.

The New Age movement I knew was a site of very sincere and open-hearted endeavour. Its spirituality had far more to do with depth psychology than wacky phenomena.

At Findhorn, the psychological practice originated by the depth psychologists, wherein one person (the analyst) took **seriously** the life issues and life suffering of the other (the analysand) had become generalised to the entire culture.

That is to say, people at Findhorn listened to each other, really **listened** to each other. They made real ‘the reality of the other'.

And in the psychological safety that people experience when they are taken **seriously**, I witnessed people opening up, becoming creative. The New Age I knew then, was marked by authenticity and personal growth– not crystals.

All of this was far, far more convincing to me than the world of (Protestant) Christianity I had experienced – which seemed simply desiccated by comparison.

And for years, I truly believed that this new spiritual holistic culture would grow, transform and open the heart of the mainstream culture.

I certainly did not expect that the growing coldness of the heart in 1980’s Reaganism and Thatcherism would continue, let alone DEEPEN. I did not expect materialism to keep **growing**.

As it now seems to me, that unless there is radical change at the **roots** of our culture, it will keep growing - impoverishing our souls and making ever more demands on the biosphere …

I read not so much wacky New Age channelings, but holistic and spiritual thinkers such as David Spangler, William Bloom, Richard Moss, Ken Wilber, Peter Russell, Caroline Myss, William Irwin Thompson, Stanislav Grof, Matthew Fox, Krishnamurti - people who deeply impressed me, and often still impress me …

And I did not notice the **Common Factors** that now seem absent - to one degree or another - in their thinking. Common Factors which so often seem to me either relativised, dismissed or not very present in the consciousness of such thinkers, but which factors are embodied in the Christian Tradition of the West.

And which I suspect are essential to 'radical change at the roots of our culture'. I shall be returning to these Common Factors that seem missing in New Age thought ...

Yes, there was so much I failed to remark. But looking back, I can understand why, in my youth, I really believed that New Age spirituality held the key to the challenges of the new millennium.

And how long it took me to begin to see its radical insufficiency and **why** it was insufficient …

Confessions – Part I (Introduction)

2006-03-17T19:10:00.000Z

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

For weeks now, it has been a very, very trying and painful time on all levels. Practical, emotional, spiritual.

And in the midst of this ongoing trial, I found myself, some days ago, writing yesterday’s entry – which has a far more personal tone than much of the material that has appeared hitherto in this weblog.

At the time, I was seriously feeling I might have to give up this project. At least temporarily.

But inwardly it felt wrong to stop – and I have found, almost miraculously, a way to continue, which feels right.

Over the space of just a few hours, I found myself writing a long piece that will now be serialised here, under the title ‘Confessions’.

I use this term for several reasons. One is to indicate a point of departure. For the next days at least, this weblog will take a far more personal turn. Though it will not address personal events in my life, it will focus on issues in this weblog – including the world situation, world spirituality and the Church – in a more personal way.

Another reason I use the term 'confessions' is that I deliberately want to call attention to the fact that, while previously I presented much material that I pondered and researched over years – the following will be a little different.

Some of it, for example, will be very fresh material emerging in my mind. Things that I have not researched sufficiently yet, to present in the previous format.

Instead, I only want to say, I confess, dear friends, I confess, this is how the world appears to me at the moment. These are also 'confessions' as to my concerns, and as to what drives me in this effort …

Under this heading of 'confessions', I am going to say a number of controversial things about Christianity, the New Age movement, the World Soul as I see them.

I am going to go further than before. Go further, as I look out at the growing suffering of the world, suffering under a soulless, secularist and capitalist system.

And as I contemplate the developments, decades down the line, if the present trajectory continues to amplify in its effects …

I will go further in saying why this contemplation leads me personally to an ever more traditional position, an ever more traditional Catholicism. Even as I strive for a traditional Catholicism, which is deeply open-hearted, respectful of other traditions and socially and environmentally engaged.

And why, for example, I cannot help but feel New Age attempts to replace the tradition of the West are inadequate to the task at hand and fatally flawed - rooted as they often now seem to me, in ignorance of the tradition, reductionistic psychologising and a hermeneutic of suspicion. Rather than profound and rigorous reflection …

And why I feel it is my painful duty to raise these issues …

And what I see the alternatives are.

Though nothing **comprehensive** is promised and what is in store will be very personal and fragmentary, this at least gives indications of what will be forthcoming.

Please note the refrains here: about appearances and feelings. How things feel and appear to me.

These are my confessions. Confessions as I look out on the modern state of the Soul of Humanity and its spiritual and religious **needs**. Or at least, what it seems to me, is so burningly needed in our world - after years of struggling with these issues.

Yes, in all these matters, I struggle to clarify and sharpen my thinking. And perhaps some of you, who struggle too, can help me.

(Comments to this weblog are very gratefully received. I work necessarily in a certain darkness, as I send out these messages. Believing in them, but having little idea as to their reception - beyond the fact that a silent majority seem to visit here every day. For which I am very grateful.)

These confessions should resume in earnest on Monday. May your weekend, dear friends, be blessed, inspired and meaningful.

To be not ABSTRACT …

2006-03-16T21:25:00.000Z

We live in a world of incredible suffering. Suffering so incredible that we must of necessity, remain largely asleep to it. For obviously, none of us could bear to be fully awake to all that it means. Only beings of the Angelic hierarchies can perhaps begin to bear the state of the world …

And at the same time, I see - however superficially - that every minute of every day, I contribute to the suffering of the world. And for this I pray to be forgiven, for ‘what I have done and what I have failed to do …’

And this, it seems to me, indicates a dimension to sin not emphasised enough.

For the term ‘sin’ has become caught up with abstract ideas of abstract violations of abstract virtues. Or else it has assumed morbid overtones.

Yet I have no wish to speak of sin in terms of breaking abstract rules. Nor do I want to invoke notions that we are completely and utterly wretched (as John Calvin maintained in his doctrine of the so-called 'total depravity' of the human being).

No, that is not what I mean at all and I have not the least wish to affirm extreme Protestant doctrines of 'total depravity', where the GLORY of human nature, human love and human effort count for nothing … absolutely nothing.

At the same time, I wish to face the fact of what sin **really** means. I wish to face the fact, with greater honesty, that I am **hurting** all of life. That my very existence brings pain – day in, day out.

At the same time, I pray not to forget, that insofar as my human nature and human love is wedded to Our Lord (by whatever name, we choose to give the sacred heart of divine humanity) - so also are my human efforts, not without effectiveness or meaning … Not even the very least of my human gestures.

Twenty-five years ago perhaps, I ventured one evening into a pedestrian subway in Chelmsford, Essex.

A woman passed by and smiled at me. I have never forgotten that smile. I imagine now that it must have been filled with profound human warmth. (That is to say, suffused by a truly Christic feeling, again by whatever name we choose to call it).

And I wonder now, whatever this woman in Chelmsford has ‘done or failed to do’ in her life, however she has added to the suffering of the world, I wonder what will happen when she dies, as we all shall die …

Will she die and see the unforgettable memory that gesture of warmth created in the mind of a young stranger in Chelmsford, one evening in the early 1980’s?

Will the profound warmth that radiated through her smile that night, which in all likelihood, also radiated to countless others in her life, come back to her as something she added to the world, without ever realising how much she added …?

For though little do we *truly* realise it, but we are all going to die. We are going to die in a universe, where justice will prevail. And just as the suffering we cause others matters, so does all we do to alleviate suffering … Including the subtlest of our human gestures.

All we do to love, in other words. That is to say, every sincere smile in a darkened Essex underpass, every prayer, every kind word, every effort to make real the reality of the other, every effort to bear another’s pain and not to reflexively push it away, push it away into the darkness of unconsciousness …

Yes pain is difficult and how often do we push it away. But every effort to overcome non-love in our lives counts and will count, in this world and in the world to come. And thus of course, also every effort to address the religious, social, political and environmental crisis of the planet.

And when we really die, we will see, we will feel, how we added to the suffering of the world, and also how we acted to alleviate that suffering.

The Reality of the Other, Part II

2006-03-15T20:04:00.000Z

Yesterday, we spoke about the Path of taking the Reality of the Other as SERIOUSLY as possible.

And we quoted Anonymous d’Outre Tombe to the effect that this spiritual path differs from an approach associated with the East, where the way is NOT to the take the Reality of the Other – or the Self - seriously at all. In this way one seeks, in fact, to negate the Reality of Personality.

Now the more one studies the thought of Anonymous d’Outre Tombe in his magnum opus, Meditations on the Tarot, the more one sees that the entire book appears to be focussed on distinguishing between these very different paths:

The First a path of Monism where the Reality of Personality is suppressed, with the result that one weeps no more … (cf. 35-38).

The First a path of liberation through the crown chakra, rather than a transformation of all the chakras into heart (cf. 227-229).

The First a path of power and superhumanness and transcendence … (So many references - direct and indirect - throughout the book, including, but hardly limited to 151-152, 450-452, 157-159, 82, etc).

And the Second, a path of love incarnated fully into the world through Our Lord … A path of tears and of PERSONALITY.

In the time ahead, I hope to explore this theme further, and why I think it is **vital** to distinguish different spiritual paths, within the vast milieu of modern spirituality.

However today, I just wish to continue directly from the quote from yesterday, where having indicated the Christian Path of taking seriously the Reality of Personality - the author begins to speak of how **practically** this path is to be achieved, how one becomes able then, to attain the Great Work of Love:

“To be able to attain this, one has first to love one's neighbour as oneself. For love is not an abstract programme but, rather, it is **substance** and **intensity**.

It is necessary therefore that one radiates the substance and intensity of love with regard to one individual being, in order that one can begin to ray it out in all directions.

‘To be able to make gold one has to have gold’ say the alchemists. The spiritual counterpart of this maxim is, that in order to be able to love everyone, one has to love or to have loved someone. This someone is one's ‘neighbour’.

Who is one's neighbour, understood in the Hermetic sense, i.e. meaning at one and the same time in a mystical, gnostic, magical and metaphysical sense? It is the being nearest to one at or since the beginning; this is the sister-soul for all eternity; this is one's twin-soul, the soul together with whom one beheld the dawn of mankind.

The dawn of mankind: it is this, which the Bible describes as paradise. Now, this was at the stage of existence that God said: "It is not good that Adam should be alone" (Genesis ii, 18).

To be: this is to love. To be alone: this is to love oneself. Now, "it is not good (tov) that Adam should be alone" means to say: it is not good that man loves nobody but himself.

This is why YHVH-Elohim said: I will make him a helper similar (corresponding) to him. And as Eve was part of Adam himself, he loved her as himself. Eve was therefore the "neighbour", the being nearest to Adam ("bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh"- Genesis ii, 23).

This is the origin of love, and it is common both to love which unites man and woman and to love of one's neighbour. In the beginning there was only one love and its source was one, since its principle was one.

All forms of love (charity, friendship, paternal love, maternal love, filial love, brotherly love) derive from the same unique primordial root of the fact of the couple Adam-Eve. For it is then that love - the ***reality*** of the other - issued forth and could subsequently branch out and diversify.

It is the warmth of love of the first couple (and it does not matter if there was only one couple or if there were thousands of them - it is a question of the fact of the first qualitative issuing forth and not of the number of simultaneous or successive cases of this issuing forth) which is reflected in the love of parents for their children, reflected in turn in the love of children for their parents, reflected again in the love of children amongst themselves, reflected lastly in the love for all kinship of human beings beyond immediate kinship, by analogy, for all that lives and breathes.

Love once born as substance and intensity, tends to spread, ramify and diversify according to the forms of human relationships into which it enters. It is a cascading current, which tends to fill and inundate all.

This is why when there is true love between parents, the children love their parents, by analogy, and love each other; they love, by analogy- as their brothers and sisters by "psychological adoption" friends in school and in the neighbourhood; they love (always by analogy) their teachers, tutors, priests, etc., through reflection of the love that they have for their parents; and later they love their husbands and wives, as their parents once loved one another.”

The Reality of the Other

2006-03-14T20:00:00.000Z

Yesterday I offered words from the Catholic deacon, Eliphas Lévi in 1868 about the nature of love, which touch me deeply.

Among these, was a simple trinity of sentences, which just-in-themselves I feel, say so very much:

“To live in others, with others and for others is the secret of love … To love is to live in those whom one loves. It is to think their thoughts, fathom their desires, share their affections.”

Love then, is to take the REALITY of the Other seriously … and ever more seriously.

Now these words on taking seriously the Reality of the Other, find a tremendous amplification in the thought of the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot (who much later in the twentieth century, would embrace the deceased Hermetic deacon of Paris, with profound love).

This amplification has tremendous personal meaning for myself. (So much so, that I feel like adding very personally, that it was read at my wedding to Kim in 1999 ... ). Here it is:

“We are surrounded by innumerable living and conscious beings-visible and invisible. But rather than knowing that they really exist and that they are as much alive as we ourselves, it nevertheless appears to us that they have a ***less real existence*** and that they are ***less living*** than we ourselves.

For us it is WE who experience the full measure of the intensity of reality, whilst other beings seem, in comparison with ourselves, to be less real; their existence seems to be more of the nature of a shadow than full reality.

Our thoughts tell us that this is an illusion, that beings around us are as real as we ourselves are, and that they live just as intensely as we do.

Yet fine as it is to say these things, all the same we feel ourselves at the centre of reality, and we feel other beings to be removed from this centre.

That one qualifies this illusion as "egocentricity", or "egoism", or "ahamkara" (the illusion of self), or the "effect of the primordial Fall", does not matter; it does not alter the fact that we feel ourselves to be more real than others.

Now, to feel something as real in the measure of its full reality is to love.

It is love, which awakens us to the reality of ourselves, to the reality of others, to the reality of the world and to the reality of God.

In so far as we love ourselves, we feel real. And we do not love - or we do not love as much as ourselves - other beings, who seem to us to be less real.

Now, two ways, two quite different methods exist which can free us from the illusion "me, living-you, shadow", and we have a choice.

The one is to extinguish love of oneself and to become a "shadow amongst shadows". This is the equality of indifference. India offers us this method of liberation from ahamkara, the illusion of self. This illusion is destroyed ****by extending the indifference that one has for other beings to oneself****.

Here one reduces oneself to the state of a shadow equal to the other surrounding shadows. Maya, the great illusion, is to believe that individual beings, me and you, should be something more than shadows - appearances without reality. The formula for realising this is therefore: "me, shadow-you, shadow".

The other way or method is that ****of extending the love that one has for oneself to other beings****, in order to arrive at the realisation of the formula: "me, living you, living".

Here it is a matter of rendering other beings as real as oneself, i.e. of loving them as oneself.”

From the Radiating Heart of Eliphas Lévi

2006-03-13T18:46:00.000Z

I wish to rebegin this weblog with a few words about the heart, from a Catholic Christian Hermeticist, who was filled with sheer heart.

This then, is what Eliphas Levi, lover of Hermeticism, lover of the Church and lover of humanity, wrote in Paris in 1868:

“Up to one’s last breath, one may retain the simple joys of childhood, the poetic ecstasies of the young man, the enthusiasms of maturity.

Right to the end, one may intoxicate one’s spirit with flowers, with beauty and with smiles; one may ceaselessly recapture the past and always recover what has been lost. A real eternity can be found in the fine dream of life.

‘How can this be achieved?’ you will surely ask me. Read attentively and meditate on what I am going to tell you: It is necessary to forget oneself and live only for others …

When Jesus said: 'If anyone wishes to follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and come after me,' did he mean us to bury ourselves in some lonely spot?

He, who always lived among men, who took up little children and blessed them, who restored fallen women, despising neither their show of affection, nor their tears, who ate and drank with the outcasts of pharisaism [and] healed the sick …

How dared the author of a celebrated treatise, which recommended isolation and concentration on oneself, call such a book The Imitation of Christ?

To live in others, with others and for others is the secret of love …

To love is to live in those whom one loves.

It is to think their thoughts, fathom their desires, share their affections.

The more one loves, the more one’s own life is enlarged.

The man who loves is not alone and his existence is in many places at once … He talks baby talk and plays with children, joins in the enthusiasm of youth, holds a rational discussion with the middle aged and clasps the hand of the old.”

I confess, dear friends, that I do not yet know The Imitation of Christ. But how deeply do I relate to what this man of radiant heart says about Christianity.

Christianity is not a path of isolated, spiritual pursuit, but of bearing the burden of the Other, whether the Other is one’s neighbour, the social and political situation of humanity, or the ecological suffering of the environment we are raping.

And it is also about the sheer joy of being 'enlarged' through the wonder and the miracle of love.

New material in this weblog should begin in earnest by Thursday, at the latest. But first I will offer more about the nature of love, from the Christian Hermetic tradition. For these gems, I hope will serve as foundation stones for what will then follow...

Mainly to Announce ...

2006-02-13T20:57:00.000Z

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

This second entry today is mainly to announce that, due to all kinds of personal demands, this weblog will be taking a hiatus until Monday 13 March. I hope to resume properly at that point, but cannot make guarantees.

However, if anyone wants to see anything further of my thoughts during this time - there is a website now containing a very, very long piece.

This is a piece some of you have seen - Hermetic Catholicism: A Letter to My Friends. Which was originally written mainly to a number of known friends. Many of them from my past in the New Age subculture in the UK - for whom the idea that Catholicism had anything meaningful to offer the world, could often seem like *science fiction*.

Perhaps a conscious pause should be made here to allow us who know the Mystery of the Church to breathe in the tragedy of those words ...

Countless spiritual seekers, often very sincere, who have NO idea about the Mystery of the Church ...

Be that as it may, this long piece is now available in two places.

Either to be read off the screen in a very basic 'bare bones' format:

http://www.graphicmath.com/roger/Hermetic_Catholicism.html

Or as a pdf file in an easier to read, more attractive format, if you wish to download and print:

http://www.graphicmath.com/roger/Hermetic_Catholicism.pdf

I should also say this piece is very personal and autobiographical in parts.

Again, my very warm gratitude to all of you who have participated in this venture with me. Thank you for all you have shared with me, in whatever way. (I also hope to finally catch up with my mail in this hiatus).

Jesus Christ be ever with you,

Roger

Letting Love Flow

2006-02-13T19:40:00.000Z

When I was young and at the New Age community of Findhorn, I believed I had a found a new way to social change.

The way for me was not social revolution and destruction.

The way was quietly to build the 'New' leaving behind the Old ...

How long it took me to see that this new way was still subtly unloving and rejecting - abandoning the old in favour of the 'new' ... Pretending that the old had nothing to offer!

And at what price! I deeply appreciate what the head wrote here a few weeks ago: "a weakness of religionless spirituality is that it may fail to integrate the various aspects of life into a greater whole - for that is needed a community that can transcend the moment of one's civilization."

Amen. Yes, it seems to me the New Age subculture is so bound to the zeitgeist, at the expense of a far wider and richer framework ... in which perhaps one feels more keenly and vividly 'the atmosphere of piety and sacrifice' and perhaps greater disquiet and alarm at the 'utilitarian' nature of so much of modernity and its reductions.

How long it took me to see a third way beyond both social revolution and the New Age movement.

A third way of deeper love.

To let love flow. Love from the past and the present ....

To let myself be loved, loved by Christ ... Christ through his Church, through the tradition ... and that this was far, far richer than anything I experienced in the New Age.

And in return, to love, actively LOVE the Church and the tradition ...

Much of the greatness of Anonymous d'Outre Tombe lies in the radicalness of his call to love, and to the renunciation of violence and rejection, even in its subtlest forms. (Though he has far more to offer, in addition).

A Call to LOVE

2006-02-13T18:59:00.000Z

With regards to the dasacralising, de-souling of the world; with the regards to its growing aridity and mechanisation of the spirit; with regards to the loss of the Christian MYSTERY; with all this in mind, I believe Anonymous d'Outre Tombe said:

‘La Mission de Jean est de garder ***la vie et l’ame*** de l’eglise …’

The Mission of John is to guard ***the life and the soul*** of the Church.

And with regards to these tragedies, I believe, he also sounded a call to LOVE:

"Are we not called, we theologians of the world and you theologians of the Holy Scripture to watch at the same altar and to fulfill the same task of not letting the lamp illumined to the glory of God be extinguished in the world?

Is it not our common endeavour duty to provide for it, to provide the holy oil so that its flame is never extinguished, so that … it continues to burn from century to century?

Has not the time finally arrived when we Hermeticists shall take account of the incontestable fact that it is thanks to the Church that we have air to breath and that we have a place of shelter and refuge in this world of materialism, imperialism, nationalism, technologism, biologism and psychologism?

It is in so far that the Church lives that we live. The church once reduced to silence, all human voices desiring to serve the glory of God will also be reduced to silence.

We live and we die with the Church. Because in order to live, we need air to breath; we need the atmosphere of piety, sacrifice, and appreciation of the invisible as a higher reality. This air, this atmosphere in the world, exists in the world only by grace of the Church.

Without it Hermeticism--indeed, every idealistic philosophy and all metaphysical idealism--would be drowned in utilitarianism, materialism, industrialism, technologism, biologism and psychologism.

Dear Unknown Friend, imagine to yourself a world without the Church. Imagine a world of factories, clubs, sports, political meetings, utilitarian universities, utilitarian arts or recreations--in which you would hear not a single word of praise for the Holy Trinity or of benediction in its name.

Imagine to yourself a world in which you would never hear 'Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancti, sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper et in saecula saeculorum, or 'Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater, Filius et Spiritus Sanctus'.

A world without worship and without benediction...how deprived of ozone the psychic and spiritual atmosphere would then be, and how empty and cold it would be! Do you think that Hermeticism could exist and live for a single day?....

Therefore make use of the balance of Justice and judge impartially. When you have done so, you will no doubt say: Never will I throw stones against the Church, since it is she who makes possible, and stimulates and protects, human endeavour for the glory of God.

And as Hermeticism is such an endeavour, it could not exist without the Church. We Hermeticists have only one choice: either to live as parasites(for it is thanks to the Church that we are able to live), if we are strangers to or hostile to the Church; or to live as her faithful friends and servants, if we understand what we owe to her and so begin to love her.

Now is the time for the Hermetic movement to make true Christian peace with the Church and to cease to be her semi-illegitimate child, leading a half-tolerated life more or less in the shadow of the Church – and to become eventually an adopted child, if not a recognized legitimate child.

But “it takes two to love”. And there is many a pretension to be abandoned in order to accomplish this. What is sure however is that if the two parties in question have at heart only the glory of God, all obstacles to this peace will evaporate in smoke.”

What Steiner Saw

2006-02-10T20:50:00.000Z

In a Catholic weblog, it might be asked why I devote so much space to the thought of one so contrary to the Church as Rudolf Steiner.

In response, I might say that, over 80 years ago Rudolf Steiner was a singular Christian Hermeticist, who I believe recognised far, far ahead of his time, several things that are relevant to the concerns of this weblog.

He recognised that materialism – philosophical and practical - would continue to increase.

In contrast to so many New Age teachings of an imminent civilisation of light and love, he warned that materialism could be ascending for centuries.

He was deeply concerned about the likely triumph of Western capitalism, leading to an ever more soulless and **mechanical** civilisation.

But I believe he recognised that there would also be a growing minority of people searching for the Spirit, in a way that the Church was not well equipped to address …

Yes, in highly Hermetic and technical terms regarding the development of the Etheric Body in human evolution, he spoke of a time **soon** approaching, where many people would both begin to recognise and be ever more drawn to the mysteries …

I believe that this time that Steiner predicted is mirrored in the burgeoning New Age movement. And that alas, the Church is indeed not well-equipped to meet this.

And that this is particularly true of the Protestant churches, which dominate the English-speaking countries (Ireland, excepted).

Catholicism and Orthodoxy are not so crippled in this way – and have vast, vast treasures to offer. Though the so-often banal liturgy that has recently emerged in the Catholic Church does not help.

But to return to Steiner, this intense lover of humanity also predicted many efforts to **deflect** the spiritual search away from the Mystery enacted on Golgotha, on Calvary …

This deflection would not necessarily be materialistic – whether capitalist, communist or a materialistic ‘Christianity’ matters not – for there were also other spiritual currents seeking to BURY awareness of the Mystery of the Redemption.

After many years of painfully wrestling with Steiner’s claims in these regards, I have come to the difficult conclusion that these latter currents DO exist – and cannot be separated from many aspects of the New Age movement.

This is not however to deny that many truly Christian tendencies are also at work in the New Age. Christ is present wherever love is present.

And although the New Age tendency to nonchalance, as I have called it, **is** lacking love – there are also many shining examples of love, within holistic circles to be found as well.

Nonetheless, it seems to me, that the New Age flattening of the Christian Mystery – with a concomitant flattening of the senses of tragedy and evil, alongside joy, gratitude and devotion in the wake of the Redemption – works against love, rather for it.

‘Works against love, rather than for it …’ I do not say these words lightly.

Though I have not sufficiently studied Rudolf Steiner’s enormous literary corpus to say with certainty – all of this I imagine was immanent within his call to preserve the Christian Mystery …

Now the purpose of this weblog is not to extol Doctor Steiner’s problematic Anthroposophy. It contains many elements incompatible with the Church. And I am definitely not seeking to challenge the Church, but to love and to support her.

For alongside Anonymous d’Outre Tombe, I believe that the disciple that Jesus loved holds the mission of esoteric Christianity and that:

‘La Mission de Jean est de garder ***la vie et l’ame*** de l’eglise …’

The Mission of John is to guard ***the life and the soul*** of the Church.
(Emphasis in original).

Nonetheless, I do not see many of Rudolf Steiner’s Hermetic insights into the world-process as contrary to the teaching of the Church. And there are many aspects of his Christian Hermeticism, which it seems to me, can be brought to the aid, the loving aid of the Church, without challenging her …

I plan to return briefly next week before taking another hiatus.

Losing the Mystery ...

2006-02-09T19:12:00.000Z

“Was heute zu retten ist, das ist das Mysterium von Golgotha.” Rudolf Steiner in 1920. Which means again: What is to be saved today, is the Mystery of Golgotha.

So much, I think, can be inferred from this simple statement. Including the fact that Rudolf Steiner was very awake to the forces that would seek to eclipse the Christian Mystery …

Now from the beginning, this weblog has hardly been systematic. It is fragmentary at best. However it is even more fragmentary, than I would like at the moment. And we will soon be pausing for another hiatus mandated by events in my personal life.

But first, I thought I would take a brief dip into autobiography for some things that may serve to illumine these issues – and why I write about them.

I came into contact with the relatively young New Age movement in 1980, age 16. At that point, I visited the Findhorn Community in northern Scotland – which is widely seen as one of the leading New Age centres of Europe, if not the world.

Later, I would live in Findhorn for an extended period, and for many years I drew much inspiration from its work, rooted in noble aspirations and marked, I feel, by a great deal of sincerity and love.

Now in those comparatively early days of the New Age culture, the movement was relatively invisible. For example, one did not generally find New Age literature in a mainstream bookshop.

No, where I lived near London, one had to visit specialist bookshops in the area. Outside the metropolis, I am sure such literature was even harder to find.

However in 2004, I visited the largest bookshop in Europe - Waterstones, Piccadilly in London. There, in this VAST emporium, which cannot in anyway be considered ‘specialist’ or anything less than mainstream, but which presumably represents the concerns of Londoners - I found four **gigantic** bookshelves devoted to Christianity.

Across the same room, however, I found and began to count, one, two, three … 30 **equally gigantic** bookshelves devoted to ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ – the literature of the New Age movement.

Now this is a very personal and approximate image – but it nonetheless suggests a ratio of 30:4 - 30 to 4 in modern Europe seeking spiritual satisfaction through ‘New Age-ism’ as opposed to the Church. (At least modern Protestant Europe. My experience suggests that although Holland and Germany, for example, may be similar to Britain in this regard - the Catholic countries are not so much.)

It also suggests a vast shift has taken place this last quarter of a century.

While those of a Hermetic orientation may note with relief that people at least seek spirituality and mystery beyond the materialism and empiricism which choke our culture, yet it is so often a spirituality in which the Christian Mystery is flattened …

And I find myself wondering what the ratio might be in another quarter of a century? 60 to 4? … 60 to 1??!

I also find myself wondering about the desiccation of the Christian **Mystery**. Which again, it seems to me, is most pronounced in the countries of Protestant heritage.

And I am also wondering how many thousands (millions?) completely **ignore** the Church, as I did, while they search for Mystery ...

Tomorrow, I hope to return to Rudolf Steiner’s notion that not only did the Mystery of Golgotha need to be preserved – but that it was definitely under threat.

Unconscious Dogma

2006-02-08T20:06:00.000Z

I gather that a wide spectrum of people have been reading this weblog.

At one end of that spectrum are folk for whom esotericism and the New Age milieu are very alien and I imagine, unknown.

At the other end are folk of a ‘holistic’ orientation, for whom traditional Christianity is equally alien – and I am sure, often almost totally unknown.

Thus it is that I may say things here, that may seem so blindingly obvious to one group, that it might be asked why I trouble to say them at all …

The reason is, that to the other group they may not be at all obvious. And very possibly radical and highly controversial - to say the least.

What is in my mind as I write this, is that for some days, this weblog has been devoted to the idea that Christian spirituality – including esotericism – has major differences from other forms of spirituality.

In contemporary parlance, this will be ‘no-brainer’ for traditional Christians who have bothered to read these words. Why even mention it at all?

What I fear may not be sufficiently grasped, is how completely radical this idea is in much of the New Age milieu I experienced for nearly twenty years, at Findhorn and in many other venues.

And the reason it will appear so radical, in my opinion, is that the New Age milieu serves to FLATTEN differentiation.

Now this flattening of differentiation is based on noble aspirations to peace and unity. Those in the New Age milieu often look at a past when Catholics killed Protestants and vice versa, when the God of other religions, Islam say, was not seen as the same God …

And the result in my view, is that in the New Age milieu as elsewhere, an effort has been made to emphasise the commonality of spiritual aspiration to such extent that not only are differentiations flattened, but that the things I have been saying recently could be actually **mind-boggling**.

Could be actually mind-boggling … That is to say, the very idea of holding **sacred** notions such as the Fall and the Redemption (common to both Catholicism and to the Christian esotericism of Rudolf Steiner, for example) could actually be **startling**.

At least, taking these **seriously** as profound Mysteries, which can serve to shape a **very different** spirituality, could be greeted in certain circles, not only as radical – but I suspect, even as **contemptuous**.

And if I am right, it seems to me, it is because, without even realising it, the New Age movement is united by an often unspoken, often even unconscious dogma that all paths are the same, or are so minimally different as not to matter …

And to take the universal Fall and Redemption seriously, just doesn't jibe with what I'm calling flatness. Yes, a flatness, no matter how noble the intent may be ...

But as I look out on a world of increasing hyper-individualism, consumerism, ever more brutal capitalism, environmental catastrophe ... as I look out on this world and search my heart, I feel the time has come to challenge this unconscious dogma – that all spiritualities are more or less the same, and that they thus presumably **shape** people and societies in the same ways …

I think the question needs to be put to the New Age movement: what if they DON'T shape people in the same ways?

What if the ascending spirituality of the New Age movement makes little difference to the secular trajectory ... towards disaster?

What if our culture needs to reclaim the Mysteries held most especially by the traditional Church (Eastern Orthodox and Catholic) ... ?

So, so much more I feel in my heart about the **ascending** ‘holistic’ paradigm that I need to try to say … all the while feeling ever more deeply those words of Rudolf Steiner: 'Was heute zu retten ist, das ist das Mysterium von Golgotha'.

This means literally: 'What is to be saved today, is the Mystery of Golgotha'. By which I take it, that he meant that as far as he was concerned, the world needs, burningly needs the Mystery of the Redemption from the Fall …

No Accident

2006-02-07T20:53:00.000Z

These last days I have been suggesting that there is a certain **distinctive** form of spirituality that animates much of the New Age movement.

Now it seems to me that the image often given by the New Age is that much of its spirituality is **not** so distinctive – but rather that it is universal and all-embracing.

But I have been trying to suggest that although I blithely accepted this for many years, it no longer seems true at all to me.

And that one can observe certain distinct qualities that highly differentiate much of New Age spirituality, from other kinds of spirituality.

I suggested, for example, that one of these was a call to detached centredness, sometimes with a corresponding nonchalance in the face of tragedy.

Still although I sense more and more deeply a distinctive kind of spirituality that lies behind the claim to an all-embracing holism, it remains difficult for me, at least at the moment, to do more than **suggest** all I feel in this regard.

But in the unfinished manuscript I have been quoting (with a few small changes), I turned to the image and example of the Christian esotericism of Rudolf Steiner, again, just to suggest what I am trying to say …

“Whatever Rudolf Steiner’s faults and failings, whatever his regrettably critical attitude toward the Church, and the Church’s understandably critical attitude to Rudolf Steiner, neither the Church, nor the neo–paganism of the New Age, should be under any illusion that Rudolf Steiner’s esotericism is simply just another species of New Age esotericism.

Clearly it is not. Its entire thrust is very, very different. If Rudolf Steiner’s Christian Hermeticism is not so concerned with the objective of simply becoming calm, centred, detached, unconcerned;

If Rudolf Steiner’s Christian Hermeticism is about epistemology via thinking, passionately thinking and strengthening thinking so as to cognise a vast spiritual world centred in the Mystery of Golgotha;

If Rudolf Steiner’s Christian Hermeticism is about engaging passionately with the culture of the West from Plato and Aristotle to Goethe, Hegel and Schelling;

If Rudolf Steiner painted a profoundly tragic picture of human evolution since the Fall and the battle with the forces of darkness,

If Rudolf Steiner drew profound strength from the daily intonation of the Pater Noster (though admittedly an esoteric version thereof) and encouraged the profound value of saying 'forgive us our **debts** ... deliver us from **evil**' ...

If Rudolf Steiner’s Christian Hermeticism is about all of these things … so profoundly different from so much of the New Age milieu;

If Rudolf Steiner’s esotericism appears so different from, say, the neo-theosophy of Alice Bailey, it is not simply by ACCIDENT.”

Christianity and the New Age Idea

2006-02-06T20:30:00.000Z

The last entry was concerned with distinctions between Christian spirituality and esotericism and non-Christian spirituality and esotericism.

I confess this theme has been uppermost in my mind for years now. And a major reason for this is an overriding sense I am left with, after many years in the New Age movement …

That overriding sense is that the New Age movement is fundamentally based on a belief (whether implicit or explicit, conscious or unconscious, is not so important) in having found a **core** to all religions and spiritual philosophies.

That is to say, to have found one central, perennial philosophy - and to assume that any variation from that core, including for example, key aspects of Christianity, together with Christian esotericism, is of lesser importance – or just plain wrong.

Now not only is it now clear to me that this fundamental belief is so widely accepted as to be akin to dogma, but within a vast growing movement, at least, I have hardly ever seen it challenged.

Yet I grow ever firmer in the conviction that it is absolutely vital that this idea is challenged.

As I have been suggesting, it seems to me that the Christian concepts of the Fall and the Redemption lead to a spirituality of profound meaning for our times. To say the very, very least ...

And it also seems to me that the much-vaunted idea that this ‘holism’ is all-embracing, because it takes the true, central thrust of all religions and discards non-essentials (including the Christian Mystery!) is not at all holistic, inasmuch as it is subtly but *highly* dismissive.

And inasmuch as it is based on an agenda, which after many years, I am now unable to see as anything other than arbitrary - arbitrary in its selection of a central set of tenets, and also filled with (often unconscious) bias.

Yes, it seems to me that this arbitrary agenda is oft unconscious. But it is also so often filled with truly noble and humane aspirations. Many of the people working within the New Age movement are animated by profound love and idealism. Profound …

Thus, there is a terrible paradox here. A paradox at the core of my life – that something I spent years enthusiastically supporting alongside people I truly admire, now seems deeply flawed. And as I hope to eventually detail in this weblog, the flaws have very real consequences ...

Yes, in these weeks after Lovelock's message, I feel more than ever that a challenge - kind, loving and decisive - must be mounted to the vast and growing New Age phenomenon. But speaking very personally, I am not yet really sure what form that challenge needs to take. I am still wrestling ...

That being said, tomorrow I will resume quoting from my manuscript, which was one attempt – however inadequate - to wrestle with these very issues …

Christian Spirituality Versus …

2006-02-03T21:20:00.000Z

The last days have seen some sort of attempt – however inadequate - to suggest that the Judaeo-Christian recognition of evil and the Fall is intimately connected to a profound spirituality of FEELING.

Far from being uncreative and morose, these core concepts can serve to deepen and intensify the pure feeling of the heart. And it seems to me, that the spirituality which then results often stands in contrast to forms of spirituality wherein notions such as tragedy, evil and the Fall are either relativised, absent, or actively dismissed and negated.

As I wrote in my original manuscript – which with a few changes I resume quoting today:

“Here lies one of the principal differences between much of the New Age and Christianity …

What do I mean here? I am going to reply by way of images. Many of these images come from my long involvement with the fields of non-Christian esotericism and the related New Age movement. There I had occasion to observe a recurring nonchalance, regarding the horror of the world:

The suffering of disease – a karmic pattern one had brought simply on oneself.

Or “one creates one’s own reality” - and thereby the universal tragedy of the world is missed or denied.

Or even nonchalance in the wake of the bomb – the bomb, that was dropped on Hiroshima ... It is a fact, for example, that the neo-theosophical writings of Alice Bailey actually describe this event as one of the greatest spiritual events that has happened for many millennia.

Yes, these neo-theosophical writings, which have more to do with the genesis of the New Age subculture than is generally recognised, speak of the bomb with a call to regard its advent as something of vast spiritual significance. And the feeling of horror is relativised there, if not dismissed altogether …

And there are other New Age writings which seemingly emphasise a call not to be overly-concerned at mass catastrophes or massacres – for the dying are simply being ‘born’ into the spiritual worlds. Now the fact of this birth is not to be disputed. But nor is it a justification for nonchalance in the wake of immense tragedy or murder.

Nonchalance, which my dictionary defines as ‘the quality of appearing calm and unconcerned’. Calm and unconcerned … Is not a central preoccupation of the New Age movement the ideal of centredness, staying in one’s centre, remaining calm …?

Yes – it is. Throughout the literature of the New Age movement and much non-Christian esotericism, one can find this leitmotive – centredness, centredness, do not be overcome by the horror of the world .,.

And is this not surely the concern of Christian esotericism, as well? I can hear a bewildered and perhaps exasperated New Ager asking me this question. The answer is yes and no. Dear friend, if you are with this question, do not allow yourself to be deceived – as I was deceived for many years – that the goals of Christian esotericism are simply identical to non-Christian esotericism.”

A perhaps pedantic footnote. In a way, I feel dishonest putting quote marks here. Though it is substantially the same, I have made changes and additions to this material. Nonetheless I seek to emphasise again that this material is very much ripped out of context, and put to service in this weblog in a less-than-ideal way.

I also regret that I lack easy opportunity to double-check or reference what I say regarding Alice Bailey. Nonetheless, I remain completely confident I report it accurately. In fact, I think I have put it quite **mildly**. Certainly my memory of the relevant text is more disturbing than I indicate.

I hope to continue Monday.

The Vision of the Heart

2006-02-01T22:38:00.000Z

We will shortly resume with my original writing, reflecting on the Christian Mystery of Feeling - and the nonchalant quality I now see in a great many holistic approaches, so-called.

But first, I want to amplify, by drawing more today from a profound soul, whose genius of the Heart - steeped in the Christian Mystery of the Fall and the Redemption - has healed me more than I can ever tell you.

Here he compares the vision of pure feeling (the Heart) with that of pure thought and pure will:

"Leibnitz, the philosopher of optimism, said that the given world is the most perfect of possible worlds.

Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, said that in the given world the sum of suffering outweighs that of joy, and that the world of our experience is therefore not only imperfect but also, in the last analysis, evil.

Both Leibnitz and Schopenhauer looked at the totality of experience of the world, as we are now seeking to, and what a difference in what they saw!

From the point of view of **pure thought**, which is that of Leibnitz, the totality of the world shows up without any doubt a perfect arrangement of equilibrium, a harmonious functioning of its essential parts and - despite what may take place in its more obscure nooks and crannies - the totality of the world taken in its great outlines, in its **essential** outlines, is harmony itself.

From the point of view of **pure will**, which is that of Schopenhauer, the experience of each individual being in the world confirms the diagnosis of the world given by Gautama Buddha, which diagnosis is therefore to be accepted as true.

And from the point of view of the **heart**, which is that of Hermeticism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition, what can one say about the world?

The heart says to us: the cosmos, this marvel of wisdom, beauty and goodness, suffers. It is ailing.

This great organism which cannot have been born out of sickness, whose birth must have been due to perfect health, i.e. to perfect wisdom, beauty and goodness, the totality of which was its cradle - this great organism is ailing.

The continents - and the planets - grow ever-more hard, petrifying: this is the "sclerosis" of the cosmos. And on the surface of its land-masses in the process of petrification, and in the deeps of the seas, and in the air, there reigns the struggle for existence - this is the fever of inflammation in the world.

But sick as it is, the world still retains - everywhere and always - characteristics of its primordial health, and shows the working of forces of its new health, its convalescence.

Because alongside the struggle for existence there is cooperation in order to live, and alongside the mineral petrification, there is the succulent and breathing cover of the plant kingdom.

The world can therefore be lauded and wept for at the same time.

This is the origin of the problem of the Fall: that the world is worthy of being sung for and wept for at the same time.

The world is not what it should be.

There is a contradiction between the totality and the details. For whilst the starry heavens represent a harmony of equilibrium and perfect cooperation, animals and insects devour one another and innumerable legions of infectious microbes bear sickness and death to men, animals and plants.

It is this contradiction which the term 'the Fall' alludes to."

Evolution and The Fall

2006-02-01T22:23:00.000Z

Yesterday this weblog offered reflections about “***a new quality of feeling*** born into the world with Christ”.

I want to continue elaborating this in contrast with a certain nonchalant attitude that is found in much, if not all, New Age spirituality. At least, I certainly experienced such an attitude in so many holistic venues, over so many years.

But rather than continue from my original ‘script’ now, I want to pause to offer some relevant thoughts from Anonymous d’Outre Tombe over these next two days.

Here the author will be speaking of the Judaeo-Christian idea of the Fall, an idea which - like that of evil - is sometimes dismissed from New Age thought, as being nothing but uncreative and morbid.

But the Unknown Author reveals here not only why this idea need not be morbid at all, not only the importance of considering the tragedy of the Fall - but he also demonstrates the blazing quality of feeling that was, it seems to me, born far more deeply into the world with the coming of Christ – and his Church.

Here then an Unknown Genius of the most profound thought – and heart:

“The doctrine of the circle of involution and evolution is generally a platitude in occult literature, but it is not so when it is a matter of involution understood as the **Fall** and evolution understood as salvation.

There is a world of difference between the orientalistic doctrine concerning the semi-automatic ‘process’ of involution and evolution, and the Hermetic, Biblical and Christian doctrine concerning the Fall and Salvation.

The former sees in the circle of involution-evolution only a purely natural process, similar to the process of respiration in a living organism –animal or human. The Hermetic, Biblical and Christian tradition in contrast sees here a cosmic tragedy …”

A cosmic tragedy which, when a person really begins to FEEL it, I wish to add, can only lead to the joy, the wonder, the infinite gratitude that is owed to the cosmic work of SALVATION …

Thus I do not believe there is anything at all necessarily morose with a true appreciation of tragedy, the Fall and Evil. And I am deeply concerned by the DISMISSAL of these ideas within the so-called Holistic perspective. So-called I say, because so very much it seems to me, is actually dismissed.

And this is why tomorrow I will add some further words from this Unknown Genius of the Heart, which can also help us come to the very core of Christian Spirituality ...

Tears, Indignation and Feeling

2006-01-31T17:20:00.000Z

One thread in all the feedback I’ve received since this project began, is a concern for the quality of emotion I am expressing. Am I despairing or perhaps unbridled in my anger?

Now I neither want to encourage despair or unbridled anger. Neither is creative, in the slightest.

But I believe there is tremendous value – not to despair, but to tears and lamentation. Not to unbridled anger – but to feeling, really FEELING what is tragic in the world. And if necessary, feeling real **indignation**.

As long as that indignation neither curdles into bitterness, nor erupts into violence. And the key, the keys to **healthy** lamentation and indignation are the keys given by Saint Paul: Faith, Hope and Charity.

Now Saint Paul who was filled, it seems to me, with ***a new quality of feeling*** born into the world with Jesus Christ, certainly experienced deep lamentation and indignation. But his faith, his hope, his charity, were such that these qualities cannot be classified as either morose or uncreative …

Still although we may aspire to the way followed by Saint Paul, how much we succeed, of course, is an entirely different matter...

Thus I certainly understand the concerns that have been raised. One might well ask: is this not too tragic a picture of the trajectory of the world I have intimated ... from the new life added to the world by the Incarnation of the Word – to the ‘life’ added to the world by Coca Cola? …

In reply to this, I will say the following. In my personal life, I remain overwhelmed. I thought today I might not be posting an entry at all. But rather than abandon this weblog, I will turn to an unfinished manuscript for the next days - in which I was dealing not only with the above questions, but also with their relationship to New Age spirituality.

Now use of this manuscript is not exactly ideal. For one thing, it’s ripped out of a certain context (dealing with the New Age movement). And there are other ways I am not completely happy with it either.

Nonetheless, having mentioned my concern, I will put it up as is (with just a tweak or two). Put it up in installments as something not written specifically for this weblog – but which may yet be of interest …

To this question of being morose, I had responded:

“Am I not aware of another trajectory at work in history – a trajectory of liberation from crippling and lethal diseases, liberation of slaves, liberation of women, liberation from the ethnic hatred, liberation from hatred of homosexuals, of human rights everywhere becoming more and more clarified and defined? Am I not being simply morbid?

It depends. For yes, I am aware that a work is at work across the millennia that testifies to the unfolding of the Christic seed, whereby for a certain number of souls at least, there are unparalleled developments in capacities for human consciousness, human compassion.

I am aware of the glory of human evolution, and one needs to be aware of all of this, if one is not to become ‘simply morbid’.

One needs to be aware and to have hope …. Without this one becomes morose indeed. Is the cup half empty or half full? So the old adage goes.

Now, a preoccupation with the half-emptiness of the glass leads only to morbidity. But what does a **preoccupation** with the half-fullness of the glass lead to? Joyous hope and inspiration?

Maybe. Or maybe it leads in the end to a certain nonchalance, and even trivialisation of the suffering of the world.

For the truth is: the glass of the world is **both** half full and half empty – at the same time. And the half-fullness of glass of the world needs to be celebrated, and the half-emptiness of the glass of the world needs to be lamented.

At least this last, I believe is among the principle messages of Christianity – both esoteric and exoteric.”

This will shortly continue with reflections on the relation of FEELING Christianity to the New Age movement.

The Predators

2006-01-30T19:19:00.000Z

It has been a long time since we received television in our household. Now, at no point was there any ideological decision to throw out television. No, what happened is that life became so rich in other ways, that most of what was offered on television had less and less importance.

In saying this, I do not want to be censorious of folk who watch TV. Though television has few riches for **me** – I can well imagine it has for others. (For example, sports never had meaning for myself, but I know they do for many).

Thus no criticism is intended here. Though I do want to encourage all of us to **consciously** fill our leisure-time with **whatever** is personally most nourishing and rich. I would go so far as to call such conscious choice of genuine nourishment as a spiritual discipline.

And for me personally, the interior life, the life of the Sacraments, the life of study and family was more rich than anything on television and so it fell away …

And a life of greater simplicity naturally evolved, as the interior life became ever more rich. And I do believe that now, more than ever, our world needs to find simplicity. Not through strict prohibitions – but through the attraction of inner **joys**.

And here a Church devoted to rich and sacramental Mystery, rather than often inane efforts at 'entertainment', could play a great role (as she once did in Ireland).

Now my abstinence from media has led to certain experiences, that I suspect are not common. For example, how clearly I recall taking my young daughter once to the cinema.

Where an experience of horror greeted me.

Horror which was put in relief and made visible, I think, because I had so long abstained from television. Without this abstinence, I doubt I would have **registered** this horror. For it would have seemed all-too-commonplace.

What is the horror of which I speak?

I speak of watching cinema advertising. Commercials, as they are called in America.

Before the film was a barrage of advertising – incredibly sophisticated, powerful, deceitful - all aimed at the child’s soul. My soul screamed: 'Why are they LYING to my child? Why are they trying to **manipulate** my child?'

Of course, the answer to these questions is all too obvious: Greed and hunger for power and control.

What is going on here, is nothing less than **predatory**.

Certain groups seek to gain control of children for their own ends.

What is less obvious are the answers to the following questions:

Why are they allowed to do this? Why are they allowed to prey on the young especially, with an incredibly blatant and manipulative agenda?

Why do so few people seem to notice?

And why when people apparently care about the imposition of ‘offenses’ against political correctness (e.g. a ‘Christmas tree’ instead of a ‘holiday tree’) do they not care about such MASSIVE attempts to impose, as that undertaken by the global advertising industry?

Yes, the so-called imposition of religion i.e. that of matters contrary to the underlying ideology of secularism, causes the greatest consternation in certain circles.

But the flagrant attempt to instill a consumerist ethos raises hardly an eyebrow.

A consumerist ethos which of course, not only does not contradict secularism, but actually DEPENDS on it. As I have tried to say here often - one way or another, however adequately or inadequately.

This is again, a very personal approach to these issues. But it is these kinds of questions of global import, that this weblog is trying to explore, in joining in the Hermetic aspiration to guard the Soul of the World ...

The Marginalisation of the Profound

2006-01-27T12:52:00.000Z

Yesterday I suggested how, in its culmination in political correctness, Secularism was imposing a tyranny of blandness.

I only **suggested**. At the moment, I feel unable to do more than indicate and suggest …

I also suggest that the bland, faceless world of so much modern architecture is imposing far more on the soul than we ever fully realise.

But the great Christian Hermeticist Rudolf Steiner realised this deeply. He therefore worked to create an architecture that would **free** the soul from the weight of all those monotonous, repetitive rigid 90 degree angles that dominate our world more and more and more.

And what would Rudolf Steiner say to that British mother who feels a marginally Christian school imposes ideology on her children, but that apparently what a state school teaches is neutral and benign?

This is the **essence** of what I think he might say, though with far, far more eloquence and power than I can achieve:

‘There is nothing at all neutral, benign or free about modern education. As modern architecture imposes blandness, so does modern education impose on the child blandness and worse.

Much, much worse – a soulless, hopeless and meaningless world stripped of Mystery. Which increasingly trains children at earlier and earlier ages in the capacity for **dead** CALCULATION, at the expense of **living** THINKING, imagination and feeling.’

Potentially great souls, Steiner said, would be crippled by the kind of education he saw modernity developing. Their souls and minds would be warped.

This is why he pioneered his Waldorf education, which now counts over a thousand schools worldwide: To save the children of the future. To save the children!

But these fragmentary notes about architecture and education are just aspects of a far larger picture. We have created a worldview, markedly emphasising the LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR of our human experience – that of the empirical senses and rational logic.

Markedly emphasising this – and this very definitely at the expense of mystery, imagination, feeling, soul. Without which however, our world becomes ever more colourless and bland.

Because to so markedly emphasise the empirical and the rational is to the emphasise the surface of life. And what is deeper than the surface – in other words, what is profound - becomes marginalised.

Such that what speaks to the profound – the Symbols of religion, for example - are seen not only as private fantasy, but often even as an intrusion into public life.

In American political correctness these days, it is sometimes held that we should use terms such as ‘holidays’ rather than, say Christmas, or a ‘holiday tree’ rather than a Christmas tree.

The underlying idea is that of sensitivity. Non-Christians should not have Christian traditions imposed on them.

The error here, I believe is to suppose that an idea like 'happy holidays' or a 'holiday tree' says nothing at all. But in trying to say nothing at all – they do indeed say a very great deal.

They speak of the poverty of our collective imagination, devastated by empiricism and rationality, and they actually impose on people that very poverty. A poverty of imagination is everywhere being imposed …

The French for example, try to ban Islamic headwear and the wearing of prominent crosses. These Symbols for profound tradition are not to be asserted - in certain public contexts, at least.

Yet there is not the slightest problem with asserting the Symbols of the banal in public. A fifty foot billboard which screams: “Coke adds life!” for example …

In a poor neighbourhood in Britain not that long ago, my wife saw near-infants 'suckled' on cola.

Now Our Lord came to bring us ‘life and life more abundant’. And today we have Coca Cola …

The Tyranny of Blandness

2006-01-26T18:30:00.000Z

Yesterday I asserted that secularism imposed its ideology onto us.

This is true in countless ways, I believe. But it is an idea I rarely hear anywhere – yet which I think needs to be raised far, far more often.

As I have admitted, this weblog is fragmentary, being written at the moment under much personal pressure. I would like soon to more fully develop the idea of secularism as an imposed ideology.

But for today, I will simply quote from a book. An unfortunately sometimes bitter and cynical book, unfortunate because bitterness and cynicism serve no-one. But a book suffused nonetheless with a noble consciousness of BEAUTY, that makes many fine and important points.

The book is Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Spaces to Meeting Places and How We Can Change Them Back Again by Michael S. Rose.

Among other things, Rose is analysing the impact of secularism and modern political correctness on one facet of our society – the architecture of modern Catholic Churches.

Here, I think, is a revealing passage concerning modern churches:

“The building recedes into the background of the landscape. There’s nothing memorable here. Nothing inspiring. Nothing particularly inviting.

[One] finds that the façade, the ‘face’ this church pre-sents to the world is ‘faceless’.,,

****It simply fits in more or less with the other buildings on that street.****

No passerby would be curious enough to go out of their way to explore this edifice; neither skeptic, nor pious pilgrim will be drawn to its portals, attracted to or even intrigued by any inherent meaning.

The faceless façade of the modern church ***fails to communicate meaning to anyone*** …

Designers and architects of the modern church are careful not to offend anyone in the community by using particularly Catholic symbols such as the crucifix or even the Latin Cross.

Following the modern church fashion of the 1990’s a circular window … is divided into four panes to form a ‘Greek cross’.

Since the horizontal and vertical pieces of a Greek cross are equal in length, the Christian symbolism is lost in the window, and therefore it’s doubtful that the frequent passerby will be offended by such inconspicuous Christian symbolism.

Neither will the pilgrim immediately (or perhaps ever) perceive the Greek cross form. To everyone except the liturgist, the round window is nothing more than a round window with four panes of equal size.”

A round window then, with a ‘plus sign’ in the middle, as Rose also observes …

The emphasis in the above is my own, and what I want to emphasise is that in modern architecture as elsewhere, we are being subjected to a Creeping Tyranny of Blandness and Mediocrity …

The Air that We Breath …

2006-01-25T20:14:00.000Z

This weblog recently began again with the prospects of wholescale ecological catastrophe.

And yesterday in response, we invoked here the little known dream of an Irish Catholic prime minister from 1943 …

I wonder if anyone thought: what is the point? Our world problems surely cannot be solved by going back to a dead past on an obscure little island, isolated from the mainstream. We must contend with the present forces of global society.

Forces, which I believe, are too often seen as having an aura of inevitability about them.

One of the chief things, it seems to me, in combating this aura of inevitability, is to HEIGHTEN CONSCIOUSNESS that there is a **worldview** that informs, shapes and guides all our current political, social and economic activity.

Which activity, moreover, is killing us.

But this **worldview** is not the only one we have available to us.

Yes, one of the first steps it seems to me, is **heightening consciousness** that this worldview is ‘pulling the strings’ – and that we have a choice.

Once we are conscious, that is, that our strings are being pulled.

Now I propose in this weblog to call this worldview ‘Secularism’. I am aware that this word is not quite accurate, nor adequate and that Secularism is not without noble roots and aspirations.

Still in a weblog like this, a certain SHORTHAND is necessary. And it is easier for me to say ‘Secularism’ than explain every time that our society is underpinned and moulded by a complex convergence of philosophical currents including:

Relativism, involving a despair of finding any basis for truth that is not relative to one’s own culture.

Philosophical Materialism, in which little but the most crudely obvious material dimensions are admitted as having **validity** and hence MEANING for the way our society is run.

A Negative Concept of Liberty which holds that any restraint, even **self-chosen** restraint, equals loss of freedom. This approach is also subtly materialistic, inasmuch as it emphasises material restraints over psychological ones (i.e. someone under house-arrest is seen as not free, but an agoraphobic may be).

While also acknowledging that the zeitgeist is informed by genuine aspirations, as well: liberté, egalité, fraternité …

I have tried to unpack these ideas a little in the previous weeks, and I cannot keep unpacking them each and every time. So for the sake of simplicity, I will use the word ‘Secularism’ as shorthand for the zeitgeist …

Now secularism so-defined, is the air that we breathe. We breathe this air so naturally and unconsciously that we never suspect that we might breathe a different air.

But I invoke very recent Irish history to show that people very like us, did indeed breathe a different air – and created a different society.

We are like fish in an all-surrounding sea – poisoned sea – which have no idea that there are very different options available. Fish in this case, that could breath a very different air, if they became aware that this was not the only sea available ...

But when these different options are suggested to us, we can react as though something will be IMPOSED on us …

Soon I want to expand on the story of a British mother I know and admire, as an example of what I mean. This British woman, who is not a Christian, had her children – for non-religious reasons - enrolled in an at least marginally Christian school. But she resented the fact that her children had Christian concepts ‘imposed’ on them.

But it never occurred to her that that in the state-run alternative, children were **also** having something imposed on them. Because these children are breathing in every day the air of secularism – an ideology composed, again, of materialism, relativism, liberty narrowly and materialistically defined – and so forth.

All of these things are being IMPOSED on our children. An ideology is being enforced. When I tried to explain this to her, she had no idea at all what I meant. And it seems to me that most of us have no idea at all – Secularism is the air that we breathe ...

Ireland, O Ireland!

2006-01-24T19:51:00.000Z

We face the world suffering and we bring to the table what we have.

And if our outlook is Hermetic, we feel that what we have is the gathered fruit from a journey, a destiny shot through with unfathomable depth and meaning.

I face the world, with my own experience of Ireland.

Ireland – a country radically transformed in the last two decades. Once one of the poorest in Europe, but suddenly transformed by a massive injection of EU capital and capitalist ‘success’. Once radically Catholic, now far more secular.

Yet the legacy of the past remains evident. Everywhere I go on this holy island, I hear the continual lament: ‘Money has ruined us. Money has ruined us’.

From neighbours, from newspapers, from churches, from taxi and bus drivers, I have never heard anything like this far-reaching collective lamentation.

The profound sense of loss cites the loss of community, most of all.

The irony is that Ireland still has by far the strongest community ethic of any country I have ever encountered. And I have lived in several. Simple goodwill and helpfulness here seem to me extraordinary. The social conscience, work for charity and so forth are markedly pronounced.

And yet I am told repeatedly – all of this is but a shadow of the community ethic that once existed in Ireland. 'Everyone just lives for themselves, these days' I am told.

By comparison with other countries, Ireland still remains a country of remarkable religious PRACTICE.

The *weekday* masses have striking levels of attendance, to say nothing of Sunday. Similarly in church after church, one can daily hear the prayer of the faithful: ‘Hail Mary full of grace’… And the chapels of Eucharistic Adoration are not empty. Ordinary people sit within them in silent reverence before the exposed Sacrament.

Again this is but a shadow of what was. I am told by the elders here of a life in their rural childhood, wherein every home, every evening the rosary was prayed. And everyone in the neighbouring area was welcome to come round and join in.

I am told of a world where the Angelus sounded at 12 and 6 every day and summoned people to prayer. And people really did *stop* what they were doing. (Though I am happy to note the Angelus stills sounds from my church and on Irish television at these times).

My destiny brought me here to see this …

Now one of the founding fathers of the modern Irish Republic was the staunchly Catholic Eamon DeValera. The political party he founded has dominated Irish politics from the beginning. He himself was elected leader repeatedly over *** decades*** in Ireland.

And what did Eamon DeValera stand for? Here is how he addressed the nation on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1943:

“The Ireland which we have dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to things of the spirit; a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry … whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be a home of a people living the life that God desires that men should live."

What I say in this webblog is fragmentary. Particularly at the moment. There are many nuances, paradoxes, shadows, and yes intolerable abuses in the Irish situation that cannot be captured here.

Still I invite you, my friends in more secular countries, to pause for a moment and reflect on your local politicians and what their electoral prospects would be – on the back of a call for frugality, 'things of the spirit', forums of serene wisdom and money 'only as a basis' for … the ‘life that God desires that men should live."

And again, DeValera was elected again and again and again ....

Clearly Ireland, until comparatively recently, breathed a different AIR to many other Western countries. And to different kinds of air I hope to soon return ...

One Fine Day … in January

2006-01-23T22:42:00.000Z

We had some lovely weather where I live in Ireland this weekend.

Saturday in particular was beautiful. The sun shone. It was wonderfully warm. The birds were singing as though it were spring.

Unfortunately it isn’t spring – or at least it shouldn’t be.

This morning, my wife recalled a kind woman we had once known, who seemed to us to take materialistic excess and opulence to a vulgar degree. What my wife could not understand was that this woman also struck her as a puritanical Christian. Her children would not see Harry Potter, and I imagine her sexual ethics were very strict. But my wife couldn’t understand her nonchalance towards wealth.

Now my wife grew up in Europe, whereas I was raised in America. In essence, I said to her this morning: it’s easier to understand than you think. In America in particular, there is this species of Christianity that is very literal.

The Bible prohibits magic and fornication. That is clear.

Despite Our Lord’s call to simplicity in so many *parables* and *metaphors*, nowhere does it explicitly, EXACTLY say: ‘Though shalt not be a devouring capitalist, devoted to consumer durables and economic growth above all’.

To this mindset then, George Walker Bush is a fine example of Christian ethics.

In the wake of Lovelock's message, I find myself thinking a great deal about **collective** simplicity. Which (if it is to be achieved, as it must be - now more than ever) I suspect cannot be achieved from anything other than INSPIRATION.

A literalistic Christianity succeeded in enforcing many ‘shalt nots’. At least for a certain period of time - in certain cultures at any rate.

But a Christianity of Mystery and Metaphor that INSPIRES is necessary, it seems to me.

It also seems to me that in spite of shadows, contradictions and yes, cruelties, that Ireland nonetheless also had, and to some extent still has, a Christianity that INSPIRED people to a truly beautiful collective aspiration … which resulted in a simpler life …

And despite the many, many fine achievements of the environmental movement over the last decades – it seems to me that this movement by itself, is only capable of inspiring a small segment of folk.To put it crudely in a contemporary idiom: it just ain’t sexy enough to inspire masses to ‘go green’ …

But it seems to me that the Christian Mystery has inspired masses to a devoted life of simplicity, over the centuries. Where the Christian Mystery is present that is, rather than legalism.

In saying this, I do not wish to discount religious Mystery operating in other faiths, attracting, inspiring, drawing, gripping … Creating an interior richness, where external riches are no longer so necessary.

Nor on the other hand, do I wish to discount the fact that the cosmos changed at Calvary, and that Our Lord, though present in all religions and all areas of humane, loving activity, daily vivifies his church, and offers his flesh and blood …

Religion-less Spirituality

2006-01-20T20:39:00.000Z

From two days ago: “It seems to me that after nearly twenty years involvement in the vast New Age movement that spreads itself particularly in the secular countries of Protestant heritage, that a kind of spirituality is distributed that is insufficient to meet world horror …”

Twenty years involvement in the New Age movement, a movement so hard to define that almost none of its participants can agree to a name for it. But a movement that encompasses many who reject mainstream philosophical materialism and seek meaning in interior paths, psychotherapeutic, esoteric, so-called holistic. Interior paths, which reject religion - especially it seems to me, Christianity.

Yes, in the New Age rejection of VAST amounts of tradition – implicit or not – there is little justice, it now seems to me, to the claim of being ‘holistic’. Though it took me so long to see this.

Then there is my less extensive involvement with Anthroposophy. Another attempt at ‘Religion-less Spirituality’. Which moreover, it seems has created a highly religious system. It seems to me that many Anthroposophists have far more **beliefs** than the formally religious …

Then there is my turning from Religion-less Spirituality to religion. Which proved unexpectedly rich beyond belief, deepening my human-ness in ways the above never did …

But what links my participation in all of these is my concern for the world. All my adult life, I could never understand ‘politicians’ – by which, I mean those who felt the world’s ills could be addressed by **purely** political solutions.

Whether socialist, environmentalist, distributivist, decentralist. And so forth. Whatever the banner - I couldn't see these strategies working in isolation. But all my adult life it has seemed to me that the healing of the world required profound attitudinal, psychological, spiritual, yes ultimately mystical transformation.

Jung said the healing of the individual soul was ultimately a religious matter. And so, it seems clear to me, is the case with our collective and world soul.

And yet this simple idea that seemed so utterly clear to me did not seem that way to so many others.

Like so many others, I turned to the New Age, rejecting the forms of Western religion I grew up surrounded by: American fundamentalism, and later an admittedly more intelligent, but humanist-socialist-political, well-intentioned British Protestantism. Yes well-intentioned, but somehow uninvolving and unmysterious …

But at the age of 34, I finally discovered that traditional Christianity (Catholic and Orthodox) was saying something so very, very, very different from all I had been led to believe about Christianity. ‘Led to believe’ … And who led me …?

Yes, this 2000 years of tradition, embracing not just 1.4 billion people (who often escape the notice of the English-speaking world) but also a living set of practices and Sacraments, and not just beliefs … As well as Mystery, Spiritual Mystery.

This week my mind, my heart, are reeling more than ever before at the world situation.

And all that I personally have is what my own very personal journey has led me to see. The failure of Anthroposophy. The frequent poverty of so-called holistic approaches, although my time at Findhorn and my time setting up a New Age centre in Cambridge certainly also had great riches.

But can these religion-less spiritualities CARRY the Spirit in our world? My experience of Ireland, if nothing else, would alone lead me to feel that the vessel of religion can carry the Spirit into our society far better than any of the other vessels I encountered …

And then there is my sense that although the John Paul papacy has been buried in lies, something extraordinarily living is happening in a Church that is REGENERATING. ‘There is my sense’ … that is again to say: so it seems to me.

In my inner world are so, so many pieces that seem to me –if not to others- directly relevant to what James Lovelock has told us this week. And like each of us, I must take what I have, and assemble them into the most effective response I can make to the world horror.

It Seems to Me ...

2006-01-19T10:18:00.000Z

It seems to me there is a series of links between:

The Rise of Protestantism, noble in so many respects, and the loss of Sacramental Union, Mystery and Practice.

The New Epistemology explicit or implicit in Descartes, Kant, Hume, Mill, Ayer, etc.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, to borrow the title of the famous essay by the (non-Christian) sociologist Max Weber.

The rise of materialism – philosophical and commercial.

Hyper-individualism.

It seems to me that Ireland had far, far, far less of this materialism and hyper-individualism until very recently.

That it had a SIMPLICITY rooted in the collective importance given to a transcendent ideal.

Not a hyper-individual pursuit – but a **collective** aspiration to the transcendent.

And that this translated into an amazingly strong community ethic. Amazing that is, in comparison to the secular countries of Protestant heritage.

And that all of this was linked to beholding –consciously or not – transcendent mystery in the form of the Sacraments. Not only the Eucharist, but Confession.

It seems to me that the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, so admirable in so many respects - please do not mistake me here – it seems to me that this so-often truly admirable Vatican II in its destruction of the liturgy, led to an immense decrease of Sacramental Mystery.

And in Ireland, as elsewhere, the effects can be felt.

It seems to me that the Sacraments – wherever they are truly present, inside or outside the Roman Catholic Church - hold a profound key to addressing the immense tragedy of hyper-individualism, mass consumption and ecological catastrophe.

It seems to me.

What do I do with this ‘it seems to me’ in the face of Lovelock? I ask my heart, I ask my Lord.

More Intimately Now ...

2006-01-18T18:59:00.000Z

Before James Lovelock’s extraordinary message (reproduced in yesterday’s entry) broke on Monday, I had written a personal ‘letter’ to the friends who read this weblog.

Though Lovelock’s message dwarfs my own personal situation by an incomprehensible magnitude - I am reproducing here the letter I wrote last weekend, with but minor tweaks:

Dear Friends, known and unknown,

Today, I must take a different approach to heretofore. A more personal one, in which I begin with a morsel of ‘autobiography’.

My life has been marked by sudden and immense upheavals. In one case, I was shocked to learn of my mother’s terminal illness and abruptly left one continent for another to care for her. At another point, a marriage to a woman who was and is very dear to me came to a shocking end.

Now another immense upheaval appears – at least appears – on my personal horizon. And this time, I am glad to tell you dear friends, that neither divorce, nor death, nor illness is involved.

But the processes around this abruptness are intensely difficult. Great uncertainty and insecurity are present – along with a very strong sense of meaning, purpose and guidance. And grace. Profound, profound grace. Without which I might not be standing.

Due to all of this, I have seriously considered abandoning this weblog. But I am not ready to do that – at least not yet.

However in the midst of intensity, I cannot maintain or at least justify the same level of concentration I gave this project before Christmas. Before Christmas, when my life appeared to radically shift, and in which indeed I received a ‘rejuvenating and inspiring effect of Christmas’ …

Now I could wait until a point where I can justify that same level again. But for a few days (or more), I have decided on a different approach.

That approach will take a more personal and subjectivist turn.

For instance, instead of trying to more carefully document what I see in the world – a process which is demanding – I will simply turn to an approach where very often I might just say: ‘It seems to me’.

This then is a more personal sharing: I am simply reporting what seems to me. At least, for the moment. For these things that I address with ‘it seems to me’ are things that I still hope to document in more depth some time in the future.

But for the next days at least, I might say – for example - that “It seems to me that after nearly twenty years involvement in the vast New Age movement that spreads itself particularly in the secular countries of Protestant heritage, that a kind of spirituality is distributed that is insufficient to meet world horror …”

And then say a little more, perhaps in a FRAGMENTARY way of what else 'seems to me' in this regard. So tomorrow I will start in this vein: ‘it seems to me’.

For now I wish to repeat that I regard this as an experiment, which may not succeed. The word ‘fragmentary’ was emphasised, because what may well follow are a series of soul fragments, testifying to a soul in fragments.

It may well make for less meaningful reading – particularly for those of you who do not know me. And I may still discontinue this blog altogether – at least for awhile.

I should also say that I will no longer commit to putting up an entry every weekday – though until further notice, at least, I hope to maintain something like that schedule. I also wish to apologise here to those of you who have sent me mail – some of it **very** meaningful – that I have yet to reply to. I will be in touch when things are easier.

If this brings disappointment to any, I am sorry. I had sincerely hoped to carry on in the old vein. But all is in upheaval and pain – yet also shot through with grace and meaning.

Your friend in Christ,

Roger

“If There Was One Scientist You Would Listen To ... It Would Be ... Lovelock"

2006-01-17T18:38:00.000Z

A few very personal words, to kick off with:

Though I know so woefully little about the environment, I have read and even (briefly) met Jonathan Porritt, a man I truly **respect**. And ‘Britain’s most famous environmentalist’ as the Independent newspaper called him today.

There he is quoted as saying in response to Lovelock’s devastating assessment of the environment:

“If there was one scientist you would listen to on a proposition of that kind, it would be Jim Lovelock.

Is he right? I simply don't know. I'm not enough of a scientist to make a judgment. With many people you would be tempted to dismiss the idea, but Jim is different.”

Now although I am still less – far less - qualified to render judgment, I will simply report that my own meditations of the last 35 hours echo Porritt’s words.

What I know of Lovelock’s trajectory suggests to me that he may have been placed on the scene of world history to bring Earth System Science to the fore – and that this is the latest installment of an unfolding story whose Hermetic depths are indeed deep, very, very deep.

But one thing I have no wish to do in this weblog, is contribute in anyway to a state of hopelessness.

While I obviously cannot come within a million light years of James Lovelock’s knowledge – the fruit of a profound lifetime – I also cannot accept that any of us, including Lovelock, can KNOW what will happen to the biosphere.

I therefore cannot accept Lovelock’s presentation of the remainder of the century as a fait accompli – and encourage all of us to nurture HOPE.

We do not KNOW – but I feel we have been given something here that merits intensive attention. To say the very least.

Speaking personally, I suspect yesterday’s announcement from Lovelock will mark a watershed in my life. One where I see more than ever, that not only HOPE is needed now – but DRASTIC action, and moreover DRASTIC re-thinking.

For very personally, I do not believe, I am unable to believe - that such drastic action can take place without a drastic revision of the way our society thinks about the world. After yesterday, more than ever, do I join with the currents of Christian thinkers as diverse as Rudolf Steiner and John Paul II in saying:

We can have neither a sustainable world, nor a socially just civilization – where the Spirit is driven out by the philosophical worldview that has brought us to this precipice.

I will say more soon. For now, may James Lovelock and the Independent forgive me – I am reproducing his text in this not-for-profit weblog. The profound urgency of this call for drastic re-thinking transcends issues of copyright, I believe. And Lovelock deserves to be heard as widely as possible. Thus I hope the following reproduction will be judged as being in the spirit of ‘fair use’ (and if not, I apologise sincerely and will remove it immediately).

And now Professor Lovelock:

“Imagine a young policewoman delighted in the fulfilment of her vocation; then imagine her having to tell a family whose child had strayed that he had been found dead, murdered in a nearby wood. Or think of a young physician newly appointed who has to tell you that the biopsy revealed invasion by an aggressive metastasising tumour. Doctors and the police know that many accept the simple awful truth with dignity but others try in vain to deny it.

Whatever the response, the bringers of such bad news rarely become hardened to their task and some dread it. We have relieved judges of the awesome responsibility of passing the death sentence, but at least they had some comfort from its frequent moral justification. Physicians and the police have no escape from their duty.

This article is the most difficult I have written and for the same reasons. My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news.

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 per cent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse.

We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

By failing to see that the Earth regulates its climate and composition, we have blundered into trying to do it ourselves, acting as if we were in charge. By doing this, we condemn ourselves to the worst form of slavery. If we chose to be the stewards of the Earth, then we are responsible for keeping the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surface right for life. A task we would soon find impossible - and something before we treated Gaia so badly, she had freely done for us.

To understand how impossible it is, think about how you would regulate your own temperature or the composition of your blood. Those with failing kidneys know the never-ending daily difficulty of adjusting water, salt and protein intake. The technological fix of dialysis helps, but is no replacement for living healthy kidneys.

My new book The Revenge of Gaia expands these thoughts, but you still may ask why science took so long to recognise the true nature of the Earth. I think it is because Darwin's vision was so good and clear that it has taken until now to digest it. In his time, little was known about the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, and there would have been little reason for him to wonder if organisms changed their environment as well as adapting to it.

Had it been known then that life and the environment are closely coupled, Darwin would have seen that evolution involved not just the organisms, but the whole planetary surface. We might then have looked upon the Earth as if it were alive, and known that we cannot pollute the air or use the Earth's skin - its forest and ocean ecosystems - as a mere source of products to feed ourselves and furnish our homes. We would have felt instinctively that those ecosystems must be left untouched because they were part of the living Earth.

So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can.

Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent. On these British Isles, we are used to thinking of all humanity and not just ourselves; environmental change is global, but we have to deal with the consequences here in the UK.

Unfortunately our nation is now so urbanised as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous.

We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct, but in human civilisation the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe.

We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home."

With Love, Eliphas Lévi

2006-01-16T17:52:00.000Z

Warm greetings to you friends, known and unknown.

I begin this year jolted, personally jolted. So much so, that I am not sure how to continue this weblog. More will be said. Tomorrow, perhaps.

Then, just in the last hours I have been jolted again – by the enormity (to say the very least) of what James Lovelock is saying today about civilisation (and so, so much more) being destroyed by global warming.

If you have not heard, I urge you to go to the site of the fine British newspaper, The Independent, which devoted its **entire** first three pages today to Lovelock's claim. Lovelock's own words are here:

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article338830.ece

But the related articles also deserve to be ***studied***.

On this matter, I will remain in silence, till more has been digested.

Today I will be very personal and simply say that my heart has been crying out these last hours: “Secularism isn’t working! …

Secularism, rooted in epistemological blindness leads inevitably to blindness of values … The loss of simplicity and devotion to a higher ideal that Ireland, for example, once had - can be laid at the door of secularism, scepticism and the materialism and hyper-individualism that followed in its wake …”

Cry from the heart. And very subjective. More time is needed …

For now, I will just say that as this blog has unfolded, it will have been obvious that I sometimes draw on some unusual Christian thinkers. These include the non-Catholic, non-confessional esotericist Rudolf Steiner. And also the very Catholic anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot.

But as this new year of my weblog gets off to a faltering start, I want to invoke a third unusual source: the great 19th century French Catholic Hermeticist, Eliphas Lévi. And without much further comment today, simply resurrect his voice once more.

For as bizarre as it may no doubt seem, I feel his voice addresses – however adequately or not – the only answer I am able to see to the tragedies intimated above.

'Able to see' that is, after many years of reflection. I am then, unable to see another answer after all these years...

Certainly not in the New Age movement which, it seems to me often plays into affirming the subjectivism of secularism … Among other things …

‘However adequately or not’ - I wish to repeat in regard to Eliphas Lévi. For although he was a man of **magnificently** radiating heart and human wisdom, his formulations can at times be excessive and extravagant.

No matter. I affirm the heartfelt essence, if not all the particulars of his message.Through the veils of prejudice, he saw the Power and the Mystery of the Sacramental Church - which is the Power and the Mystery of Christ ...

Here then, is my friend, the Catholic deacon, Alphonse Louis Constant speaking from Paris in the 1860’s and 70’s:

“Homo sum humani a me nil alienum puto. I am a human, and nothing human can be foreign to me. This is what God has said to the world in the Spirit of the Christian Revelation.”

“The ancient rites have lost their effectiveness since Christianity appeared in the world. The Christian and Catholic religion, in fact, is the legitimate daughter of Jesus, king of the Mages. A simple scapular worn by a truly Christian person is a more invincible talisman than the ring and pentacle of Solomon.

The Mass is the most prodigious of evocations. Necromancers evoke the dead, the sorcerer evokes the devil and he shakes, but the Catholic priest does not tremble in evoking the living God.

Catholics alone have priests because they alone have the altar and the offering, i.e. the whole of religion. To practise high Magic is to compete with the Catholic priesthood; it is to be a dissident priest.

Rome is the great Thebes of the new initiation. It has crypts for its catacombs; for talismen, its rosaries and medallions; for a magic chain, its congregations; for magnetic fires, its convents; for centres of attraction, its confessionals; for means of expansion, its pulpits and the addresses of its bishops; it has, lastly, its Pope, the Man-God rendered visible.”

(By which,in the last instance, Lévi may simply have meant that the two thousand year history of the See of Peter is due not to arbitrary human invention, but to a Sacramental Mystery that reveals Christ in a particular way ...)

“The supernatural is the eternal Paradox of the infinite desire. Man craves to assimilate himself with God, and he does so in the Catholic communion. From a Rationalistic point of view and considered in a purely natural manner, this communion is a thing of colossal extravagance.

In the Catholic Communion they eat the spirit of God and the body of a man! Eat a spirit, and an infinite Spirit! What madness! Eat the body of a man! How horrible! Theophagy, and Androphagy! What claims to immortality! And yet, what can be more beautiful, more soothing, more really divine than the Catholic Communion?

The religious want, innate in man, will never find more complete satisfaction; and how vividly we feel that it is true, when we believe in it. Faith to a certain extent creates what she affirms; hope in the superhuman never deceives, and the Love of the divine is never a deception.

The First Communion is the coronation of the human royalty, it is the inauguration of the serious side of life, it is the apotheosis and the transfiguration of childhood, it is the most pure of all joys and the most true of all happinesses.”

Now I might add to what Eliphas Lévi says here, that I realise many children today do not experience this.

Nonetheless, I was shocked, SHOCKED by the inexpressible joy which the confirmation in the Catholic Church so unexpectedly invoked in me on Easter night, 2000.

Giving me the most profound, unnamable richness, that only seems to unfold more, year by year by year. Yes, I know what lies behind Lévi's words, as to this most pure of happinesses ...

And Lord, the wholesomeness, the mysterious calm and peace of this divine-human wholesomeness, engendered by Sacramental Union with your Being ... perhaps that is what we need now more than ... my voice trails off.

O Lord.

Into the Manger of our Hearts and Minds ...

2005-12-23T22:35:00.000Z

Dear Friends, known and unknown,

Today, I want to share with you in a more personal way.

And after that, I am going to step back for a little while.

As indicated earlier, this weblog is taking a break. I need time to recharge and to more deeply ponder the issues I have been raising here. For those of you who wish to rejoin me, I will be resuming on Monday, 16 January.

Personally I pray that those of us who are engaged in these matters can use this period for deepening our quest. For years now, it has seemed to me that this time of year has special qualities that foster and reward **intensified** reflection.

As ever, I turn to Anonymous d’Outre Tombe, who speaks to us poetically in this regard – poetically, but with profound depths for meditation:

“It is not without reason that the manger is venerated by the Church each year and that a unique light is lit in the world each Christmas. What I want to say is that Christmas is not only the festival dedicated to the **memory** of the historical nativity of Christ, but that it is in addition, the **event** of the nativity which is repeated each year, where Christ becomes child anew and where the history of humankind becomes the manger.

Then all that is in us of the nature of the shepherds of Bethlehem and all that which is in us of the nature of the mages of from the East responds as in the past.

That which is in us of the nature of the mages from the East is enamoured of the “star” and sets out **en route** with the little incense, myrrh and gold gathered during the year that is drawing to an end; and that which is in us of the shepherds of Bethlehem kneels down before the Child whose reality is revealed from above …

Just as the Child is present at Christmas, so also there is an awakening and activation at Christmas of forces (including individual souls) capable of receiving His revelation …

It is thus that it happens that Hermeticism also undergoes each year the rejuvenating and inspiring effect of Christmas, and that Hermeticists - often without being aware of it - receive vivifying impulses and illuminating inspirations for their efforts.”

Personally my friends, a profound sense of this kind of ‘awakening and activation … rejuvenating and inspiring’ me at this time has been present in me for years. I look forward to the Holy Nights to come with deep joy. And I pray that you will too …

For although the matters I raise in this weblog are serious, and the suffering of the world demands of us that we seek ‘another way’ forward, this way will certainly not become evident without opening to the joy of inspiration.

With whatever fruits I gather in this coming time, I look forward to rejoining you in January with my thoughts on what I am calling Hermetic Catholicism.

But if any of you would like in these intervening weeks to get a fuller sense of my thoughts in this regard – which I know can be both cryptic and fragmentary - I have two suggestions.

First, if you go to this page:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1585421618/104-8741947-1971107?v=glance&n=283155&%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

You will find my Amazon review of the most important book behind this weblog, which I dare to suggest may also be the most important spiritual book of the twentieth century. And there are links at that review, which if you are interested, can take you to further things, mostly reviews, that I have written, which are all relevant to this weblog.

Second I have a long piece, originally a letter to friends, and called appropriately enough Hermetic Catholicism: A Letter to My Friends. But if Unknown Friends wish to e-mail me, I am happy to send them an edited copy of this piece, which goes far more into the background of this project, including much of a personal nature. Please note however, you might need to be patient, as my aspirations to deep reflection in this time, may well involve my getting far away from cyberspace.

Finally I want to thank all of you who have been reading and responding to this weblog, particularly the head, fred k, jeff, dr john, mamapelican, 1dayin7 and chariot for **enriching** this site with your comments. I also offer my real gratitude to those of you, whom I know have made effort to generate awareness of the existence of this weblog. I truly **thank you** all.

May Christ be born(e) in the manger of our hearts and minds this Christmas season …

Your friend in Jesus Christ,

Roger

No Eclipse

2005-12-22T06:59:00.000Z

I have been speaking of the need to find another way. Another way in which the Christian Mystery can inform our desiccating culture. Another way, in which the Christian Mystery is not imposed on people.

But neither is the ECLIPSE of the Christian Mystery allowed to proceed headlong. And neither is a secularist, philosophical materialism imposed on us…

Now this other way begins to be seen. It begins to be seen - as I have suggested - in the papacy of John Paul the Great. And I think in the radiant thinking of Anonymous d'Outre Tomb, as well. And I feel it is also within sight in other ways - at least in fragments. And I want to tentatively explore these in the coming weeks.

But among all these matters is the need for a stance - a stance of true love for the Church and true willingness to give respect and credit, **wherever** respect and credit are due. (Whatever errors may also be present).

This stance is a major thing I have in mind, then with 'Hermetic Catholicism'. This stance involves a discriminating **listening** to many profound thinkers, who stand beyond the Church.

Into this category, I clearly place Rudolf Steiner. But this is not the same as endorsing his vision. Now from different quarters recently, I have heard a concern I think, that I appear to link Steiner too closely to orthodoxy.

Now this webblog HAS contained numerous caveats in this regard. As to the question for example, whether there was accord between Steiner and John Paul's remedy for the world, I said yes AND no.

But perhaps the 'no' needs to be stated more emphatically: there IS a very great deal in Steiner’s Christianity that IS in contradiction with the two thousand year collective spiritual effort of the Holy Church. Such that the question has been raised whether Steiner is Christian at all.

Now this is a question attended by enormity. It is complicated by the fact that Steiner spoke of the event on Calvary as such a momentous happening, that humanity would take untold ages to grasp its full significance. And it is clear that for him, Calvary's true nature is such a transcendent, multifaceted MYSTERY, that it, more than anything, cannot be contained in human concepts - but must be approached from many angles.

Steiner's vision is further complicated by the fact that numerous commentators have amplified it and I, for one, am not at all confident they have been able to follow him accurately.

Nonetheless, one of these commentators, Christopher Bamford, gives us something, which I take as nobly addressing the core of Steiner’s vision. A core, which I take as Christian, no matter how unorthodox Steiner might be in other respects:

“For Steiner … the incarnation of [Christ’s] Being (His birth, death, descent into the Earth, resurrection and ascension) is more than the redemptive turning point in humanity’s relationship to God.

Enormous though that is and hardly to be conceived of, the meaning of Christ’s passage through our human Earth is greater still, and marks a watershed not just in the life of human beings and the earth, but also in the life of the [entities of the archangelic hierarchies] and – dare one say it? – even in the Divine Life itself. …

Christ’s deed continues to transform human nature and the cosmos, as it were, turning these inside-out – so that for human beings today the once transcendent God is no longer beyond, but within a non-exteriorised divine-human interaction, more intimate than our jugular vein."

Now in his rich, thought-provoking comments to this webblog, Fred K observed that Jesuits 'engage the world even if many of them seem paralyzed to make any claim beside peace and justice.'

Now I am not an expert on Jesuitism by any means – but I recently read a book on Christology by a learned Jesuit, whose conclusion seemed to give little meaning to Calvary at all, beyond the pacifism of Jesus – i.e. that the Crucifixion's chief significance lay in the fact that Jesus had refused the path of violence.

Yes there is ‘peace' here and perhaps 'justice’ – but is there the Christian Mystery?

No, my friends, the Christian Mystery has been eclipsed in such thinking. Entirely eclipsed.

And whatever his errors may have been, this is precisely what Rudolf Steiner was concerned about: the Eclipse not only of the Mystery of Calvary, but the loss of Mystery everywhere in the face of more and more prosaic, flat and reductionist ‘answers’ ...

I am aware that many a traditional Catholic will question my listening to those outside the Church. I only hope that they will not question my devotion to this Holy Church, and see that whether I am right or whether I am wrong, I believe in all sincerity that this must form **part** of the way forward.

If my traditional friends remain troubled, I would ask that they listen to these words from that great English Catholic, GK Chesterton:

“I myself am working in defence of civilization side by side with men who call themselves Agnostic, Anglican, Methodist. I trust that in the end they will realize the name of the home they are defending. But they are already defending that home. They are … in the work for … defending the rights of man; and it happens, curiously enough, to be the work for Catholics in the service of the kingdom of God.”

If that bastion of orthodoxy, Chesterton can embrace the good in people everywhere working for Christ, I hope that my traditional friends may come to accept my listening to Hermeticists - Hermeticists who are often are closer to the Christian tradition than current 'Catholic' theology. Even if some (though not all) remain separated from the tradition and the Holy Church in other grievous ways as well.

“Now is the Time …” (to LOVE)

2005-12-21T19:23:00.000Z

Yes, Anonymous d’Outre Tomb did not consider it valid or possible to separate Esoteric and Traditional Christianity. And as I emphasised yesterday, he thought it ***NECESSARY*** that we who aspire to Hermeticism begin to concede this …

‘Begin to concede?!’ It is this and it is MORE than this: ‘Now is the time’ he writes ‘for the Hermetic movement to make true Christian peace with the Church.’ This he says will take – ‘love’. A love, which is ready to abandon pretensions:

“May the pretension of certain Hermeticists evaporate in smoke – namely to have the authority to found small churches under their own leadership, and to set up altar against altar …”

Yes … it will take love that blazes not only with this kind of **humility** – but also with compassion, with warmth, with forgiveness, with understanding, and not least - with determined **commitment**.

The time is now, says the Catholic anonymous author ‘d’Outre Tomb’. And he says it, I feel, with immense HOPE in the face of a world situation he well understood.

And personally, I believe it is this same situation to which Rudolf Steiner pointed, when he said that Rome ‘alone in fact is awake.’ And again, the same situation (as I said some time back), of which the man who is now our Holy Father warns: ‘a future in which it is no longer possible to be truly human’ for ‘the population of an entirely planned and controlled world are going to be inexpressibly lonely.’

Yes all of this is to do with why I believe Anonymous d’Outre Tomb said: the time is now.

To continue in this vein, I resume quoting Rudolf Steiner from 1920. I wish to repeat that no endorsement of Anthroposophy is intended here. I simply feel that Rudolf Steiner in his profound thinking and magnificent love deserves listening to with respect.

Now what we have had to do with so far, is Steiner’s conviction that Rome has long been awake to the fact that a philosophically materialistic civilisation will inevitably lead to disaster. Whether capitalist or communist does not matter. We have then, according to Steiner - three choices before us:

We can continue heading down the road to an ever more soulless and brutal society.

Second, we could choose ‘Roman domination’. In his era, Steiner predicted mainstream Protestantism would wither – but the Catholic Church DID have the resources to offer an alternative to Communist and Capitalist Materialism.

His evaluation of the potency of pre-Vatican II Catholicism will sound truly bizarre to many today. However, my own still fragmentary research suggests the power – for good AND ill - wielded by pre-Vatican II Catholicism is far more significant than is realised.

I have in mind here not only places like the Latin countries, Poland, Ireland – but even America. For example, in his well researched history book American Catholic, Charles Morris documents the ascending influence of Catholic culture in 1940’s and 1950’s America – to the point that many **alarmed**, yes truly alarmed Protestants voiced public concern that America might no longer remain a Protestant society.

‘My fragmentary research’ - this is but a fragment of a larger picture, I am working with. But after a Christmas break, it may figure more in this webblog. I will just say now that I suspect Vatican II helped to derail the ascending Catholic culture again for good AND ill in America and elsewhere. And that far, far more has been lost in the destruction of the liturgy than is ever commonly seen.

Thus in returning to the SECOND choice of ‘Roman domination’ – so-called, Rudolf Steiner said:

“There is **one** [Steiner’s emphasis] power ready to deal with [the fatal consequences of continued Capitalist/Communist materialism] and that is the power of Rome. It is only a question of how it will be done. Rome can establish a dominion; it has the necessary means for this.

Thus the only real question is, not whether Bolshevism or Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie [rightly or wrongly, Steiner saw the threat of global capitalism, principally focused through the Anglo-American establishment] will get the upper hand, the question is whether there will be anti-social chaos [again either Communist OR Capitalist]; Roman domination or …”

And he then goes on in technical Anthroposophical terms to outline his vision of a THIRD way. A vision that is far beyond this single entry’s scope. But which concerns many elements, which have been touched on here in previous weeks – including epistemology.

Essentially, Steiner is saying we must behold the Mystery of Christ again – in a way that is impossible, he maintains, under ‘Roman domination’.

For myself, I cannot help but feel that eighty years after Rudolf Steiner died, Anthroposophists must confront the VAST gulf that exists between Steiner’s hopes for his attempted THIRD way, and the present world, which it seems to me, more and more conforms to his dark ‘Ahrimanic’ vision. A vision that is also indicated by the words of the Holy Father.

Now this dark vision is – again – one, which Steiner is claiming that certain Christians – both Anthroposophical and Catholic – could clearly see. I believe the Roman Catholic author, Anonymous d’Outre Tomb could also see this vision – and that this is why he said to us: ‘Now is the time.’

Now is the time in which one can contemplate a FOURTH way. A way that is not Capitalist/Communist materialist domination. That is not Catholic domination. That is not the failure of Steiner’s vision.

But something else again. It is something that I have been approaching throughout the last weeks of this blog. It is something that John Paul intimates with a Church that ‘proposes’ – and vigorously so – but ‘never imposes’. It is something intimated in ‘now is the time … to make true Christian peace with the Church’ … through LOVE.

But I will confess to you, my friends, that it is also something still fragmentary in my own vision. But which I shall be contemplating over these Holy Nights to come. A little more will be said these next two days, and then we shall take a break …

To Heal the World …

2005-12-20T17:10:00.000Z

Rudolf Steiner … John Paul the Great … Two Great Doctors of Humanity – with a similar diagnosis, but a world of difference in treatment.

Or is there? The answer it seems to me is both yes and no. Now whole volumes could and I feel, will need to be written about the worlds within worlds I approach here. (To date, the greatest one, which we have, is unquestionably, Meditations on the Tarot).

But in this humble space, I can indicate a few fruits of my own reflection in this regard. As Unknown Friends in the comments to this webblog have most helpfully pointed out, the post-1958 trajectory of Rome IS very different from what Steiner knew in his day.

In 1958, John XXIII ascended the throne of Peter, and proceeded to convene the Second Vatican Council. Nothing has been the same since.

And rumours of a restoration of pre-Vatican II Catholicism are flawed at best. As this webblog has endeavoured to illustrate, in certain respects at least, John Paul was far more radical than any of his predecessors.

And this is not least the case with his 1984 call for the Church to be a 'house of glass' with full transparency and again, a Church that only ‘proposes [but] imposes nothing’.

There are many paradoxes with John Paul’s pontificate – which hopefully can be addressed somewhat as we proceed. For now, let it suffice to say that I for one, have no doubt at all about John Paul’s IMMENSE sincerity.

His work for freedom in the Church spans decades - from his own Vatican II innovations as Polish bishop to his long, truly **extraordinary** Papacy.

Yes, what is meant by freedom here may be a little different from a reductionist idea of ‘negative liberty’ (present, for example, in Anglo-American libertarianism) which seeks to overcome authority as much as possible.

For John Paul certainly does not divorce freedom from a not-intimidated, but rather **voluntary** and **conscious** obedience to authority.

But John Paul’s **massive** accomplishment also stands in contrast with the anti-modernist Catholic Church Rudolf Steiner had in mind, a church of which he could accurately say in his day: ‘in the Catholic Church, there is no such thing as revolt’.

Here is Rudolf Steiner again from the lectures we have drawn upon. Steiner is speaking of a time gone by in which ‘free discussion’ was still possible in the less centralized Church of an earlier era: “This free discussion has gradually been completely eliminated. Free discussion was something, which the Catholic Church could not stand. And why not?

Because quite a new consciousness was arising in humanity. This was the transformation of consciousness in humanity, which took place … in the middle of the fifteenth century.

The human being wants ever more and more to form his own judgment from the depths of his own soul. In the Middle Ages that was not so. Humanity then had a kind of communal consciousness, and only a few learned people, the real scholars could get beyond that.

They were able to evolve out of this [pattern] because they had been trained in Scholasticism [or]rabbinical teaching. In general, however, humanity’s consciousness was uniform. It was a community consciousness, a family consciousness. But the individual consciousness was developing more and more …”

Thus Rudolf Steiner is essentially calling for a free Christian spirituality in the modern era, which lamentably, he sees impossible under ‘Roman domination’.

Now I want to re-emphasise here the phrase I used above: ‘worlds within worlds’. I am hardly competent to address all of these worlds and continually work to deepen my understanding of them. In the upcoming Holy Nights of Christmas, I shall be pondering these things as deeply as I can.

More tomorrow. Today I will just say that Rudolf Steiner considered free esoteric Christianity impossible with Rome. But decades later, Anonymous d’Outre Tomb, considered this not only possible, but **NECESSARY**. Necessary I think, for so much, not least the healing and hope of the world ...

And in the very first, opening paradigmatic sentences of his Magnum Opus, he indicated to the ‘Cher Ami Inconnu’, the dear Unknown Friend, his work for a way ‘que unit l’esprit de libre recherché au respect de la Tradition’ – unites, that is, the spirit of FREE research with respect for the tradition …

Steiner and John Paul: A Certain Accord

2005-12-19T20:40:00.000Z

If you have joined me these last days, you have joined me in listening to Rudolf Steiner. Rudolf Steiner has been speaking here of the Expulsion of Spirit from the rationalist and empiricist impulses of naturalism in the last centuries.

The result is a world ever more stripped of Soul and Mystery, in favour of functionalism and utilitarianism – as I have been asserting since this webblog commenced.

Rudolf Steiner forecast that if such a state of affairs were allowed to continue, the result could only be the greatest decadence and bondage of the human spirit in the centuries to come. And what was needed most of all was ‘the Mystery of Golgotha’ the Mystery that **entered** our world two thousand years ago …

As stated, Rudolf Steiner also said in 1920 that Rome ‘alone in fact is awake’ to the tragic social consequences for a civilisation increasingly stripped of Mystery and Christic Mystery. I will return to Steiner tomorrow, but today I am going to pause a moment to listen to the more recent voice of Rome in this regard. A voice, which I think can be heard as resonating with Steiner’s, in many regards, at least.

More specifically, I turn to comments John Paul II offered in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, a bestselling book and perhaps the most well read papal document of all time. The fact that John Paul broke all papal precedent to offer his thinking in this groundbreaking format, suggests that he held the contents he selected for this slim volume in the highest importance …

“[Questions of modern doubt regarding God] stem from … purely rationalist … philosophy – the history of which begins with Descartes, who split thought from existence and identified existence with reason itself. ‘Cogito, ergo sum’. (‘I think, therefore I am’).”

Such rationalism, John Paul claims, determines "***the history of European thought after Descartes***. I put Descartes in the forefront because he marks the beginning of a new era in the history of European thought and because this philosopher, who is certainly among the greatest that France has given the world, inaugurated the ***great anthropocentric shift in philosophy***. "I think, therefore I am" … is the motto of modern rationalism.

All the rationalism of the last centuries-as much in its Anglo-Saxon expression as in its Continental expression in Kantianism, Hegelianism, and the German philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to Husserl and Heidegger - can be considered a continuation and an expansion of Cartesian positions.

[In which] only that which corresponds to human thought makes sense. The objective truth of this thought is not as important, as the fact that something exists in human consciousness.

We find ourselves on the threshold of **modern immanentism** and **subjectivism**. Descartes marks the beginning of the development of the exact and natural sciences as well as of the humanistic sciences in their new expression.

He turns his back on metaphysics and concentrates on the philosophy of knowledge. Kant is the most notable representative of this movement.

Though the father of modern rationalism certainly cannot be blamed for the move away from Christianity, it is difficult not to acknowledge that he created the climate in which, in the modern era, such an estrangement became possible. It did not happen right away, but gradually.

In fact, about 150 years after Descartes, all that was **fundamentally Christian** in the tradition of European thought **had already been pushed aside**.

This was the time of the Enlightenment in France, when **pure rationalism held sway**. The French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, knocked down the altars dedicated to Christ, tossed crucifixes into the streets, introduced the cult of the goddess Reason. On the basis of this, there was a proclamation of **Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity**.

The spiritual patrimony and, in particular, the moral patrimony of Christianity were thus torn from their evangelical foundation. In order to restore Christianity to its full vitality, it is essential that these return to that foundation.

Nevertheless, the process of turning away from the God of the Fathers, from the God of Jesus Christ, from the Gospel, and from the Eucharist did not bring about a rupture with a God who exists outside of the world.

In fact, **the God of the deists was always present**; perhaps … in the work of Voltaire and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and even more so in Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which marked the beginning of modern physics.

This God, however, is decidedly **a God outside of the world**. To a mentality shaped by a naturalistic consciousness of the world, a God present in the world appeared useless; similarly, a God working through man turned out to be useless to modern knowledge, to the modern science of man, which examines the workings of the conscious and the subconscious.

***The rationalism of the Enlightenment put to one side the true God - in particular, God the Redeemer***. [i.e. Christ, who is now, since the Mystery of Golgotha as Steiner would say, IN the world …]

The consequence was that ***man was supposed to live by his reason alone, as if God did not exist***. Not only was it necessary to leave God out of the objective knowledge of the world, since the existence of a Creator or of Providence was in no way helpful to science, it was also necessary to act as if God did not exist, as if God were not interested in the world.

****The rationalism of the Enlightenment was able to accept a God outside of the world primarily because it was an unverifiable hypothesis. It was crucial, however, that such a God be expelled from the world****.

(All words that I have emphasized by ***, are in italics in the original).

Rome ‘Throws Down the Gauntlet’ …

2005-12-16T21:44:00.000Z

I want to move in the direction of clarifying what it is **specifically** that Rudolf Steiner claimed Rome ‘alone’ was awake to.

For today, I will focus on more comments from the 1920 lecture I quoted yesterday, and the talk that followed it. When the webblog resumes Monday, I plan to expand on these themes. Again, I implore you to bear in mind all the **caveats** I voiced yesterday, in regards to what I now quote:

“Since the middle of the fifteenth century, what has appeared as philosophy, science, public opinion, world conception, apart from the Roman Catholic Church, is for, the most part void of spirit."

In this, Steiner includes much at very least of, "the natural scientific trend inaugurated by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler ... out of which Darwin, Huxley and so on have blown the last remnant of spirit …”

But Steiner contends that an all-dominating worldview devoid of spiritual mystery can only bring ruin. As he says in the lecture that follows this one:

“For if only the materialistic knowledge that has been developed in the last three to four centuries should continue to permeate human evolution … the present social chaos of the civilized world will repeatedly recur …

What science has been able to give humanity, since the middle of the fifteenth century has certainly been sufficient for the making of technical discoveries, has been sufficient to spread over the earth a network of commerce and business intercourse, but it does not suffice for the creation of social arrangements …

As long as an external, material science is alone recognized, so long will humanity be in the grip of chaotic social conditions.”

‘Chaotic social conditions’ may be understated here. From all I have read, I believe Steiner would classify both the Communist and Capitalist empires that continued to ascend after his death in 1925, as having the most **grievous** of social conditions. In chilling lectures with astonishing foresight, he foretells a grave future for a humanity based on either Materialistic Communism or Capitalism.

Steiner would affirm, I believe, that our society is still running on a spiritual ‘capital’ accumulated in the past – before the rise of a modern epistemology and science that marginalised the Spirit. But this ‘capital’ is now being rapidly exhausted. And a society based only on materialistic conceptions can only grow ever worse.

I return now to the original lecture. Though most regrettably I feel, Steiner labels Rome’s direction as ‘extremely harmful’, he also says: "it must be recognised that the Catholic Church has shown great foresight …

The Catholic Church long ago foresaw the [modern] social condition … the Catholic Church took her own measures to make her influences felt in these social conditions …

In face of the rising tide of naturalism [Rome] throws down the gauntlet before all this rising materialism … It demonstrates the only wakeful consciousness within our sleeping civilization …

Modern civilization is asleep … Rome is awake … Rome was wide awake and made in advance her necessary preparations … That Rome is awake is revealed by the mighty drama [of the seven decades previous to 1920] unrolled in the [1854] definition of the dogma of the Immaculate conception; in the [1864] Syllabus condemning eighty modern truths; in the declaration of the Infallibility of the Pope; in the naming of Thomas Aquinas as the official philosopher of the Catholic priesthood; and finally in the anti-modernist Oath."

Now, Rudolf Steiner, it must be said, condemns this trajectory. Nonetheless it is based, as he says in the next lecture, on ‘magnificent foresight … [with] a real spiritual basis, a spiritual foundation that is rooted in a real spiritual life and not in mere abstraction."

Now, my quoting Rudolf Steiner at length should not be taken as an endorsement of his views. For example, I lament most deeply Steiner’s assertion that the Catholic Church had nothing left to offer humanity. As far as I can see, this only creates tragedy at the present time ...

I reproduce his comments, then, not to propagate Anthroposophy, but in my belief that, for friends of a Hermetic persuasion concerned with the same issues as myself, they may suggest most useful avenues of reflection. As they have done for me. Webblog will resume on Monday with further considerations in this territory.

The Viper’s Sting: Rudolf Steiner on Philosophical Materialism

2005-12-15T12:02:00.000Z

Today I return to Rudolf Steiner, philosophical materialism and the viper’s sting. That is, Steiner call to vividly **feel** as though we are attacked by a viper! I am thus going to begin quoting from a lecture given by this Christian master in 1920 …

In reading this, I beg readers to bear in mind what has been said from the start of this webblog, about the dangers of one-sidedness. That is, what Bohr had in mind when he said: “The opposite of one great truth may well be another great truth …’

Inherent, then, to what commences today are many paradoxes. For example, that regarding Steiner’s position on Catholicism. Now I have no wish to mislead readers in anyway. Although Steiner could appear respectful of Catholicism in what I will be quoting – it must be said that the overwhelming mass of his material is decidedly negative regarding the Catholic faith. At least, the Catholic faith of his era …

I will not enter into this matter in detail. It is already well documented and – as far as I can see - has given rise to a tragic situation. Thus I have no wish at all to echo Steiner’s condemnation of the Holy Church. Nonetheless, I do not want to mislead and a little more is said in a comment to this entry.

Still more apparent contradictions abound. Thus, it might appear that either Rudolf Steiner or myself condemn the rise of Natural Science. But that is not the case, at all. Rudolf Steiner certainly celebrated this rise.

To appreciate Steiner, one must think deeply and endeavour to hold the opposites continually in mind. Similarly, Steiner’s horror of Communism here should not in anyway be read as a sympathy for Capitalism. And now I quote the master:

“I should be interested to know how many people felt as if stung by a viper when they read a certain sentence [which had recently appeared in the press]. I should really like to know how many people, when reading this felt stung by a viper! The sentence runs:

‘Religion, which represents a fantastic reflex in the minds of human beings concerning their relations one to another and to nature, is doomed to natural decay through the victorious growth of the scientific, clear and naturalistic grasp of reality which is bound to develop parallel with the establishment of a planned society.’ This sentence is to be found in an article on the measures taken by Lenin and Trotsky against the Russian Catholic Church …

One knows for a certainty that the number of Lenin’s opponents who feel as if stung by a viper on reading such a sentence is very small.

I want to emphasise this as not being without significance, because it brings out to what an extent modern humanity passes **lightly** over things, usually **asleep** – how it passes over the weightiest facts, facts which are **decisive** for the life of humankind on this earth …

But the Roman Catholic Church is awake, **she ALONE in fact is awake**, and is working systematically against the approaching storm …

What is it that is to bring about the decay of the old religions one and all? It is all that has arisen during the last three to four centuries as modern science, enlightened science in the educational institutions of civilized humanity.

Bourgeois teaching and bourgeois methods of administration have been adopted by the proletariat. What the teachers of the universities and high schools have put into the souls of humanity, comes out through Lenin and Trotsky. They bring out nothing but what is already taught in the institutions of civilized humanity.

My dear friends, today … the primary necessity is no longer to allow our children and youth to be taught what has been taught right up to the twentieth century in our universities and in our secondary and elementary schools …

That is why one has to say that whoever reads a declaration such as the one I have just quoted, even if it only appears in a few lines of an article, should feel as if stung by a viper; for it is as if the *whole situation of present day civilization* were illumined by a flash of lightning (Emphasis mine).”

I beg friends to delay judgment, while I unpack more from Steiner in the days to come. Again I wish to stress many polarities in his thinking. Rome, he claims, is not the answer, though Rome alone is awake to the heartbreaking trajectory he depicts. Materialistic Communism is decried here- but Steiner was equally lucid about the alternate threat posed to the world by Materialistic Capitalism.

And even though he felt that certain consequences of the development of natural science had had the most tragic of effects, he certainly also celebrated humanity’s growth through reason, the Enlightenment and natural science …

All the Pope’s Men (Book Review: Part Four)

2005-12-14T20:11:00.000Z

John L. Allen’s book is a book of many, many facets – all aimed at creating clarification, mutual understanding and peace.

In my review, I have emphasized some aspects more than others. For example, I have stressed Allen’s effort to hear and represent the perspective of Catholic traditionalists. For it seems to me in a world awash with media hype and secularist assumptions, that this latter voice is almost entirely drowned out in favour of the former …

In conclusion, however, I wish to emphasise that as someone coming from a liberal American Catholic newspaper, and a liberal background himself, Allen clearly understands very different positions and his book is a call for understanding in **every quarter** – as when he writes: ‘exchanges between Rome and America would be more constructive if both sides were to drop the pretense that they know the real motives of the other, and consider instead their actual aims and fears.'

At times, I feel Allen’s inspiration is near angelic. As an example, I will simply turn to one last passage, regarding divisions between liberal and traditional Catholics – which has flared up in the U.S. after the sexual abuse crisis, involving perhaps as much as 4% of the American priesthood.

As Allen points out, such a figure is disproportionately and tragically high. (It is perhaps around 2% in analogous non-Catholic contexts of authority). Yet Allen points out that both sides of the Church seek healing very sincerely – but often they can barely communicate. As Allen writes:

“Both sides in this conversation would feel more at ease if they could somehow assuage the worries of the other. Americans often suspect that when Rome talks about reform, they spiritualise the concept in order to avoid any substantive changes. In truth, the Holy See [is] not closed to the possibility of structural changes …

In the Vatican … suspicion is often that Americans know only the language of political power and their reform agenda is more akin to a putsch than a purification.

American Catholics would reduce anxiety levels in Rome if they would learn to speak in a more spiritual argot. For example, since forgiveness and healing are essential … to the sex abuse crisis, perhaps the various groups … could promote a nationwide return to the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

If the Vatican were to see churches across the United States filled Catholics desiring to make confessions, imploring God’s grace … it would speak volumes about the underlying ecclesiology of the reform movement.

Further, it would help to avoid phrasing public activism in antagonistic terms, as if ‘the laity versus the clergy’ or ‘the left versus the right’. Obviously no one is pretending that pious exercises by themselves can solve the sexual abuse crisis... Yet … to heal, an examination of conscience by all parties is essential. Prayers for forgiveness and grace are never wasted. The more the reform movement can be visibly rooted in faithful, committed Catholicism, the better."

There is great, great deal of good will and sobriety – calm, caring soberness - in Allen’s book. Things that are desperately needed in a culture of increasing stress and hype.

If you care about the Catholic Church, if you care about its mission in the world, I can think of few better things to do than read this book and if you agree with me, recommend it to as many of your friends as possible.

Widely circulated, the kind of material in this book, so lovingly, fairly and articulately expressed, could do both Church and world an enormous power of good. `Blessed are the peacemakers.' Blessed be John L. Allen.

All the Pope’s Men (Book Review: Part Three)

2005-12-13T19:04:00.000Z

Although I mainly quoted Allen yesterday about what is seen as a Catholic-Calvinist America divide, I would suggest far more is at issue here. And again, that Allen’s very fine effort can help to stimulate our cultural imagination in many unexpected ways – especially for those of us in the Anglophone world, who have little or no experience of cultures not of Protestant and secular heritage.

To illustrate, I note what Allen writes of Italian society:

“Despite proud assertions of its identity as uno loco laico, a lay republic [Italy] has never really separated Church and State …

The Church remains in a position to move votes … There isn’t a candidate in Italy who would say no to a picture with the Pope … For every issue that comes up in Italian national life, one of the first thing journalists will do is seek out the opinion of a member of the College of Cardinals …

Italian culture gives clerics every reason to conclude that nothing is outside their purview … Their opinions on every conceivable issue, from cloning to tomorrow’s soccer matches are solicited and weighed with great seriousness …

On the cultural front, Italy is many ways still an intact Catholic society in which the Church’s liturgical seasons still shape the annual calendar and in which Catholic custom’s and vocabulary are part of the ordinary public consciousness.

People in Italy know when it’s Lent, they know when it’s Advent … Cab drivers can explain the difference between Franciscans and Dominicans … Catholicism is in the marrow of the place.”

Certainly my own experience of Catholic Ireland, mirrors Allen’s picture of Italy. Although Ireland rapidly secularises, and there is bitter opposition to Catholicism in certain quarters – this bitter opposition exists in large part **because** Catholicism still counts as a major cultural force.

People can get very worked up about the Church here – precisely because this is still a culture in which the Church can mount an effective critique of the secularist and materialist capitalist shadow.

It may boggle many a secular mind to realise this is a country in which, just over ten years ago, Playboy magazine and divorce were still illegal. (Divorce was legalized by referendum in 1995 – but 49.7% voted against it. Before that the legalisation of divorce would have clearly been contrary to the will of the people.)

Now in speaking of ‘effective critique of the secularist and materialist capitalist shadow’ – I do not wish anyone to suppose I endorse every single aspect of Catholic culture. Nor that I think that Catholicism is without considerable shadow.

In a fallen world, any institution with a two thousand year embracing 1.1 billion people – nearly one sixth of humanity – will clearly cast a considerable shadow. It is my contention however that this Catholic Church is also casting far, far more light and hope, than many people will be able to credit.

And the incapacity to credit this, will be particularly true in countries where there is little Catholic tradition – and I fear often almost no sense of **any cultural alternative whatsoever** to constructing a society around an increasingly shallow media world – rooted less and less in tradition and thinking and more and more on a corporate agenda of keeping us all ‘entertained’.

I know that the picture here of highly Catholicised societies sends chills down many a spine. But I wish that the power and manipulation wielded by the Corporate Priesthood sent far, far more of a shudder - a cold shudder - down our collective spine.

Now, in 1920 Rudolf Steiner once read out a sentence which illustrated, he said, the consequences of materialistic education and suggested that if we were really, truly awake, we would hear these kinds of things – and feel as though a viper has stung us! If this webblog should lead any of us to **feel** more acutely the viper’s sting of secularist materialism, it will not have been in vain …

Be that as it may, I hold Allen’s effort in the highest regard. For raising awareness of cultural alternatives and stimulating imagination – Allen’s is a book that deserves to be deeply listened to. It is also a very worthy effort on other fronts, as well. As I will indicate in hopefully concluding this extended review tomorrow.

All the Pope’s Men (Book Review: Part Two)

2005-12-12T19:21:00.000Z

As I say, much of Allen’s self-declared aim is to render communication between the Catholic Church and the Anglophone world (again, Ireland excepted) much better. And to do this, it is necessary to **stimulate imagination** by asking the parties concerned to **really imagine** the very different grounds on which they stand.

Without this, as when Americans (who as an American himself, Allen largely has in mind here) simply assume Catholic values are identical to their own, there can be no impetus, no call to the imagination.

That is, Allen suggests conservative Americans often simply assume that conservative Catholics are the same as they are. Again: ‘pro-life, anti-communist’ – and that’s that. But Allen here provides a stimulus to imagination – by showing what a vast gulf really exists here.

Rather than say much more today, I’m simply going to quote more from Allen’s very fine book:

“Cold War politics made temporary bedfellows out of the Vatican and the US, and what is re-emerging now is the caution and reluctance that have always characterized Vatican attitudes about America. In other words, perhaps [the cold war] alliance … was [an] aberration …

From this point of view, the clash of cultures most exacerbated by the Iraq War may not be between Christianity and Islam, but between the Holy See and the United States.

The war [helped to suggest] to Vatican observers that the ghost of John Calvin is alive and well in American culture …

The deepest thinkers in the Vatican have always harbored their doubts about the United States, seeing it as a culture forged by Calvinism and hostile to a genuinely Catholic ethos … One archbishop put it this way: ‘Americans have a bad combination of youth, wealth, power, isolation and very little serious Catholic intellectual tradition …

Key Vatican officials … have long worried about aspects of American society – its exaggerated individualism, its hyperconsumer spirit, its relegation of religion to the private sphere, its Calvinist ethos. A fortiori, they worry about a world in which America is in an unfettered position to impose this set of cultural values on everyone else.

The Calvinist concepts of the total depravity of the damned, the unconditional election of God’s favoured, and the manifestation of election through earthly success, all seem to play a powerful role in shaping American cultural psychology.

The Iraq episode confirmed Vatican officials in these convictions. When Vatican officials hear Bush talk about the evil of terrorism and the American mission to destroy that evil, they sometimes perceive a worrying kind of dualism …

After Cardinal Pio Laghi returned to Rome from his last minute appeal to Bush, just before the Iraq War began, he told John Paul II that he sensed ‘something Calvinistic’ in the president’s iron determination …

[One Vatican official] told me he sees a ‘clash of civilisations’ between the United States and the Holy See, between a worldview that is essentially Calvinistic and one that is shaped by Catholicism. ‘We have a concept of sin and evil too’ he said, ‘but we also believe in grace and redemption’ …

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago made a similar statement [saying] that U.S. citizens ‘are culturally Calvinist, even those who profess the Catholic faith. [American society] is the civil counterpart of a faith based on private interpretation of scripture and private experience of God.’ He contrasted this kind of society with one based on the Catholic [focus on] community and a vision of life greater than the individual."

Yes, Allen’s book is largely oriented to America. And as I say, to helping Americans really imagine the very different place the Vatican is really ‘coming from’. For this alone, it has enormous value. But I hope, in due course, to suggest that his book is most valuable as a stimulation to our cultural imagination in many other ways as well …

Shock! Pope is Catholic!

2005-12-09T17:56:00.000Z

Change of plan. When this webblog resumes Monday, I intend to return to my review of John L Allen’s most important work.

Today though, I hope you may forgive a detour, which will prepare the stage for that continued review. That is, I want to say more about why I value so highly what Allen trying to do, in addressing the Anglophone world’s (Ireland excepted) incomprehension of the Vatican.

Among my reasons for applauding Allen is that I see a poverty of imagination in our culture. As though we simply cannot imagine any other alternative to our society, than it being built on the basis of the lowest-common-denominator of our experience: logic and empiricism. Which, as I have said, Rudolf Steiner so eloquently warned would lead to disaster.

Yes, friends, so that you are clear ‘where I am coming from’ I will say that I am haunted, haunted by Rudolf Steiner’s vivid portrayal of the ascent of ruthless capitalism on the back of Cartesian-Kantian epistemology and its heirs …

I am Catholic and I do not support many aspects of Steiner’s Anthroposophy. But I am haunted by what I take to be his undeniable foresight, as to a continued loss of soul in the world … with the gravest of consequences.

As to what I am calling a ‘poverty of imagination’, I think I can illustrate by turning attention to a common bewilderment about Catholicism, which can be regularly observed everywhere in the non-Catholic world – and as I have indicated before, particularly in the secular countries of Protestant heritage.

A bewilderment, which it seems to me, reflects an **unconscious assumption** that the Catholic does or at least should, think along the same lines as the non-Catholic, which conveniently ignores the fact that to be an accepting Catholic means to have one’s worldview shaped by very different factors than that of Secularism, or even Protestantism.

Now with the election of Benedict XVI earlier this year, this ‘unconscious assumption’ came into much sharper focus. At least for me. I can illustrate what I mean by referencing a piece by Gerard Baker in the London Times following the Papal election.

Commenting on ‘the simple incredulousness at the very idea that a man such as Joseph Ratzinger could possibly have become leader of the universal Church’ Baker went on to say:

“Pundits for whom the Catholic Church has long been an object of anthropological curiosity fringed with patronising ridicule have really let themselves go since the new pontiff emerged. Indeed most of the coverage I have seen or read could be neatly summarised as: ‘Cardinals elect Catholic Pope. World in Shock’.”

What Baker essentially suggests is that the non-Catholic world is simply unprepared to imagine the dynamics shaping contemporary Catholicism.

But I would say the problem goes far, far deeper than that. Our secular world is not simply unprepared to imagine Catholicism - it seems unprepared to imagine ANYTHING OTHER than its own perhaps-suicidal trajectory …

To be continued Monday.