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Today is winter solstice. In my little town we’ll have daylight just over nine hours. This summer it was closer to fifteen.
Now, going forward, instead of darkening, the world becomes a little lighter and warmer. Things will grow differently; they will create differently.
More of my ancestors celebrated solstice than Christmas. But when I celebrate Christmas, ghosts of their rituals and festivities, inform me. There is no separation anywhere.
This morning, I nodded at them all as I sipped coffee on the back porch, awaiting the light in which writing becomes possible.
This morning, they nodded back. This morning they said, “hey Sean, what did you mean by “ecclesial reckoning?”
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The phrase “ecclesial reckoning” stunned me a little. It stunned me when I wrote it – I didn’t want to see it. But this morning, my family said, “don’t look away.”
Sawicki is less interested in a therapeutic model for its own sake because of the risk it will devolve into something merely personal, effacing the necessity of ecclesial reckoning. Whatever illusion resurrection penetrates, it must also takes with it the illusion of separate interests. Do you want to see the Lord or not?
I mean yes, I want to see the Lord. I want to look at the Lord. But no, I do not want to go to church. Fuck church.
I mean that.
I know what some folks say here: fine, don’t go to church. You’re an adult. The world doesn’t care. You do you.
But that’s not what I’m saying. Or rather, that’s not what the writing is asking.
The writing invites a “reckoning,” in the archaic sense of “settling up.” There’s a debt somewhere, somewhere justice is being measured and paid out. Expectations and obligations abound but not in the clear light of day and reason but deeper in the psyche, where Grendel lives and great floods begin and certain hugs and kisses have to suffice for lifetimes.
Sometimes I say to people who are lost in moral quandaries, strangling in scrupulosity, or all tied up in someone else’s text, “get right with your God.”
I mean, figure out your moral and ethical stance and then live by it. What does God want? What is God asking? There are answers to those questions but to reach them you have to realize in a deep and sustainable way that a lot of the interior welter is pitched against realizing those answers.
If, when someone asks, what does God ask of me, and you cite A Course in Miracles or some other gospel or self-help guru, then you have not yet gone deep enough. You are still collaborating with ego.
God is incredibly specific and totally transparent: I say this from experience.
When I sit quietly with God – when I go to the well, when I kneel at the altar, when I sip from the confluence of the Alpha and Omega – I do so always in fear and trembling. Why? Because God invites me to live in a way that heals my heart and the world’s but the world doesn’t see it as healing and so actively – sometimes murderously – opposes it.
Love is often mistaken for weakness, naivete, and disorder. To ego and ego’s works, love is a threat. A world constructed by guilt and fear is not going to just say, oh thank the Good Lord, Jesus is here.
Jesus wasn’t killed to atone for our sins or for any other fancy theological reason. He was killed because he lived a life of love that threatened the dominant political and religious culture and so they tortured and killed him. They always do.
The crucifix is no joke, nor is it merely an historical event. And absent the crucifixion, you don’t get resurrection, and it’s resurrection that joins the circle and unites us with all Creation.
Sawicki says, in order to make sense of resurrection, we have to interpret something. We have to learn how to see in a certain way, a new way. That’s the point of all our practice: we want a new way of seeing – a new way of making meaning together out of our living.
The Holy Spirit’s goal gives one interpretation, meaningful to you and to your brother. Thus can you communicate with him, and he with you (T-30.VII.6:2-3).
Sawicki says – it’s the part of her writing that I resist, set aside, it’s the part I forget – that you need a community in which to teach and learn this new way of seeing.
Also, this teaching and learning reflects an active pedagogy – it’s not just we feed the mind with beautiful scripture and deep metaphysics. It includes – it must include – the body.
Crucifixion and resurrection are things that happen to and through bodies. Miracles and meals – the crux of the historical Jesus’s practice of justice and mercy – are also things that happen to and through bodies.
I’m not saying throw A Course in Miracles away! I’m saying, it’s wrong in a vital way about mind/body dualism. But “wrong” is really a cry for help, one to which we are personally called to respond. We want to see it differently, right?
I will write more about this “cry for help” elsewhere later. Here, this morning, I simply want to stand in the light cast by the phrase “ecclesial reckoning.”
What is God asking me here? And is it separate from what God is asking you here?
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Jack Gilbert’s poem “Island and Figs” is a good poem to read on winter solstice. Everything in it is dense and bright and solid – the sun, the rocks, the stone. Even the old woman gathering snails owns an ancient quality, as if she has been there a thousand times a thousand years working to feed us.
Here is how Gilbert ends his poem:
The heart
never fits
the journey.
Always
one ends
first.
Next to Emily Dickinson, Jack Gilbert is my favorite poet. Nobody taught me more about how to see the world by living in it a certain way. My debt (there’s that word again) is large.
And yet.
In Advent, on Solstice – heart weary, mind at range – I wonder. I wonder if Gilbert’s assumption is an error. What if that to which the word “heart” can sometimes point never ends? What if “journey” is merely “seeing another way together?”
I wonder about this fight I’ve been having for going on sixty years. I wonder who am I fighting? I wonder if my enemy is as lonely as I am? I wonder if he, too, wants a reason to lay down his arms?
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I wonder if he, too, has spent a lifetime looking at women – even a woman – waiting for Her to look back and see him? Sawicki again: “The word that became flesh was yes and Mary said it” (Seeing the Lord 326).
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The long night ends but this light, my God, it blinds me.
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Ah, Sean, so good to be with you this Solstice and read your thoughts. Each line, paragraph, a veritable prompt for a several page inquiry for me. This point into words a swimming angst of mine..… “ Love is often mistaken for weakness, naivete, and disorder. To ego and ego’s works, love is a threat. A world constructed by guilt and fear is not going to just say, oh thank the Good Lord, Jesus is here.”. I’m so grateful for your sharing your wrestling with the Oneness as I have been struggling for a long to come in from the cold. Thank you ✨
You’re welcome, Denise. Thank you for being here and sharing. So much of this “journey” or “learning” or “awakening” or whatever really does come down to just remembering that we are together, it’s okay to remember that, live that way. I really appreciate “struggling for a long time to come in from the cold” – I hear this, it’s my struggle too. Thank you – I’m very grateful for the companionship. Thank you 🙏🙏
~ Sean
I share your feelings about church, Sean. Your post gets to the heart of the matter: what is God asking of me? In the last couple of years, I’ve figured out it’s just about being present for somebody – somebody who has lost her husband, had a flooded home, or lost his job. Yes, I love A Course In Miracles, but we learn our way back to God through the body, and relationships. When I seek it, the answer is always the same – it’s love, just love. It cuts through all the BS thoughts, feelings, and excuses. I think that’s what Jesus did too.
Yeah, I think that is close to the historical Jesus too – the ability to just cut through the conditioning, the pathology, the politics and the rest of it, and just say, we’re family. We’re one. We’re here for each other, we have to be.
I have felt your close reading these past weeks here and I really appreciate it, especially your willingness to hear and not be afraid of what I am saying – and trying to clarify – about A Course in Miracles. I really appreciate your presence, Susan – thank you 🙏🙏
~ Sean
And church man . . . I mean, yes, the hell with it but . . . also apparently there is something there that needs to be looked at and healed so . . .
God bless you Sean.
I read this twice, and the second time ore doors and insights opened to me. No doubt third and forth readings will peel back more of your onion to me.
I wonder why the people I know that are most like me, that feel like they are walking my community path, are all middle aged, female and single. Is this my projection or my calling? Does my ego invite me to them, or does love call to an expanded expression through them? Am I blinded to love by my resistance to them, or my attraction?
What is a soul mate? How is community to be executed? Is the journey I’m on solo and lonely regardless of which path I take, or am I depriving myself of unity with God through others?
Is all of this just murderous egoism, word salad to mask a great simplicity that lies right in front of me?
ACIM tells me that ‘I need do nothing’, and that doing anything requires a body, which is illusionary, and untrue.
Oh! To live in the Holy Instant and cast ask this turmoil off!
Sometimes it seems so simple. But most of the time I’m really conflicted about where I am.
Maybe I just need to ask more of the Holy Spirit, and think less…
Those are often my questions as well, Bernie. And yes, often, the answer is a variant of “think less and give more attention to the Holy Spirit.”
Most of my readers are women; I don’t always understand that. But it’s always been true, even when I was discovering myself as a writer in my early teens. God and Jesus both code male for me, but the path to which they direct me is female. I’ve always known this.
But I am still learning what it means in application. I am still learning how to walk it.
Gilbert was an interesting poet in this regard. I remember going to hear him read in Northampton (mid eighties, Green Street Cafe, where I’d bought his beautiful little book Kochan) long ago and he read a poem about being on the beach and admiring the breasts of nearby women. Several women left the reading then. I felt utterly naked in that moment. If women weren’t comfortable – if even one women was uncomfortable – then I needed to leave as well, right? I needed not to let MY body be where women felt objectified, unseen, unsafe in THEIR bodies.
But I stayed. I think about that reading a lot. I was conflicted then and, in a lot of ways, remain conflicted now.
Your comment on the holy instant reminded me of something Kimberley wrote yesterday, exploring her own experience of that clarity in a challenging conversation:
She is perceiving a deeper level of dialogue than the words or their ostensible meaning. It’s an allowance for her, not an accomplishment. It’s a pointer I’m still reflecting on.
I wonder if at that poetry reading I was cooperating with faithlessness? Or was I being faithful?
I remember how unalarmed Gilbert was as the woman stood up and walked out, as if he understood and respected what they were doing, but also insisted on being able to speak what was, for him, truth. I don’t know.
Thanks for being here and sharing, Bernie. I’m very grateful 🙏🙏
~ Sean
Sean,
Yes, I think that the feminine carnal form of love has a deeper unifying power than that of the masculine power based form. I think that’s why more women are attracted to the unifying love of Jesus. However both sexes still house deep insecurities about expressing non-monogamous universal expressions of love. That kind of expression can get one crucified! At least that’s what my ego (and my wife) warns me about 🙂
A man needs his feminine side, and too many men are terrified of relaxing into love and forgiveness, seeing this as weakness, mistaking surrender to love as disempowerment, thereby closing themself off to the power of universal love.
But I do think that men have an important role still. Encouraging the feminine, and then guiding that spirit with nurturing love and protection.
We need everyone, as equals, as partners, as a community of love, without ego, but with eternal love and patience.
Men need women to open up their hearts and teach us. Women need men to encourage them to express that feminine form of love, to all of us. At least that’s what I think.
Thank you, Bernie. This all makes a lot of sense to me. A community of love – agape love – which we create together, teach and learn togehter. Thank you – I appreciate this very much 🙏🙏
~ Sean
I said No to Mary. I was a second grader assigned the role of a grumpy inn keeper in our school’s Christmas play. I was only seven, deathly shy and trembly on that small gymnasium stage, posing in front of the infallible priest, the looming nuns, my dysregulated family, the wall-to-wall benumbed parishioners. In front of everyone, I emphatically shook my head No while shutting the cardboard door on the holy family seeking refuge. I felt awful—my body felt awful. If it weren’t for me, Mary might have had an easier time of it—my body might have had an easier time of it. What if I had said Yes, come on in? I was made for the Catholic projections of my time and took every action to heart; did so for years, still do. And although it turns out there’s no mention of an actual *inn keeper* in the bible—just that there was no room—it didn’t stop the fabrication of such a key character going forward. For me, that character serves a purpose this Advent, and I’ll say how in a minute.
But first, I’m grateful to you Sean, for inviting this reflective Advent experiment. I love Advent, and I love writing. Forgive my staying in the margins until now, but that’s where I’ve been shyly hanging out, mostly writing in poem form. I’ve been writing daily “to Advent” since your invitation but haven’t felt comfortable saying so until now, until this insight about the inn keeper. I’ve been reading your words attentively, along with the rich responses from others. I feel pretty much on the outside of ACIM looking in because I don’t resonate with the tone of it when it comes to “the body” as you know. But I’ve been deeply nourished by your very human Advent missives. I feel I can come closer here, experience relationship/sangha/community here—dance awkwardly here and be accepted—better than I can with the more scholarly ACIM writings, although I still read those and learn from them as well.
So, during this time of fertile darkness, I’ve been asking myself (still the Inn Keeper) how am I keeping the Christ-embodied Mary outside of my heart, my life? How am I saying No to Mary? To anyone? How am I shutting the door on the vast light that is already here? If there’s one thing I’ve learned from ACIM—and currently from Yogacara Buddhism—it’s that I am largely creating my own suffering. I am doing this to myself— *every* this. *This* this, as you say so clearly, is where I/we can live in the Joy of Light if we are awake to it.
Thank you, Friend.
Thank you, Susan. This is very clear and helpful. The intersection of history, scriptural narrative and biography is such a revelatory matrix. This whole comment is basically a master class in how to creatively enter it.
Thank you 🙏🙏
A pressing question lately is: if Tara Singh had not shown up when he did, would I have persevered with ACIM? It is such a fundamentally conservative text and, as I have been saying these past weeks, deeply structurally confused about mind/body dualism.
(I think there are cultural / biographical reasons for that – for the mind/body dualism error at least – but I am not sure they are mine to explore – I am working on that)
Singh was – a way that is both beautiful and at times frustrating – unafraid of women. The gender divide did not exist for him the way it did for Ken Wapnick. A big difference between Ken and Tara Singh was that Ken considered himself Helen’s teacher (basically teaching her through the editing process what the course was saying, e.g., what the kids call “mansplaining”) while Taraji considered her a teacher on par with Krishnamurti. Their relationship was formal and he was very devoted to her. She expressly asked to teach the course.
And Singh was not afraid of the body! He was perfectly happy getting a massage, enjoying fresh food, fasting, going for long walks, traveling abroad et cetera. The divide so cherished by the course and most of its teachers simply did not exist for him. It allows for a simpler and deeper course practice.
I think Singh – through his Teacher/Student relationship with Helen (and also Mother Teresa) – points to a solution to the problem of mind/body dualism, which rests in service.
Or so I say. I like what YOU say:
In the community for which I long, the woman who asks these questions cannot be other than the one who answers them. Whatever “no” you mimed as a little girl has long since been transformed into “yes.”
Thank you, Susan, for being here. The Joy of Light, indeed.
~ Sean