Kingdom Power Glory etc

In my recitations of the Lord's Prayer, I had, in the years leading up to my apostasy, found myself rushing through Kingdom and Power to get to the Glory part, the only part of the concluding doxology's triad that I could stomach.  

I understand the paradoxical usage, the subversion of the temporal structures that Christ represents. But "kingdom" is still foreign and "power" still utterly rankles, all the more so when one looks toward the ecclesial world and finds monarchical structures and hierarchies of power that closely mimic and are, in fact, in league with, the secular world's.

Do this, Jesus said, for the remembrance of me. And, before you know it, there are structures of kingdom and power and wealth that rival nation states in their ability to exclude and wound. Even when not established, religion cozies up to the state (and vice versa) to create Machiavellian synergies of dominance. From Ratzinger to Rick Warren to Fred Phelps, various dudes want to tell us what's what, who's who, and where to go, and, because things "of faith" sell, the assorted bullying pulpits of the media are always forthcoming.

Let's face it: God's a hot commodity, and the market has been effectively cornered. Oh, sure, the shareholders (usually at pledge time) receive their yearly slick prospectus, and get to cast a token vote now and then, but the power lies deep in the corporation. It's ontologic, see, conferred with ordination -- the particular change in one's being that allows one to channel the Holy Ghost into the unleavened bread to change its substance into the Body of Christ.  And without the high power transmission line that is the apostolic succession, it's just broken bread no matter what pretty words and gestures surround it. Absolutely null and utterly void.

There is little keeping of silence anymore. Speech sells. Broadcasts move from hard news to the subsequent long wallow of commodified, voyeuristic infotainment with every fresh catastrophe. The heart sinks farther than it ever thought possible, and the corporate armies, laden with cash, rush into the breach. 

If ever there was a time for custody of the eyes, it is now.

It's time to tell the long joke that begins like this:  

Henry David Thoreau sat down next to Rev Lillian on a plane, and, noting her collar, said

I (go forth to a) hill at sunset to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon — to behold and commune with something grander than man. Their mere distance and unprofanedness is an infinite encouragement. It is with infinite yearning and aspiration that I seek solitude.   

And then, a bit tactless, Henry continued, relating how

ministers who (speak) of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject 

would sometimes come to visit him at his cabin at Walden Pond. 

And her pastoral reply ? 

Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? 

So, carefully balancing her laptop and martini,  she sidles down the aisle and sits in an empty aisle seat next to Papa Ratzi himself, the Bull Goose Looney of Those-Formed-By-A-Mighty-Cloud-Of-Witnesses -- who proceeds to remind her that, lacking a penis,

you, Madame,  should not be sporting that clerical garb, and, moreover, your employer, in spite of calling itself the United Church of Christ, is not in fact a "church" but rather an  ecclesial community, offering a most defective path to salvation ! The only True Church is The Roman Catholic Church !

He glares at her, blows his papal nose on a silken handkerchief especially blessed for the occasion, then returns to his breviary.

The joke goes on for hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles, undoubtedly including how gorgeous Monsignor Ganswein looks in his cassock,  and never quite gets to the punch line.

It's a wintry afternoon, the last of the long slide toward the solstice. Mist, maybe sleet, is blowing sideways and I've already drunk too much coffee. This year I received a splendid, animated Advent Calendar -- Jacqui Lawson's Alpine Village -- that is a long marination in nostalgia for a Christmas-That-Never-Was. Nonetheless, I appreciate it like a fine confection -- a thin cookie dusted in sugar, a sugarplum -- and consent, for a few minutes a day, to its sweet dream.  

Maybe I should learn to look at the church -- in a broader sense than Ratzi's -- as a sweet dream, a play upon the world's stage, an epic poem, a musical comedy, a tragedy in far too many acts, an opera bouffe -- oh, who the hell knows. Maybe just admit it's an acquired taste that I tried and failed to acquire, in the end just not my cuppa,  Rev Lillian notwithstanding. Who is, after all, as invested in the survival of her Ecclesial Community as the Pope is in his One True Church.

Jesus (take, eat) is somewhere beyond this fray, over the rainbow maybe, or maybe off in the cloud of witnesses or the cloud of unknowing.

Or maybe he's hiding in the dead tree on the grounds of the shuttered asylum, or under the finely woven skirt of a mushroom on a rotted log. It's all the bread of heaven, all God's body,

and it doesn't take a man of the cloth to make it so.

Signs Of Endings

I suppose I could construe taking pictures of weeds as a sort of practice or discipline, even a spiritual one if I could say the word without wincing. It is a peculiar grace of having lived this long that words do tend to fall away, mottled and torn with long use and misuse; I must remind myself that, for those newer to the language games, the words remain green, even photosynthetic, and that is lovely. The young should never be this weary, else babies would not be born, poems not written, blessings not uttered, the sick not tended. But, as the hymn goes, the green blade riseth, even in the surrounding deciduous riot. So it is, and so it shall be. Until is isn't. 

The world goes on and will go on without me. My cat, for that matter, could outlive me, conducting its daily round of naps and meals and romps oblivious of my departure, a singular affront. This whole business of being survived by is, come to think of it, an affront, a universal affront, so the rude advice -- get over it -- is extraordinarily well-taken. It's a life's work, actually, that getting over it; or maybe it's a question of getting through it or under it or maybe even into it, it being the twin shocks of that I am and that I will no longer be.

Late fall by the river after rain, thick clouds and the waning day, atmospheres of cold and damp, decaying leaves dark and slick with water and stripped vines and branches beaded with clear drops: the stage designer has obviously studied up on Advent and knows his or her craft. The riverwalk is where I first noticed weeds: the sexual parts of switchgrass, to be specific, its feathery purple stigmas and tiny, orange-tipped stamens. Who knew that grass -- that ubiquitous green wash of the world -- flowered in such an outrageous manner ! What was this marvelous thing ?

I had found a place where I finally, completely, belonged, a sphere of unfraught reciprocity, a world where all the skies are overcast and all the hymns are in f minor and the congregation sings all seven verses without the least grumbling.

Now a bright morning is clouding over. A dog barks, cars pass. Footsteps upstairs, cat snoring on the chair behind me. Wallace Stevens would add oranges and a cockatoo; others would add incense, bread, wine, gathered humans. There are different ways through the question what is this; there are different answers to the question now what, and all (or maybe even none) are correct. One hundred bottoms on hard wooden pews; one bottom on a 30 year old zafu; boots in the mud in the woods.

With respect to matters metaphysical,  the decidual option, the less is more option, has become the most attractive. Even YAHWEH, in his many moments of exasperation, was prone to bellow I hate your incense, your festivals, your solemn assemblies, your feasts ! I hate your sacrifices ! 

As to beauty, what can surpass the cathedral of the world ? The surprising streamers of the witch hazel in the december woods --

rosa multiflora holding on for as long as it can --

a seagull's inland exile --

a green leaf's silvery, spotted decay --

an astonishing, bilobe of yellow amidst a brown tangle --

a witchy "moon" appears behind locust thorn --

and leathery oak leaves, stippled with beautiful black mold, in leaf-fall mudras underfoot

and the much-despised knotweed, robed in rain.

If ritual is repetition, then taking pictures of weeds qualifies. Each iteration of the rite involves old and new, now and always, particle and wave.  There is this one, particular dying maple leaf caught in in evergreen,

there are these five elephantine knotweed leaves like laundry on a line.

There is this moment of frozen flight,

and these stiff golden evening primrose pods that never fail to remind me of the delicate, yellow blossoms from which they derive: blossoms are blossom and pods are pods, or  I am the resurrection and the life ? What shall it be ? Both ? Neither ? 

The fact that I am drawn to the shadowy outskirts of the world is an accident of nature and nurture. It is neither a virtue nor a vice, although some might make it so. It is, rather, my own particular means of navigating the bright circle that leads away from then back to the clasp of darkness. Nothing more, and nothing less.

And, when I run out of words,

as I have now,

the weeds

will take up

where I

left off.

Ex Cathedra

One of the great peaceable kingdoms is the late autumn community garden. The trees at the perimeter rise into limitless fog like Gothic towers or human hearts into the Clouds of Unknowing, at least until the morning sun burns through. 

Below, in the realm of things named and things seen, it's the Last Dance, the one before exhaustion, collapse and sleep. Most of the audience has left, but those of us who remain are rapt before the elders of the company -- the angular, wispy and skeletal grand dames whose moves are honed to the essential,

and whose ambiguous names --  Virgin's Bower or Old Man's beard -- fuel a winter's worth of reflection.

Here, cultivars coexist with weeds, and coiled tendrils coexist with coils of wire. And nothing agonizes over the grand dichotomies -- female and male, art and life, grace and nature, form and emptiness.

Even life and death, those seemingly irreconcilable categories, collapse into one another's arms.

Humility and submission are among the great, classic religious virtues, implicit in the three famous evangelical counsels of monasticism, poverty, chastity and obedience. 

The late autumn garden offers its own version of the counsels. The architecture here is that of a shantytown constructed of materials seemingly gleaned from a domestic catastrophe. Doors,

gates and trellises

even high-tension wires and clotheslines in miniature

are spare and poor, stripped to the essentials, choirs exalted in their barrenness and ruination, where only the wind chants now, tonus peregrinus of course, until the return of the sweet birds on the far side of the long winter-yet-to-come.

Homely, thrifty, patiently empty and waiting to be filled. And chaste, that is to say declining to transgress or despoil.

To be, fully, and then to relinquish everything, burning even the old quitclaim deed found in the back of someone else's dresser drawer.

Obedience, in the autumnal garden, is simple. Its scripture, intracellular and ancient, practically reads itself. Its breviaries are extracanonical, its year is natural, not liturgical.

And there are no imprimaturs, nihil obstats or concordats forthcoming,

only  word of mouth from other more experienced travelers that (for example)  Richard Headstrom has much to say to a woman with a macro lens and an affinity for weeds.

So even if it's Advent -- especially if it's Advent -- the lure of the liturgical year should not prove irresistible to eremitical and self-exiled residents of the outer darkness. There is high drama aplenty in the abandoned community garden, all the birth, death and resurrection, all the yet-to-comes, comings and second and even third comings one could ever desire.

Granted, the story lacks the scandalous details of the particular human narrative, sin and atonement, sacrifice and absolution, the wars and rumors of war, the oppression of widows and orphans, the seemingly eternal lording-it-over of the powerful. But there is a way, and a truth and a life that one finds in the weedy, November shantytown. There we observe the letting-be that has been described as God's love, which forms the template for ungrasping human love.   

I don't want to push the metaphor to its breaking point. Nature can be read as a manifesto of greed and territoriality in the interest of survival of the fittest. Even the devil can quote the scripture of the abandoned garden to his fell purposes. And who's to say Satan does not love an abandoned garden, particularly the one ruined by his own initiative ?

What pride of place he must feel among the melting ice caps, oils spills, waste pools and belching smokestacks of the world ! One bite of a single forbidden fruit, and humans, appalled by death, are off to get everything they can before the end. Who would have thought it would work so well ?

But, again, dial back the metaphors and just look, which is the prototype of letting be: the feathery tendrils of the Clematis --

foxtail bristles, tipped with water droplets --

grass blades bending through a plastic fence --

and then, irresistibly, dreaming again, the solitary dancer in the fog --

or galaxies, and everything ! everything ! everything !  exploding into, boiling over into being, so utterly astonishing

--  that even here, in the abandoned late autumn community garden, in the outer darkness, as extra ecclesia as one can get --

tattered prayer flags air like dirty laundry on the lines.