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.

Relapse, relapse.

This may look like a fully loaded Christmas tree, but it is in fact an evergreen being choked to death by bittersweet, a pretty but aggressively invasive vine. I don't usually get on a weed's case for doing what it does -- heck, I've even admired Japanese knotweed and swallowwort -- but I can't resist the timely metaphoric value of something green and fresh and natural being obliterated by strangling cheap crimson gaudiness.

Confiteor: the idea of Advent has been seducing me churchward. I love the dark, cold, Christless, time-beforedness of it all; I love it so much that the nativity always seems anti-climactic. The religious part of my rat-brain has been busily re-examining and retrofitting the metaphors to see if, after all, they might actually suffice in a way that's not reeking too much of mauvais foi.

So I crept into the back pew of a local RCC a few weeks ago, the Church of the Darth Vader Helmet, AKA the Holy Armadillo, and the first thing I heard was a woman yammering on at the microphone -- in an unpleasant, stern and schoolmarmish Boston accent -- about spaghetti sauce, and the upcoming meat raffle. My vegan sensibilities fell into a deep swoon, only to recover and hear the choir launch into a syncopated tune, more sit-com theme song than hymn.

So, even before the priest had processed half-way down the nave,  I fled.

It was Providence, I decided. A message from Beyond -- like an anvil dropped on my head -- telling me to run for my life.

Unteachable, I tried again the next week, elsewhere, still Catholic. Same modus operandi -- back pew, anonymous, wary. This time there were baptisms rather than a meat raffle, and the joint was thronged, loud, convivial, the rumble of conversations and crying babies audible through the whole Mass.

The first hymn was, inauspiciously, "Gather Us In," by Marty Haugen, a Lutheran hymn writer  with whom Catholics seem queerly and inordinately smitten. Back in my churched days our little Piskie choir had dipped into "Gather," the Catholic hymnal, so I have first hand experience with the Haugenian oeuvre and I was not happy to re-encounter it in its native element.

"Gather Us In" sounds like a tune from a bad Riverdance clone, and, later, when the choir broke into the ubiquitous and loathsome  "On Eagles' Wings," I realized that  providential anvils were raining down on my head. After the interminable Eucharist (to which I was, of course, most unwelcome) I skulked off.

The message was slowly sinking in.

As the week went on, Providence, in whom I have never really believed, kept lobbing its heavy ordnance at my incredibly thick skull.

First, the Vatican defrocked Father Bourgeois, a priest whose very Jesusy, career-long witness for justice included doing jail time for protesting the US torture academy, School of the Americas. His crime ? Attending a woman's ordination.

And Boston's Cardinal Law not only got to keep his frock after covering up priestly rape for years, he got a fancy Roman basilica to go along with it !

Then, not to be out-done, the Church of England decided that women are simply not Bishop material. +++ Rowan had the gall to say to English churchwomen, "this is still your church," which I found reminiscent of what the new ABC elect, +++Justin,  appended to his own quarrel with gay marriage --

 Above all in the church we need to create safe spaces for these issues to be discussed honestly and in love.

Disambiguation: A safe place in which to discuss how much we think you (= all but heterosexual men) suck. 

Yes, yes, I know. I am being extreme and uncharitable. But there have been too many anvils this week, and it's finally sunk in:  I have been barking up the wrong, bittersweet-choked tree. Ironic that Providence should be the occasion of my utter rejection of Providence, that messages seem to be flooding me from a Beyond that does not exist.

See, the thing is this. I realized it today. Among all its other aesthetically congenial attributes, Advent has served me as armor against the most catastrophic, heartsickening excesses of secular Christmas. The thick stone walls of our pretty little church helped me keep the howling riot of buying and selling at bay. But now, outside the walls, I am in the line of fire of worse ordnance than Providence could ever imagine. I am on my own. In the woods. With brittle weeds and choking bittersweet, stripped of the old story, the old maps, left with deepening night and deepening cold and, over the hill,  the raging din and pulsating lights of the ravenous, secular city.

But, after all, why would I need to hang a Church Year on the natural year ? Hasn't Advent's main appeal (at least to me) always been it's co-incidence with oncoming winter ? Hasn't the baby in the manger just been a pretty footnote, an ornament, a fleeting leitmotif ? It's autumn and winter that I love, with a truly pagan affection. It's a love that admits -- even welcomes -- colored lights in the darkness, boughs of holly, wassail, nostalgia, stories, even the notion that the most mere and powerless of beings, an indigent infant in a pile of straw, embodies the impossible strange valor we call "divine."

So, once again, I resume my place in the outer darkness. The anvils have stopped, and I have muttered an atavistic prayer of thanksgiving for the goose egg on my head. I will, in all likelihood, require future fusillades of them, and I'm sure the Church, in its bottomless wisdom, will be forthcoming.

But, for the time being, the hermit of the meadow has rejoined her weeds, bittersweet and all.

Of Ascents

It's fall, but in the meadow things are rising; a great levity responds to the great gravity.

Things tend toward weightlessness. Dry, stiff, hollow, they bend with the wind and clatter against one another -- not for warmth, for that is no longer possible, but in song

The heart, bled, opens its chambers to ghosts -- disembodied beings who pass through the world unmarked,  elusive as wandering hermits.

Night follows day. The designated words are spoken.

To say that we are anything but homely is a lie. A meal, a hearth, a bed; a book, a lamp, a fond companion. The family cat. Dread and comfort. Unknowing. Gratitude. Despair. This street address, this planet. This galaxy. This universe. These lares and penates. This outer darkness.

And, homely, we adorn our cave walls with our homely thoughts: equations, aphorisms, creeds, histories, algorithms, fictions and musics, myths and laws.

And, meanwhile, milkweed pods do what, in a poem in 1978, I called unsoul in brightness. That's what they seem to do, I suppose. I can't recall what notion I had back then of soul, likely something inchoate and sentimental. Today, in the meadow, they reminded me more thin, colorless, wispy hair stuck through with burdock and cockleburs.

Not everything rises, though. And that which rises eventually falls. Inbreath, outbreath, systole, diastole, day, night, summer, winter, life, death -- somewhere, behind this big organ, a choirboy works the bellows and the ranks of pipes sound. And wheeze, and choke and sigh and sound again.

And here we are, in the baffling midst of it all, with our homely angsts and our homely devotions, wanting nothing more than home, and needing nothing more than being home to one another.

Come Round Right

I watched, yesterday, as two squirrels ferried mouthfuls of leaves up to a capacious crook in the backyard maple tree. They were building a nest, and, oddly enough, it seemed they were building it together. They were industrious and cooperating, ascending and descending like the angels on Jacob's ladder. I wondered about their state of mind. Mine, as one might expect in deepening autumn with a big storm approaching, was sympathizing with the idea of nest and shelter. 

Today, rising wind is tearing off the vivid top layers of their nest. Last year's pulp of gray, packed leaves remains.  I am pulling down storm windows and taping the cracks around the air conditioners. The tape barely holds on a year's worth of gray grit and dust. I have stowed the lawn flamingoes in the garage and am watching the last leaves fall into the back yard.

Consider ecstasy: standing beside oneself. There are things that seem to pull us out of ourselves and our ruminations -- or, perhaps I should say "our" ruminations -- for there is an autonomous and almost impersonal life to the currents of thought that stream through our consciousness. The weather -- the darkening skies, the leaves blown sideways, the ping of rain on glass -- attracts and holds our attention and displaces (for a time) whatever tape-loop of anxiety currently seems to be at the top of one's playlist.

It's the same thing with taking pictures of weeds, I realized yesterday: looking about with squirrel mind, waiting for the frisson of attraction (red leaf, acorn, berry) to animate the arm that holds the camera and the eye that peers through the lens. I am storing up caches of images against an instinctually anticipated great hunger and long winter night.

And it's the same with lots of things -- music, reading, writing  -- little ecstasies during which the yoke and burden of the self seem to slip away for a time. And, of course, there are other, less private ecstasies:  sex and church and football and holiday parades and political rallies, up to and including what Leni R. presented in the Triumph of the Will.

Someone yawns, and soon the whole room is yawning. Someone begins to drub the oddball, and soon the whole gang pitches in. The Adman flashes an image of the next iteration of the i -pod, -phone, or -dol onto our obsolescing screens, and soon we're queued up in an overnight, shivering breadline to get our very own.

So there is, I think, some wisdom in the warnings that many religious traditions raise against desire. It is lovely that, modeling Jesus, people come to desire justice and mercy. It is terrible that, modeling proponents of other religious/ideological opinions, people come to desire exclusion and oppression and even violence.

But all this is above my metaphysical pay grade. With respect to religion, I am now, more or less,  a card carrying none-of-the-above. I have yet to cut up and relinquish my Piskie card (much as Piskies were asked to do this weekend with their Bank Of America ATM cards) and I continue to be seized by moments of wishing to re-enter the fold. But by and large, I have resisted them.

I had a small epiphany, the other day, reading the combox of a Zen Roshi/Unitarian Minister's blog. I had been wondering whether my issues with Jesus made me a defacto Unitarian Universalist. If any denomination seems inclusive in its welcome and broad in its precepts, it's the Unitarians. Why, there's even (I recently learned) a high church UU congregation, King's Chapel in Boston, that uses a version of the Book of Common Prayer in its worship !

So as I read through the comments on Rev Roshi's blog, I was shocked to read the following from a long-term UU.

I am sick of seekers.

It was a Damascus Road moment. First of all, I realized that no denomination is free of well-guarded boundaries of inflated self-regard and ideology. The sign outside the Catholic Church may say "welcome," but as a divorced and remarried woman I am far from that. The UUs may broadcast their seven principles of inclusion and dignity and respect and interconnectedness, but enough already with the squalid seekers cluttering the back pews, refugees from God knows what backward Trinitarian hellhole, or even, God forbid, from that amorphous, unwashed horde known as the SBNRs !

And then, even more to the point, I realized something else. It's not bad to be a "seeker," in the sense that one's metaphysical journey is lifelong, and that the driving questions are almost unfathomably complex and the answers, if indeed there are any, are most likely half-glimpsed and provisional. But there is wisdom in the advice that it takes practice and persistence -- conversion and stability, to put it monastically -- to any religious undertaking.  The Shaker Hymn, Simple Gifts, puts it most kindly and gently --

'Tis the gift to be simple,
'tis the gift to be free,
'tis the gift to come down
where we ought to be,
and when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained
to bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
to turn, turn, will be our delight
till by turning, turning we come round right.

The trick is to find that place just right. The woods are and have always been reliably right. The text of the forest never demands the same tortured hermeneutics as the Bible. The seasons come and go in their own liturgical colors and rebirth follows death as surely as Easter follows Good Friday. But as right as the woods are, are they just right ?

There is, and I am often a stranger to it, an ecstasy -- an escape from the self -- that involves relationship, that most fraught state-of-being. For the constitutionally solitary, the shy, the introvert,  relationship often drives the self inward, behind the barricades that define it. Defending itself, it swells like a puffer-fish, grotesque and off-putting. Or, it simply retreats.

Religions are about forgetting the self; about putting on the mind of Christ, about bowing and bending (before the Other) even while turning and turning and turning (conversion anyone ?) until one comes round right. And it does not escape me that this simplicity is not a triumph of the will, but rather a gift. Grace.

It's all a big, complicated koan -- far too big for me, I fear -- so I begin simply. Putting on the mind of squirrel. And once I've mastered that, who knows ?