Is Covid 19 interrupting your spiritual experience?

I saw a little discussion about how there is a lack of flow due to quarantining. There are no gatherings, people have to do cyber offerings which don't seem to have the same impact, drinking, partying, and the social component of our religious experience as Pagans or as magicians is something from which we are cut off. As a result people feel cut off from the gods and spirits with whom they normally enjoy communion. 

I don't really get this. 

To me, Paganism is definitively social. Pagan means the local religion, so it is the community's relationship with itself and through that relationship between its members its shared relationship with the gods. My primary practice tends to focus on magic and animism and Christianity because I can engage those are part of personal spirituality. Being Pagan means I need a community which I don't have. Not having a community doesn't mean I can't have a relationship with the gods. 

I think there are some things which work a lot better when we have people. I can't host a bacchanal right now. I can still have a relationship with Dionysos that is meaningful and connected and impacts me. I have to adjust it, because part of my Dionysian Charism is sharing drunkeness and revelry with others. I'm looking at some other projects for doing that. The universe is throwing copious drink making recipes and articles at me at record pace. The influence doesn't disappear. 

I think there is also a tendency for people to need the awe inspiring flashiness of some physically obvious touch point. Only seeing the beauty of nature in a strikingly ancient looking tree and not seeing it in the intrepid weed breaking through the concrete of a city sidewalk is too easy of a trap to fall into. Christians and Catholics thinking they have been cut off from their religion because they can't go to church services instead of reaping the joy of a rich and personal devotional prayer practice at home is a similarly easy trap. Pagans lost without the light of a community bonfire forgetting that they can be warmed by living well and making sacrifices to household gods and spirits as much as they can from the conflagration at the great gathering is the same trap. 

It's a trap which is natural for humans. It's a trap we're designed to fall into. We have a great capacity to enjoy and be moved by the epic. It's a wonderful part of who and what we are. 

We also have a great capacity to be moved by the small beauty we find in personal and silent moments. These moments are harder to find, but when we find them their beauty and power can be staggering. 

Losing the physical community of our religious activity is truly a loss we should recognize and experience. It can be unsettling and lead us into feeling cut off. But it's a reminder of the wonder that we can seek, and find, and immerse ourselves within all around us. 

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What Does a Christian Bealtain Look Like?

          Short answer, it doesn’t. It doesn’t look like anything. It’s not a thing.

          I was in a Christian Witches’ Forum on Facebook and a newbie witch was talking about prepping for Bealtain, and I asked what a Christian Witch Bealtain looks like. The answers were basically, whatever you want, it’s all about intent. The forum is mostly people doing Eclectic Wicca from a Christian perspective.

          Christian, particularly Catholic, witchcraft is a solid thing. Historically we have centuries of Catholics practicing witchcraft, we only have about seventy years of NeoPagans practicing witchcraft. So when NeoPagans try to say Christians and Catholics can’t be witches there really isn’t a leg to stand on.

          What is more reasonable is pointing out that Christianity isn’t Paganism and Christian Wicca and things like that don’t smoothly exist as a single thing. Catholics have frequently engaged in double-faith, in which you might go into the woods, or to a clearing, or to your house on a Saturday and engage in Pagan customs and then on Sunday go to Mass. But each tradition is approached separately as their own thing. Another way to do it is to accept that Catholicism is universal, so it universally encompasses all things which exist in the world. So if spirits exist, if gods exist, then they exist in a Catholic world and so there is a way to understand them and experience them from a Catholic perspective. With that being the case Catholic magic must exist. In fact, it does, all over the world and all throughout history.

          So why no Catholic or Christian Bealtain? Well from a Protestant perspective, a core element of most Protestantism is stripping out those elements of religion. Nothing Pagan, nothing superstitious, no magic no idolatry. Catholicism has room for a lot more of that, but it does it in a Catholic context. It isn’t just a matter of doing a Wiccan ceremony with Mary and Jesus as the Goddess and God. There are rich spiritual traditions as part of Catholicism for engaging holy days, and these can include witchcraft or occur next to it. Bealtain isn’t a witchcraft ritual, it’s a Pagan holiday.

          So what does a Catholic Bealtain look like? Well, Walpurgisnacht. A night celebrating a Saint and exploring the otherworldly and supernatural powers. A night where we recognize the same access to the spirit world that Bealtain recognizes, but with customs and practices that engage that experience from a Catholic worldview. Or Mayday, the day after Walpurgisnacht, where we celebrate the advent of spring and the crowning of the Blessed Virgin as Queen, ready to be celebrated over the course of a month dedicated to her. Maybe even May’s Eve, the traditional Wiccan celebration, which is – on some level; more a mystery tradition ceremony than a religious Pagan custom.

          What if Bealtain really speaks to you though? Then do a Pagan Bealtain. Commit to it. Do it right. Even if you’re a Christian or a Catholic, take the double faith approach. Go live it up, explore the access to the dead, talk to the faeries and then ward your land from them, sew fertility into your life. Don’t water down your Bealtain and your Christianity trying to do a fluffy dime store book ritual that is half way between the two things without really being either.  

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Image: By Nyri0 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81651179

The Church is Dead and God is in Hell...so your Freedom is Sacred

I'm sure many of my friends and blog readers know I love Lent and get super excited about it. Last year I had a pretty popular post about Ash Wednesday and my Gnostic interpretation of the meaning of Ash Wednesday vis a vis Palm Sunday. But did you know I think Holy Saturday is the most amazing day of the year? I made sure my ordination as a Gnostic Catholic Priest fell on the Saturday of the Easter Triduum for this reason, once I organized a Mass, Class, Spaghetti Dinner, and Dionysian Mystery Tradition ritual for a Holy Saturday chocked full of wonder. I think it's a day which is in itself mystically inclined...here is a discussion I had this early afternoon of why. I hope you enjoy it, and that you share it with your friends, so that you and they can go find the infinite in all that you do.

BJ: After 3pm we enter the best time of the year. Because the church is dead and god is in hell.

College Fencer: I’m sorry I must have been to the boring catholic education cause that sounds way more fun than my average Good Friday

My explanation as to why Holy Saturday is the Greatest Day of the Year for Mystics, Gnostics, and Antinomianists:

The Harrowing of Hell occurs on Good Friday after Christ's death when Christ descends into Hell and tears down its gates and in doing so conquers sin and death. In this process God essentially descends into Hell. Christ's incarnation is described as God achieving sympathy for Man by taking on Man's suffering and weakness. With the Passion on the Cross and the Harrowing of Hell God takes on all sin, all suffering and pain and descends into a moment of isolation from himself, achieving the ultimate weakness and powerlessness before then conquering it. In this moment God is closer to mankind than ever. In an almost gravitational way God sinks below man and draws man closer into a shared proximity than would seem otherwise possible.

When Christ dies the Church as his Bride dies as well. From 3pm on Good Friday until Dawn on Easter Sunday there is no Church. This is the most sacred antinomian moment. There is no institution, there is no mediation so there is only man and God. God's grace exists simultaneously with the depths of human experience and error with no Magisterium to dictate its nature or how to access it. This is shown when the veil of the Holy of Holies is rent in the temple at the moment of Christ's death. The veil separated the common man from the sanctum in which God resided, an inner sanctum in which only the High Priest could enter. With the veil torn asunder God permeates the world. With no Church and no Veil man and God stand face to face unmediated such that man directly experiences the infinite fully and unfiltered on his own terms in his own space of being. With this it can be interpreted that in this time all acts that express man's nature and his experience of the world are redeemed and are in contact with divine grace.

Death, or the withering of man from a state of perfection in which he resides within divine grace, is the price of experience and knowledge in the story of Man's exile from Eden. It is by descending into the fullness of human experience that Christ defeats death and returns the dead to paradise. Thus again, the full experience of our humanity during Holy Saturday is the experience of divine grace which allows death to be conquered and Sin to be transcendent.

So in my view, as a Gnostic Catholic, from the afternoon of Good Friday through to Dawn on Easter represents full access to the goal of mysticism, union with God and transcendence over the suffering and error of humanity such that our humanity, our drives and desires are elevated as the vehicles by which we Triumph and are resurrected with the Dawn. 

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