Dreaming the Blue Sword: A Vision of Nonviolence

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In 2007 the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing Mahatma Gandhi's birthday (October 2) as the "International Day of Non-Violence." The resolution highlights "the holistic nature and the continued relevance of the Mahatma's message for our times, indeed for all times to come. It encompasses the rejection of violence against oneself, against others, against other groups, against other societies and against nature."

We were in the dream, deeply, all of us abandoned to the dark and nervous landscape of nightmare.

There were so many of us, all strangers, all lost in what might have been a vast forest of ancient trees, their rough bark twisted with vines, or what might have been a great hall of smooth marble pillars, impassive as gods holding up the infinite ceiling of the night sky. Whatever it was, it was grand and tall and sweeping in every confused direction, and we bumped and stumbled together, low and frightened and half-blind. I was panicked, terrified, my heart pounding in my gut and my ears and in the soles of my feet. And in my hands, slick with sweat and fear, I gripped a sword.

Madeline, Praying (a short story of quiet and mystery)

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A hand injury has cruelly kept me from the keyboard for the past week, and in the interest of healing I am still taking the typing very slow and easy. So that my lovely, loyal readers won't feel abandoned, however, I offer you something from the stockpile. The following is a short story I wrote seven or eight years ago, way back in college, before coming whole-heartedly to the Druid path, during a time of grappling with (dis)enchantment, death and mystery. Oddly enough, it features a girl named Madeline (more cynical and angry at Spirit than I ever was), and a hint of flowers. I thought it would be an enjoyable follow-up to last week's guest post. Reading it now, I can only remember hints and shadows of what I was trying to grasp as I wrote it. But I hope you enjoy it, despite its uncertainty.

Madeline, Praying

Entering the abandoned church, she felt as if she were entering the glen of a deep forest. Etched stained glass windows filtered light like entwined branches arching out from the thick columns, trunks of stone. Normally so hard, so brittle, the glass just like any glass, fragile and easily shattered, splintered by a brick or baseball. The marble and granite unmovable, chiseled perhaps, but otherwise worn only by time stretching into future eons of unwritten histories. Yet as she entered the church, she felt as if she were entering something alive, something breathing, momentarily transformed from brittle, breakable, into something delicately living, moving with the breeze, shifting colors of sunlight through branches of trees, seemingly so still and yet growing, always reaching, imperceptibly, in all directions for the sustenance of warmth, of earth and sun, of water, air and light with which the world of this stale chapel was suddenly transfused.

A Ha'penny Will Do: A Pagan Perspective on Christmas

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The noise of the internet is in my head today as I sit down to my computer. Already afternoon — where did the morning go? All fog and rain here in the hilly Steel City, and no snow yet this year except for that brief slushy mix drifting from the sky on Black Friday, as if in response to some pre-planned Xmas Shopping marketing ploy. December already, and the full moon, a full Fire Friend moon last night. Fire Friend, high cloud-webbed shining rock in the sky on the drive home, echoing the tasteful evergreen wreaths wrapped with strings of tiny star-like lights and topped with red bows on the windows of the house next door. I joked with Jeff about putting one of those cheap plastic candelabras in the downstairs window of his apartment. In a Jewish neighborhood that decks itself out in huge wooden lawn menorahs and fills the grocery store aisles with blue and silver Hanukkah decorations every year, would anybody even second guess which holy day we were celebrating?

Christmas is coming. Amidst the noise in my brain this afternoon, that song wends its way through. "Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat...." It's strange, but Christmas is one of those holidays that make me feel the most Pagan. Maybe it's all the greenery brought in from outside, the whole-hearted unabashed singing and celebrating and decorating, especially with the simple old-fashioned trimmings of ribbon and candles and holly and bits of shining tinsel. During the Christmas season, my parents' house itself becomes a kind of walk-in shrine to Yuletide Cheer, and I've inherited my fair share of holiday decorations that find themselves strewn about my apartment each year, a simple nativity scene still taking a privileged place atop the armoire in the living room. The green and red and ribbon and fire and shiny things, all this raging against the dying of the light, is all very Christmas-y to me, though. Alban Arthan, the solstice, remains distinctly quiet, reflective and dark, the new-born sun like a small, cold seed of potential light still to be planted, hidden away, unripe and unready. Yet it seems more obvious than ever that both of these are necessary, both moods relevant and revelatory each in their own ways.

This year, my decorations will be migrating over to Jeff's place where, for the first time, I will be sharing Christmas with children as a kind of parent-figure in my own right. Children who still don't know Santa Claus isn't real (despite the oldest being eleven and having only just found out the Tooth Fairy has been mommy all along). The "story" we're sticking to, in case this is the year they ask, is that Santa is real, because he is the spirit of generosity and gift-giving that we invite into our lives and into our hearts, to help guide us in choosing the perfect gift for our loved ones. It's the same story my parents explained to me the year I playfully, but knowingly, asked my father for Santa's phone number because I needed to call him and update my wish list, and my father in turn dutifully dictated our own home phone number as I dialed, a mischievous look on his face. And if this weren't also a bit of a lie — if we weren't more carefully guided by marketing and game-theory parenting — it would be a very nice story, a lot nicer than just acknowledging that we lie to our children every year. But I find that I can't be all too concerned with whether or not the kids believe in Santa Claus (though I worry sometimes that the longer their disillusionment takes, the more fundamentally disturbing it will be for them in the end). Instead, I have found myself ruminating on Christianity and the story of Christ, and how to share this with the children in a meaningful way as a Pagan "parent."

Honestly, I find that I'm having a bit of an identity crisis over the Christmas holiday this year. Not so much the kind that leaves me wondering who I am — I know who I am — but the kind where I find myself asking, "Who the f' are all of you, anyway?" Christmas is still the one time a year when I attend church with my family, though I no longer participate in the sacrament of Communion out of respect for the Catholic Church's own sense of community-identity boundaries and sacred mysteries. Every year, midnight on Christmas Eve (or, I guess technically, Christmas morning) finds me sitting meditatively in one of the long, polished-wooden pews of my old church, smiling familiarly at the faces I recognize, noting the muted creams, greens and golds of the church's Christmas decorations, neither gaudy nor solstice-seasonal, that always seemed so oddly out of touch with everything except the building's own particular sense of style.

Midnight Mass is presided over every year by a priest now well into his eighties, who is one of the wiser and kinder spiritual leaders I've known in my life, and who speaks gently and deliberately each prayer and blessing. Whereas once I thought his long pauses and slow pacing were signs of senility finally setting in, work with regular meditation in my private life has in recent years opened up these moments of quiet, in the darkest hour of the longest night, to reveal the spaciousness of absence and Mystery. From the warm lights and bustling family noises of a cheery home edged with expectation and excitement, each year we venture out into the windy darkness of winter midnight, starlight scattered across shorn-down fields rolling out to the horizon in all directions, to sit for a time in dimly-lit tranquility, singing old, familiar songs in keys nobody can comfortably reach. And when the wizened priest stands at the altar and recites the Proclamation of Christmas — "Today, the twenty-fifth day of the month of December, countless ages after the creation of the world..." — to the building crescendo of the organ piling chord upon chord, culminating in the announcement that Jesus is born, today, this day, in the present tense, while the organ shakes the building to its rafters, every year I feel that strange and knowing thrill. The thrill of mystery, where garish light-filled celebration collides with darkness and fragility and the silence of the rumbling, trembling pipes of music suddenly cutting out.

And I find myself wondering, this year especially, what does all this have to do with Christianity?

Now, I think many Christians would themselves say that this is it, this is really the heart of Christianity when all's said and done. This moment of creation and beauty and light within the gently howling darkness. Yet so many things get tacked on, added and amended, huge socio-political institutions growing up around simple, powerful truths, institutions that expect assent to certain formulae and doctrines, that draw conclusions about heaven, hell, salvation and revelation. I no longer believe the story of Jesus as exclusive spiritual truth, let alone as literal historical fact. Yet I believe in the story in a way that anchors it deeply in my bones, regardless of what religious community I belong to; I believe in the truths this story tells. I have not left those truths behind; they were in many ways the very thing that led me to Druidry, that left me dissatisfied with Christianity as an organized religion. These truths have never disappeared from my life, and yet I am as sure of them today — as sure of their mystery and power and gentleness and goodness — as I am sure that in every way that counts, I'm no longer a Christian. Not really.

But that leaves me with a question. Because the solstice season is a season of noisy celebration and fire-lighting and gift-giving, as much as it is a time of death and darkness and the suffering struggle of rebirth in the biting, barren cold. And the story of Christ being born is, all theology and doctrine aside, the story of the birth of the world, weak and squirming and covered in glop, the on-going singing of the World Song, ever-new and always renewing, today, this very day, in the present tense. So the question I'm left with is: how do I share this aspect of the solstice, Alban Arthan, with children never raised with a theology of god-become-man, not even familiar with the story, with the bizarre notion that Utter Godness is within each of us? And how do I tell them the story without getting bogged down with the language of doctrine and interfaith politics? Never mind that Santa Claus isn't real, how do I teach them the things that are?

Because one thing you can certainly say for Christians is, they've got focus. The birth of a sun-child on the winter solstice is all the more powerful when that babe of light is the unique Revelation of Spirit, the whole Divine shebang condensed down into this singular, fragile form. This is, in some ways, poetry heightened to the nth degree: not only the use of particulars to speak of universals, but the exclusive worshipful focus on a single Particular as the whole of the Universe. The Hindu bhakti yogic discipline of love and devotion to one particular deity has nothing on this. And the mild Pagan focus on Mabon, or Sol Invictus, or whatever other solar deity... well, feels a bit lacking in comparison, just another god among a whole slew of gods and goddesses to choose from, if you please. Besides which, the gods of Pagan polytheism sometimes feel so heroic and larger-than-life that the utter mystery of vulnerability and weakness gets left in the mythic-metaphorical dust.

Whereas, take Mary, whose only superpower was having not had sex yet. As the story goes, this young woman, living in poverty, sustained in her livelihood largely by family and community ties and betrothed to a man she loved deeply, is confronted by God — friggin' God, you guys — and given the choice to bear a holy son destined, after only a few short years on the planet, for degradation, suffering and death. Aside from the destiny of the child, to be an unmarried woman and pregnant at this time risked personal shame and community rejection, jeopardizing the future of her marriage and permanent ostracism from the social ties on which she depended. And the Universe itself basically asked her permission, this nobody, this fragile little human thing, and in full knowledge, knowing what risk she faced and the suffering it would bring, confronting the overwhelming injustice of it, and her own smallness and impotence in stopping it... she said yes. No goddess with nothing really to lose. Just an ordinary woman, who gave birth to a god as wrinkled and spongy and smelly as any infant.

There is something important in this, something that I wonder sometimes might be missing from today's Paganism still deepening and finding its sea-legs. There is, in the Christmas story, something about confronting the reality of darkness and suffering, not with shouting and singing and leaping bonfires in defiance, nor with acquiescence, silent obedience or willful denial... but with quiet, unflinching affirmation, the affirmation of empowerment, courage and strength, the life-giving, meaning-making affirmation of creation. A recent comment from a reader of this blog spoke of the "gentle respect" for suffering and difficulty that lurks sometimes in my writings here. For me, sorrow, loneliness and grief go hand-in-hand with joy, connection and love in this life we live together, in this song we all are singing. In a very real way, I could not devalue or deny these things without sacrificing the fullness and complexity of beauty and life, without substituting a shallower, simpler version of mere contentedness and safety in their place. This is a truth of my Druidry, my Paganism — the balance, the intricate interweaving of darkness and suffering with illumination and ecstasy. The liminal space between, within which nothing is precisely delineated and separate.

And so, this is the space I find myself in again as Christmas approaches. Wondering, wandering in a liminal space that is not precisely Pagan, nor exactly Christian. Asking myself how to teach children that realizing their own inner Santa Claus is infinitely more challenging than believing in some unlikely literal jolly-old-elf, and infinitely more rewarding. Asking myself where I belong, where we all belong, and how we belong to each other. Asking myself how I can tell the stories of my ancestors, pagan and Christian alike, to the children of my partner, who do not really share those ancestors with me, at least not by blood. What can I say that will be meaningful and relevant for them, that will share with them the "spirit of the season" that I have come to know and love and value? What will I say when they come singing, a penny for my thoughts?

Well, like the song says, if you haven't got a penny, maybe a ha'penny will do. And if you haven't got a ha'penny... may the gods bless you.

Three Humans Walk into a Bar: Language, Labels & Naming Spirit

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The three of us perched on barstools at a small tile-topped table near the emergency exit, sipping our beers and talking about Spirit: a polytheist, a panentheist, and an agnostic. Stop me if you've heard this one.

Pondering Deity

I've been thinking a lot recently about polytheism and deity, prompted in part by Kullervo's post about his "conversion experience" (for lack of a better term), and in part by my own continuing explorations in meditation and daily spiritual practice. I can feel it--part of me is waiting for something to click. And it hasn't happened yet. When I read about others' experiences of deity--the power and beauty and awe that go along with it, the certainty as well as the surprise--and when I talk with Jeff about his own views of the gods and goddesses, I feel as though I might be missing something. But try as I might, I can't seem to wrap my head around these ideas of gods, at least not in anything but a metaphorical sense. Faeries, Shining Ones, elemental beings and spirits of all shapes and sizes striving and thriving together in an "ecology of Spirit" that echoes and gives rise to the physical world--sure, hell yeah. But where do the gods come into it? How do I understand them? I'm still waiting for that part to fall into place.

As a child, and even into my teens and college years, I had experiences of what you might call "personal deity"--the small, intimate kind. Jesus and I were rather close for a while, even though I'd always had a better grasp of the Big Guy, the Transcendent Spirit of Godhead, the Breath and Life that infused everything, everywhere, with love and connection. In her recent post, Cat talks about how she began not with this unifying, unified Spirit that was too big and abstract, but with the little particulars of the world. For me, it was just the opposite--the Spirit moving over the dark face of the waters was something almost tangible to me, as though all these particulars were secretly veiling something else, some deeper essence. I could feel it in the wind and rain, in the bright summer fields, and in the way everyone's shoulders rose and fell together in one rippling intake of breath reciting the Our Father during Mass.

For a while, in fact, I struggled to understand where Jesus came into it at all, besides playing the role of wise teacher and political rebel. But at some point, this role as wise and loving shaman-sage developed into full-blown deity, Jesus the Christ, the Reconciler who brought transcendence and immanence together in a uniquely and fully human form. Jesus was not just embodied Godhood, but conscious, living, breathing, moving, evolving Godhead--change and flux within the perfection of essence, the human becoming as an expression of utter being. And other kinds of mystical language. But the simplest way to put it is, he was the broken-hearted god I met in dream: sitting quietly in an empty corner sipping his beer and watching the careless violence of love and connection bloom and shred to dust under dancing feet... he was the shy bisexual and misunderstood poet-lover shunned by the noise and callousness of the raging house-party, and utterly in love with every drunkard there. He was the one I could turn to when I needed to understand devotion and sacrifice, loneliness and death.

And then, gradually, we just lost touch. Almost without noticing it, I began once again to relate to the world with an immediacy that seemed to have no need for a medium or Reconciler. I went through periods of depression and near suicidal moods (that is, if a heart aching for connection, even if such connection means bodily death and the dissolution back into the universal tides of Spirit, could really be called "suicidal"); yet during these times, the world would not abandon me, would not leave me alone. Its presence--both beautiful and terrible in its indifferent, impersonal, imperfect perfection--bore down on me inescapably, so that I knew I could not merely cease to be even if that was what I wanted. All this time, it was the world-as-sacred, the immanence of what I once would have called Holy Spirit, that lurked in every blink of an eye, moved through every corner of being before I could look away. Transcendent Godhead seemed far away, or rather deep, deep within past the dull, devastatingly holy mechanizations of embodiment. And personal deity seemed about as real and relevant to me as things like "getting a real job" and "establishing good credit." It was something that happened to other people.

Where am I now? Back in February, I felt as though I might be onto something, something having to do with imagination and love and the way they work in tandem to create images of deity. I had some realization--which I can now barely remember--about the way poetry and metaphor led me back and forth between the transcendent Universal and the intimate Particular, and how these same faithful allies could teach me about personal deity in a polytheistic sense, about the role of archetype and personality, guardian and guide, in my understanding of divinity. I was making progress, developing an interesting if not always warm-fuzzy relationship with Caer Ibormeith, the faery swan-maiden of Aengus Og's dreaming, exploring through meditation and prayer ways in which her story of independence, strength, transmutation and love might have lessons to teach me. Perhaps I learned those lessons a bit too well; soon after that, I found myself plunging into a new romantic relationship that fulfilled and sustained parts of me that had been starved and bitter for several years. The need for personal deity once again dropped out of view, as the very real and immediate presence of a fellow human being took precedence.

Labels & Names

Three real and immediate human beings walked into a bar. I might be a masochist, but I can't resist the urge to provoke debate between two dear friends when I know they disagree. I sat nursing my Woodchuck (all right, not exactly a beer, I'll grant you) between Raymond, my old anam-chara, and Jeff, my new kindling flame. You might call Raymond a skeptic, or even an agnostic--if you wanted to sit through a long lecture about how he rejects labels like "god" and "spirituality" and "agnostic" not because he is uncertain or unwilling to commit to certain beliefs about this possible Something else, but because he respects the power of language and would not idly rob that Something of its namelessness. And you might call Jeff a polytheist--as long as you knew about the time his Zen Buddhist mother asked him if he believed the gods were actually real and he replied, with a conspiratorial wink to anatma, "As real as I am." And I sat in the middle, as if some literal-minded playwright had scripted the event, hardly saying anything but listening intently to their conversation.

I might call myself a panentheist--someone who believes in both the immanence and transcendence of divinity--and in fact I have called myself that for many years now... Except that more recently this term has started to sound redundant, as though it were almost too obvious to bother articulating. What else could Spirit be than "the eternal animating force behind the universe, with the universe as nothing more than the manifest part"? I don't exactly like the slightly dismissive sound of "nothing more than"--the vast complexities and mind-blowing, heart-wrenching harmonies of intricate manifestation are nothing to sneeze at--but in a nutshell, there it is: immanent manifestation and transcendent source, the complete package. Still, for me this doesn't resolve the question of the gods. From the panentheistic point of view, it seems to me that everything is God, you might even say that everything is a god in one way or another. But what could this possibly mean for traditional ideas of polytheistic gods like Apollo, Brigid, Cernunnos, Odin? I might feel the deity-aspect of ocean, but it is this ocean here, not some abstracted Manannan mac Lir striding through myth; just as it is this sun and not Apollo; or this woods and not Cernunnos. I struggle to bridge this gap between particulars in the manifest world, and particulars in the realm of transcendent divinity where specific gods and goddesses rule over certain ideals, realms, activities and cultural traits. Isn't the nature of transcendent Spirit precisely that it does not break and fracture into bits and pieces, but resides in a kind of unity of Universality? And yet, I understood Jesus at one time as personal deity--connected to that transcendent Godhead. Was this different, because I imagined or experienced him as "in the world" in a way that these other deities seem not to be? (Am I dancing around the need for idols, perhaps, and places of consecrated space dedicated to the gods and allowing them residence in the manifest world?)

I am losing myself in language once more, it seems, as I try to articulate my own stumbling blocks. Jeff's views of polytheism seem simple and elegant, but at times almost too literal for me to connect with in a deeply meaningful way. I admire the trust that both he and Kullervo express when they speak of taking their experiences of the gods at face value, and yet as someone without such experiences of my own I wonder if I'm missing something, or if I'm just not as good at make-believe. Of course this sounds insulting, but it's not meant to be. There are certain things in which I believe almost as though they were a part of my nature--reincarnation, for instance, and to some extent faeries and elemental beings--and I have wrestled before with the question of why some beliefs, which are no more rational or mature, come naturally while others just don't "click." But even if this struggle cannot help me to appreciate the language of polytheism, in other ways it helps me to understand where my friend Raymond is coming from when he objects to the use of certain words as unhelpful, even bordering on meaningless.

Because if there's one thing I do believe in, it's the power of language--not to label things, but to name them. For me, words are never fatal, killing a thing dead when we speak about it. Indeed, words are powerful--they allow us to think, they provide us with a structure, a grammar and vocabulary of thought. But a word that cannot evoke a meaningful and complex reality is useless to us; it is language which depends on a thriving essential connection to the real world, and not the other way around. When a word--be it "god" or "truth" or whatever--is thrown around too easily or too often misapplied, then yes, something does die: the word itself. A word that cannot speak to experience is dead indeed, empty and disconnected. But we're mistaken if we think that because the word is dead, we have killed the reality with it, or even that we have cut ourselves off from that reality in its uniqueness and intimate presence. The struggle to articulate our experiences can lead us far from the original immediacy as we knew it at first, but working through this divergence eventually brings us back again to a place in which reality can speak on multiple levels at once, both through particulars and through universals, without one denying the other. When we respect the role that language can play, when we respect both its power and its limits, words can become an instrument of connection, freedom and creativity, rather than a barrier or killing blow.

This, I believe, is the difference between naming and labeling, or the difference between limit and restriction, choice and decision, as I've discussed before. I have never allowed labels--even those applied to me against my will by others--to act as a restriction on my freedom to be who I truly am. Quite the opposite, in fact: I have always felt that who I truly am shapes and gives context to whatever words might attach themselves to me. This is the essence of a name. This is why I am and always will be an "Ali," not because my parents knew me before I was even born (they barely know me now!) and somehow picked out the best label for me, but because the arbitrary gift of that name has given me something to work with creatively and deeply, and I have made it my own. Likewise, being "a waitress" has not restricted me or forced me into a role I do not like; instead, I help to define and expand on what it means to be a waitress by accepting the word as a name and working creatively with it. Being "a Druid," I do the same thing, my ideas and experiences adding meaning, context and life to the word, instead of sucking life out of me and rendering my spiritual experiences shallow or silly. When someone seeks to label me, I do not worry too much that I might somehow be lessened in their eyes, for if they reduce me to a label it is not really me they are talking of, and if they acknowledge my own true being then the label itself is transformed and expanded by "my good name," so to speak.

Understanding the limits of language, as well as its power, means that I also relax a bit and develop a sense of light-hearted playfulness. Words are immensely powerful in shaping our thoughts (and our thoughts do, arguably, shape reality in turn), but I am not just my thinking. I am also my poetry, my music and aesthetics, my intuition, my laughter, my crying, my running and walking, my dancing and my sitting quietly in the park. I am my meditation, whether that meditation is discursive explorations of reasoning and free associative logic, or imaginative journeying through inner landscapes, or the zazen practice of sitting still and quieting the monkey mind. For me, language is something that I play with, in the same way a musician might play his instrument, setting aside all the theory and "right" ways of making music, breaking all the rules in order to give his own soul-song a chance to breathe and speak. To be able to play, to act creatively and discover or make new meaning, I need the freedom of allowing myself not to take language so seriously all the time. I need the freedom to say whatever occurs to me, without worrying if it's always precisely and exactly what I mean, to explore what sounds good and what evokes suggestive or provocative images and ideas, even if it doesn't say something "true." This is what allows me to write poems and stories about gods and goddesses that still hold meaning and power for me, even if I do not know what I believe exactly about deity or the truth of others' beliefs. By playing with language and allowing myself to explore, I learn what it is these words mean for me.

Where It Gets Me

It gets me right here. The other night in meditation, I posed the question--to Caer in whatever form she felt like showing up, or to the universe in general, or to my own subconscious--why I don't seem to experience personal deity any more. The answer came back that it was simply because, at some point, I decided I didn't need personal deity anymore, that this focus on mystic transcendence or whathaveyou was more valuable or more real or simply more meaningful to me. But this was a choice I made, based on what I believed about the universe, and not necessarily some revelation of inherent universal truth. It was the name I chose for my own spiritual path, and to some extent I have been working with that name and making it my own ever since. That doesn't mean this approach is any worse than relating to divinity through personal deity or deities....and it's certainly not a matter of whether or not one "needs" gods or God to grow or love or evolve or connect. I don't think gods, or even a conscious connection with what I call Spirit, is necessary for these things. But that doesn't mean, either, that having a spiritual life that includes ideas about Spirit and deity is worse or more damaging, or prevents people from connecting, growing or appreciating reality, anymore than having relationships with family, friends and so on prevents me from realizing the unity and interconnection at the heart of all our uniqueness.

So in the end, I continue to question myself and others about these subjects. Sometimes I'm surprised that I've been worrying this same bone for more than three years now; other times it just amuses me how some things are ingrained no matter what kinds of other revelations we might have. It is not that I feel my spiritual life is somehow lacking or that I'm not making progress. It's that I am curious about these experiences of personal deity as experiences, as things that others have experienced. In a way, I want to see if I can choose differently, choose a new way of approaching Spirit, precisely because then I will know to some extent that I do indeed have the capacity to choose freely and truly as a creative, free individual. If I have such experiences of my own, I will understand the experiences of others better and the language they use to speak about them. Perhaps, if it is true that not everyone can wield the power and limit of language effectively without slaying the reality it means to express, then I might have some other gift to offer, speaking or writing about these ideas and experiences in ways that are meaningful for others and articulate things they themselves have not yet learned to say. I can only ever talk deeply and meaningful about my own experiences, in the end, but I can strive to shape and work with language in ways that illuminate and communicate meaning and truth, rather than obscuring and detracting from it. And if this effort can help to honor and praise Spirit, in whatever form, then that's what I will work at until my bones ache and my tongue and fingertips are sore.

Re-Membering Theology: Part II

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(Meanwhile, a few more posts have popped up... And I've discovered some very interesting things about Pagan goings-on in Second Life, which I'll write about later.)

Part II: Salvation/Illusion

As a child, I had a relationship with the Huge Generic Personal Spirit that I felt in the breeze over a sunlit field, the flock of gulls swinging towards the ocean's horizon, the quiet darkness that lingered like a loving presence and to which I prayed at night. Jesus, on the other hand, was just a cool guy, a role model, a man I'd heard stories about all my life--but deity? What did it mean to believe in good ol' J.C. as a god, as God itself? I still struggle with this question, and though I can tell people without flinching that I was "born and raised Catholic," sometimes I feel as if I know too much of its murky, complex and sometimes downright unlikely theologies to have any clear sense of what "being a Christian" actually means. I suppose this uncertainty is amusing, considering plenty of people have similar difficulty knowing what it means to "be a Druid" (since the ancient Celtic caste system which defined the original Druids no longer exists and so little information about it has survived).

In some ways, I was only ever truly Christian insofar as I didn't know some of the more obscure details of the religion. (On the other hand, this might very well be true for a majority of Christians; but that's a different debate, between clergy and laity.) Despite the myriad theologies and denominations of Christianity the world over, it is probably safe to say that the one core belief they hold in common is that Jesus Christ is a/the Savior, and that his crucifixion and resurrection in historical time was the vehicle or medium or manifestation of his saving act. This is what I had been taught as a child. Growing up, I elaborated vast and complex explanations for exactly what this belief in a Savior actually meant, especially how it jived with my personal experiential relationship with a Divine that seemed to leave no room and no need for salvation. Eventually, I settled on the mystery of the Trinity, locating that H.G.P.S. of fields and sunlight and oceans and darkness in the theology of the Holy Spirit; the transcendent quality of the Divine, I decided, was God(head) the Father/Creator; and the place of Jesus, the Christ, was that of Reconciler, the bridge between immanence and transcendence, that third unique element of human consciousness that expresses the universal through the particular.

For all its heady technical terms, for a while this spiritual story hung together quite well for me. But soon its metaphors began to take their toll. The image of Christ stretch between immanence and transcendence, between earth and heaven like some axis mundi, his tendons forever strained with the effort of holding us close as we threatened to spin away out of control, holding up the sky as Godhead teetered almost near enough to obliterate us--in short, the image of Christ on the cross, and the suffering aspect of love--became not only what kept it all together, but also what kept it apart. When before I had not understood the need for a Savior, so intertwined was the transcendent Divine with dancing manifest creation; now I looked to a savior who could not even save himself from the suffering of unconditional, selfless love, but could only submit to it in a kind of blinding, awe-filled sacrifice. I began to pity my god.

Meanwhile, the thought lurked in the back of my mind that, if God were the fundamental essence of our being and of existence itself, then salvation from a separation from that essence could only ever be a kind of illusion, or rather the waking up from illusion. Yet trying to believe in a Salvation had only led me into an illusion I hadn't held to begin with (perhaps this was why Jesus was so adamant about not leading the innocent children astray, though Catholicism would maintain there was no such thing). It seemed, in the end, that believing in a Savior just wasn't part of my spiritual make-up.

Wonder

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Wonder

Her absent god and his empty tomb
amidst the snow and flower-bloom,
the ready earth and garden tilled,
the Gardener smiling, sweet and stilled:
moon-full night and balanced day
have swept even her god away.

Is Christ Special?

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Continuing along my recent theological ponderings about polytheism, I return to a question that I've been asking myself for several years now. Growing up in a fairly open and religiously liberal atmosphere, I have always been exposed to religious traditions other than Christianity, and my identity as a Christian was based largely on a sense of inheritance (it was the religion of my father and his family) and community (it was the church I attended). Once in college and somewhat removed from these two aspects of my religious life, however, I began to consider the theological foundations for why I considered myself Christian. (Incidentally, though I've been meaning to write this entry for the past several days now, Cat's recent blog post "What is a Christian?" over at Quaker Pagan Reflections finally provided the spark of inspiration to do so. Thanks, Cat!) Until this point, a somewhat vague relationship with God as loving, watchful Guide and pervading, sustaining Spirit had defined my personal religious life; but I knew already that this particular spiritual attitude was not the sole property of the Christian tradition, but was held in common with several other Western monotheistic religions, with echoes and shadows in many other traditions as well.


Christian Theology as Something New?

So what, then, was Christianity about?

From a theological point of view, for me the answer seemed fairly obvious: Christ. That is, not the historical person of Jesus, or not only this, but the spiritual concept of the Divine manifest and incarnate in humanity, the loving sacrifice of God in order to demonstrate and reveal that love, and the role of Christ-the-Reconciler as the Bridge between the transcendent Father and immanent Holy Spirit in order to complete a Trinity of Divinity that resolves the paradox of union and uniqueness on a higher spiritual plane. Yes, I came up with that definition in college. I loved big words and complicated imagery. (Still do.)

But of course, Christianity does not have the monopoly on trinities, sacrificial dying-and-rising gods, panentheism, or love and Spirit, so I still hadn't really answered my question. And this is the point I return to today, in my contemplation of polytheism. For, if I acknowledge that Jesus the Christ just happens to be my "patron" deity out of many available Reconciler deities from other cultures and climes , then it is possible to argue that I am (and perhaps always have been), in fact, a polytheist who has a personal relationship with the Divine or Source through a Christ-based pantheon. On the other hand, if Christian theology actually offers something substantially new and revolutionary in the development of the spiritual life, if the figure of Christ is not "just another deity" but embodies a strikingly and essentially new way of thinking about our relationship to the Divine, then there is something more than just a label, heritage or common social institution underlying my Christian self-identity. If this latter is the case, it might even mean that I will remain "Christian" in essence, even if I build relationships with deities from non-Christian pantheons and cultures, as long as I continue to pursue a relationship with the Divine in a markedly or uniquely Christian way.

Which brings us to the central question: Is Christ special?

This, for me, is a different question from "Was Jesus special?" regarding the historical person of Jesus and my beliefs about him, as well as the beliefs of the Christian community at large. In the past, I have attempted to answer the question, Is Christ special?, by exploring my beliefs regarding the unique manifestation of Christ as Jesus-the-historical-person. I've struggled to articulate the necessity of believing that Jesus, unlike figures such as Buddha and other Savior deities of the past, did not attain to Christ-consciousness (or, that is, to a conscious embodiment of Divinity) but rather was the unique historical expression of that consciousness itself. Simply put, he was born that way--a paradox, or Mystery, both fully human and fully Divine. But this just seems to confuse the issue, since I'm not even fully committed to this belief. My intuition, instead, is to reply that we are all both fully human and fully Divine, and yet this statement seems to relegate Jesus once again to just another deity incarnate or, alternatively, an ordinary person who's attained to full Divine consciousness.

The real dilemma, for me, is whether or not the very notion of the Mystery of the Fully Human/Fully Divine paradox is not itself a unique contribution by Christianity to the evolution of religion, or whether this idea existed in pre-Christian times. When I ask, is Christ special, what I am asking is if the idea of Christ as developed and explored within the Christian tradition is a new way, and perhaps a more highly evolved way, of understanding our relationship with Spirit.


A Tale of Two Fishes

This question has come to the forefront again as I've been reading Emma Jung's and Marie-Louise von Franz's work The Grail Legend, which applies Jungian psychological analysis to the narrative(s) of the Quest for the Holy Grail. In their discussion of the material, they seem to suggest repeatedly that the beginning of the Christian Age (which corresponded with the Piscine Age, an age not of one but of two fish) marked a new revolution in religion: that of emphasizing individuation. The Grail legend, which suddenly increased in popularity after 1000 C.E., is a response to the ending age of the "First Fish," which was characterized by an unbalanced emphasis on the light and masculine aspects of Christ. This imbalance, absorbed into tradition as defining features of the collective Christian consciousness, resulted in an intensified conflict between opposites: light and dark, masculine and feminine, man and nature, Christ and Antichrist. To redress this polarity, a shift into the age of the "Second Fish," began--the Grail legend with its knightly Masculine seeking an elusive and often ambivalent Feminine was the mytho-poetic expression of this shift--in which these opposites were, ideally, to be reconciled on a conscious level in order to achieve greater individuation and a wholeness of Self.

This conscious reconciliation or re-union is distinct, they explain, from the unconscious unity existing in the "primitive" pre-Christian pagan religions, in that it allows for personal, and not only collective or communal, relationship with God. In their analysis of Perceval's adventure in hunting a white stag and returning with its head to win the love of a water nixie, they discuss the imperative that the "question of the Grail" (i.e. the question about the Grail's origin and purpose, the asking of which would heal the King and restore the land) lays upon the hero. "A mere regression into paganism would be equally meaningless, so that this state of suspension, this crucifixion of the animal soul and the agonizing conflict bound up with it, must be maintained until the growth of consciousness striven for by the unconscious, namely the question concerning the Grail, has been achieved. [p. 275, emphasis added]" In other words, once one realizes there is a question to be asked--once the tension between opposites has been recognized, which inherently points towards the question of their resolution--returning to the pre-sundered state is meaningless, if not simply impossible. This, in itself, is rather obvious, but the fact that the authors designate paganism specifically as the religion to which it would be meaningless to return is likely to cause some objection, if not outrage, among the modern Pagan (i.e. NeoPagan) community.


Pagan Possibilities

On the other hand, Jung and von Franz also seem to speak of Christianity and the Christian aeon with a certain amount of ambivalence themselves, as if, given Christianity's second millennium that followed the supposed shift to the age of the "Second Fish" and should have seen the resolutions of the first age's polarities rather than their exacerbation or intensification, they're not so sure the Christian tradition may be up to the task. (Keep in mind, this is my own impression of some of their more subtle statements, and I'm by no means an expert on Jungian psychology on this point.) When discussing the origins and development of the Grail symbol a thousand years ago, for instance, they write, "The return to Celtic and Germanic mythological material on the one hand, and to some apocryphal traditions of early Christianity on the other can all be explained psychologically by the same need: to complete the Christ-image by addition of features which had not been taken sufficiently into account by ecclesiastical tradition. [p.104, emphasis in the original]" But couldn't such a statement be just as applicable to today's alternative spirituality movements, many of which have modern roots in a reaction against Christianity's continued patriarchal, dogmatic and ecologically-ignorant attitudes?

The difference of course, as Jung and von Franz argue, is that the Grail is still an inherently Christian symbol, and the incorporation of other mythological material as an attempt to expand the Christian tradition, not reject it completely. Yet later, in exploring the occasion of Perceval (now acknowledged, at this point in the story, as the best of all knights) crossing the "Bridge Over Which No One Crosses," they write:

This is only half a bridge, but it turns round on its centre when the right hero steps on to it. Being only half a bridge alludes, no doubt, to the fact that Christianity permits only the one, light half of the transcendent function to become conscious but does not allow for the psychic law of reversal of all opposites (enantiodromia), which is surprisingly and frighteningly manifested in the turning round of the bridge on its own axis. It is precisely because of this, however, that Perceval is enabled to reach his goal. In doing so he walks back over the same half of the bridge, but goes forward towards the opposite bank.

This incident seemingly represents a regression which nevertheless leads forward, an impressive indication for modern man with his apparent turning back to a quasi "pagan" attitude which nevertheless does not lose the religious and ethical values of Christianity but broadens them through further progress. [pp. 280-81]

Once again, here we see an ambiguity: on the one hand, Paganism seems to be dismissed off-hand as a "regression" or at best a "quasi"-urge, while on the other, it is presented as offering solutions to the problem of Christian polarity and imbalance. As usual, the authors seem to imply that the only way "forward" is within and through the Christian tradition, but one wonders exactly why this should be the case. Isn't it possible, instead, for modern humanity to acknowledge the tensions and polarities brought into consciousness by the Christian aeon, and then more forward from these to a conscious but still essentially Pagan spirituality? (Is this possibility also on the minds of the authors when they write, "For in those days, unlike the present, the recognition of nature could have implied a dangerous loss of direction, because it would have seduced naive medieval man into the abyss in which he would no longer have been able to find his way. The primitive in him was still too close to the surface. [p.286, emphasis added]"?)


So... Is Christ Special?

We seem to have strayed far from the original question at this point. Indeed, it seems obvious from Jung's and von Franz's writing that their answer is an unequivocal, "Yes, the Christ figure as god-image within the Christian aeon is 'special'--it is a new development towards individuation within religion, one which cannot be ignored or abandoned without consequence." If they are correct (and I have no idea whatsoever if their analysis is confirmed or supported by archeological, anthropological, historical and sociological studies or not), then the question becomes: How do we respond to, reject or incorporate the unique aspects of the Christian tradition into our own spiritual lives?

My choice to identify myself as "Christian" hinges, in part, on the answer to this question, though in another sense it is only a small matter of semantics. Whether I choose to identify myself with mainstream Christianity in the future, the Christian tradition is already firmly established as a core aspect of my heritage and the shaping of my personal spiritual consciousness. Indeed, I know already that I will never be satisfied with any religion or spiritual path that does not have the capacity to bring into conscious tension the many polarities and opposites which the process of personal individuation requires; just as I will never feel comfortable within a fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity that refuses to reconcile or transcend those tensions, to unite Christ with his Shadow, the Anthropos with his Anima.

Happily, the path of Druidry--in particular that inclusive Druidry embraced by OBOD and AODA--do not demand an outright rejection of Christianity (OBOD even has a link off the mainpage of their website to an article devoted to discussing "Christianity and Druidry"). Instead, both of these Orders readily acknowledge the importance of all of Druidry's development throughout history, including the period of Mesopagan Druidry that was highly influenced by Christianity.

I feel as though I've finally come home!

To Love a God: Struggling with Morality in Polytheism

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In my continued attempts to explore polytheism and the various pantheons of the ancients, I recently read both R. J. Stewart's Celtic Gods, Celtic Goddesses, and Goddess: Myths of the Female Divine, coauthored by David Leeming and Jake Page. In some ways, polytheism continues to have a certain appeal or attraction for me as, perhaps, a final, definitive embrace of my Druid path. Devoting myself to wild, colorful deities of my ancestors carries the same kind of tantalizing mystique and fresh spiritual intrigue as dancing with faeries, seeing auras, singing with the river stones or treading moonlit wooded paths in the evening, seeking contemplative solitude or poetic coincidence in the world. The fulfillment of this imagined "magical self" that I have been crafting and cultivating over the past several years--first through witchcraft, and now through Druidry and other occult studies--seems always to have been the kind of devoted, ecstatic priestess who was only naturally polytheistic or, at the very least, more interesting than a plain, familiar Christian.


Still, though I continue to explore polytheism--in particular, the loose conglomeration of deities one could call the Celtic pantheon--I'm reminded again and again of certain things that don't quite sit well with me. Leeming's and Page's Goddess brought this unease home to me once again as I read the book over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Putting the Double-D in Goddess

The least problematic issue I run aground on is the ancient forms of Goddess-worship, those associated with the deep caverns of the earth painted with symbolic vulvas and protective, procreative wombs. While beautifully ecstatic, creative and sensual--celebrating the power of both womanhood and nature to give and sustain life, and transforming death into a return to generative darkness--it has always struck me as, well, a bit lop-sided (might I even say, top-heavy?). In its purest form, perhaps, in which Goddess is conceived as almost androgynous or trans-gendered, all-embracing in her presence, it echoes and affirms the kind of pan(en)theism with which I find myself most comfortable. Goddess not as anthropomorphic deity, but as life-force, Spirit and ground of creative being, transcends the male-female divide in the same way the God of my childhood Catholicism embraced all existence and paradox when the priest called upon the Divine as loving Mother (for now, I'll not spend time explaining that not all Christians are patriarchal misogynists--just trust me on that one ;).

But it seems, far from this aspiration towards pan-gendered unity reflected in certain pantheist and monotheist traditions today, many ancient Goddess myths take for granted the secondary, disposable nature of the male counterpart. This has always felt, to me, just as unbalanced and short-sighted as a spirituality that takes for granted the female side of Spirit as secondary or non-essential. Not only does it seem to reduce men to either amusing pets or convenient sacrifices, but it puts forward a view of the feminine with an exaggerated sense of sensuality, fecundity and receptivity. Perhaps the truth is, in being female, I personally look for the animus or male energy in my conception of a personified (that is to say, in some sense, an "external") conception of deity, while feminine aspects of the Divine I experience more directly as imminent, an animating breath or Life-force within me. This has made it difficult for me to feel comfortable worshipping a Goddess, but it has not stopped me from experiencing the Goddess-nature of myself and the larger Divine that suffuses reality.

Gods Behaving Badly

Another stumbling block I find within many polytheistic traditions is when the balance so clearly swings in the other direction, away from Goddess-worship and towards the repression and distortion of the feminine archetype of Spirit. Though Christianity has become an easy scapegoat to blame for rampant, repressive patriarchy among the world's religions and spiritual traditions, the myths explored by Leeming and Page often illustrate repressive, misogynistic and downright immoral behavior within plenty of purely polytheistic pantheons. Zeus's many rapes of women, both mortal and divine; the early Epic of Gilgamesh and his rejection of Ishtar as an untrustworthy seductress; even a late Apache myth about the toothed "vagina" goddesses, progeny of the Kicking Monster, who must be tamed, literally de-fanged and taught the pleasure of submissive "swallowing"!

Certainly the sexist mythology of Eve and the Fall, as well as of Lilith, Adam's first wife who dared to believe herself an equal, have their place within the Christian tradition, but it is also important to note that these are Jewish myths in origin. As far as new contributions to the misogyny of past and contemporary traditions, Christianity seems to have added very little, at least if we consider its mythology rather than its socio-political structures. Indeed, within the Gospels, women are often treated as equals, as worthy and devoted disciples, and as the most powerful of divine instruments (from creative vessels of new life, to sacred witnesses to the grief and mystery of death). The fact that the socio-political institution of Christianity as a religion has not always reflected the feminist lessons of its own mythology is no surprise; consider, after all, how rarely the gods and goddesses of various polytheistic pantheons seem actually to embrace the ideals of diversity and humanism that have become a cornerstone for the Neopagan movement. Although the modern Pagan religion as a socio-political counterculture encourages equality, personal will and tolerance, polytheistic pantheons seem full of deities with no qualms about unequal favoritism, fickle wrath or even seemingly manipulative impositions onto the human personal will.

Worship & Love

If I find polytheistic deities a bit fickle or inexplicable, however, this is partly because they are much more closely related to the mysterious forces of nature, which themselves are often highly indifferent to the whims or will of men. Oddly enough, I have no trouble appreciating, praising and even loving these forces of nature when I experience them within the context of a more unifying, interwoven, infinitely-living whole--when I experience the fierceness of a thunderstorm, the brutal cold and blinding purity of snow, the persistence and continuity of a wide river and the stolid starkness of the hills that loom over it. I can appreciate and experience the way in which Spirit manifests itself in each of these particulars, to create a tension and conflict out of which beauty and transformation arise through struggle. Yet, can I call these particular beings--these nature spirits and animating forces--gods and goddesses? And can I really worship them as such?

There is no question that I respect, admire and sometimes even fear the various particulars and manifestations of the world--but the quirk of having been raised Catholic is that, for me, these feelings are not enough. I grew up believing that the proper attitude towards one's god(s)--that is, the proper relationship between oneself and the Divine--is that of love. The Law of Love, which trumps everything else according to the "Good" Book, is to love God, and to love others and oneself as one loves God--creatively, freely and unconditionally. Jesus Christ, as portrayed as a deity incarnate in the Gospels, engages in the small, daily activity of creative, unconditional loving--he acts morally within the human sphere of experience in order to blow open and transform that sphere, transfusing it with Divinity. He is not only a poet-prophet, magician, philosopher-teacher and political radical--he's just a damned good guy, really. In the theology of Christianity, humanity is not simply incidental to the indifferent glories of a Divine natural world; Jesus, as deity, not only acknowledges and celebrates a sense of sacredness in nature (through parables and acts of natural magic) but elevates human beings themselves as deserving of respect, as worthy of Divine love. To me, he is not only a deity to be praised or feared (i.e. to be worshipped), but to be loved, intimately and fully.

Yet the mythology of Christ is not simply that of love, light and warm-fuzzies. Other, more scholarly Pagans than I have noted the parallels between the Christ myth of death and rebirth/resurrection and those of other polytheistic cultures. The Sacrificial God-King who dies to redeem and bless the land is a common mythological figure, particularly among agricultural-based societies. The deaths of these gods, however, are usually portrayed as brought about by those very same inexplicable and larger-than-life forces of nature--the God-King sacrificed to the Goddess-Mother/-Lover/-Land--and require of human beings either mere ritual witness, or the requisite personal sacrifices. The sacrificial death of Christ, on the other hand, is deeply human; indeed, it is not the inexplicable and sometimes tragically indifferent mysteries of nature which demand it, but the inexplicable and equally tragic community of humanity itself. Jesus, as historical figure, goes to his death at the hands of his fellow man, while Christ, as deity, inverts and subverts the vast gulf of power usually assumed to exist between all-powerful God- and Goddess-forces and a humanity buffeted about by their winds. Christ then becomes not only a deity of love and moral commitment, but a dark god of death, destruction, tragedy and the shadows of the underworld--not merely the ugly or incomprehensible fears of nature, but those within humanity itself. With humanity so intimately involved in the mythology of this deity, it also lends new responsibility (some ex-Catholics would probably be accurate in even saying "guilt" to some extent, though I have always understood it as response-ability) to the relationship one has with the Divine. We see that we are not powerless and ineffectual, that we are indeed capable of killing a god, and that this becomes yet another reason why love of Divinity and for Divinity, as both manifest within and transcendent beyond humanity, is possible.

The Disconnected Line

All that said, I have no doubt that my friendly neighborhood Pagans and polytheists out there have intimate, inspiring, even loving relationships with their gods and goddesses, which move way beyond simple worship in terms of praise and fear. I see these relationships expressed daily in indirect ways, as other bloggers talk about their spiritual practices and experiences. What I find frustrating is, well, akin to the frustration a person might have when trying to start dating again after years of being "out of the game." How do you meet the "right god"? How do you go about beginning the process of learning about one another and establishing a connection?

I'm still puzzled about this process. I read the books on mythology and ancient tales that people recommend, but I often feel as though these are out-of-date phonebooks and I'm looking up numbers for deities who have grown and moved on. Or, perhaps a more apt metaphor, it feels a bit like stalking someone on Facebook or MySpace, where the worst and the best of a person (or deity, as the case may be) are splayed for public view out of all context, hardly reflective of the real experience of knowing and working with him or her. Even among the Celtic deities, many of whom I find intriguing and potentially powerful patrons, I find myself coming up against silence, the dialtone of a disconnected line. Perhaps if I were part of a working group of local Druids, rather than a solitary practitioner, making that connection might be easier. I've even contemplated the more indirect route--meditating, for instance, on my apparent connection with frogs, hares/rabbits, pigs and even horses as recurring totem animals, researching which deities in which pantheons are associated with them, almost as if they were mutual friends who might be able to introduce us.

The question I always come back to, though, is: is all this really necessary, anyway? Am I, perhaps, just a naturally monogamous lover and, spiritually speaking, worshipper? Did I get lucky and meet the "right god" when I was very young, growing up with a Christ that is not the judgmental, oppressive or vindictive deity known to so many others? Is it, perhaps, really all right to be a Christian Druid, in the end? I mean, of course it's "all right" in the sense that the OBOD and AODA communities embrace seekers on the Druid path regardless of their religious backgrounds. But my concern is really about internal consistency and the integrity of a personal spiritual tradition. Is there something inherently polytheistic about Druidry? If there is, I am bound to confront it one of these days. Still, I wonder, who are these Gods and Goddesses of the Neopagan pantheons, and how do modern practitioners reconcile the sometimes less than admirable and moral mythologies from which they seem to evolve?

For those of you readers who are polytheists, I really would love to hear your views on this. Over the past few years, I've come to understand and even experience the nature of spirit guides, ancestors, "elementals" and group thought-forms (for which I can never remember the gosh-darn name--it starts with an 'e', right?)... but deities, Gods and Goddesses... they remain beyond me.

On Faith & Its Loss

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Some of you may have already heard about the letters revealing Mother Teresa's loss of faith in the later years of her life.

Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta's slums, the spirit left Mother Teresa.

"Where is my faith?" she wrote. "Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness... If there be God — please forgive me."

Eight years later, she was still looking to reclaim her lost faith.

"Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal," she said.

It's not so surprising when atheists and believers of other faiths or spiritual traditions (especially those with a particularly anti-Christian chip on the shoulder) mention Mother Teresa's deep doubts about her religion with a kind of repressed triumph, as if they've managed to recruit one more morally superior non-believer into their ranks. Just one more example of how one doesn't need to be a "real Christian" to be a good person.

Yet I find myself wondering what exactly it means to be a "real" Christian, after all. In some ways, I feel as though I can relate to this sense of emptiness and lack of solid deistic ground. Recently re-reading a favorite book of mine (Radical Optimism, by Beatrice Bruteau) I discovered that, while much of her talk of creative freedom and self-giving love still rang true, the idea of the loving, protective parent-god seemed almost silly. For a moment, I wondered where my own faith had gone. Was this just a symptom of cynicism, pessimism masquerading as maturity and objectivity?

Several years ago, while working on my chapbook The Rosary Poems, I began to ask myself about the nature of the Christian spirituality in relationship to an absent God. In a journal I was keeping at the time, I wrote:

Word became flesh--Jesus was born--so that he would die, I know that much, it would seem. What I don’t understand is how I am supposed to be a religious person now. The Word became present so that we would be “saved” by its absence? But then, if it is eternal, not only is it not absent now, but it was never not-present to begin with... Jesus is the self-revelation of God in human form--but he is dead now, and now all we have are words, which is what we had to begin with. Am I supposed to believe that if Jesus had never been born, no amount of words would be enough? How are words enough now?

The metaphor of the empty grave began to dominate my contemplations, and towards the end of the short collection of poems based on the Mysteries of the Catholic rosary, I wrote a verse entitled "Resurrection," in which Mary Magdalene searches for her beloved:

Resurrection

       Tell me where you have laid him,
       and I will take him away. JOHN 20:15

I seek you in the garden--
small roses blossom like tombs
from the earth, dark scabs of flowers
that itch between thick layers
of clotted petal, and butterflies
alight, unroll them, opening
with angelic curiosity--but you
are nowhere. Pained and peeling,
I find nothing but the tightened,
milky scar of this new morning.

What does it mean to be a "real" Christian? Christ is, in some ways, an underworld god, a god of darkness and suffering, a god of death. He has the power (and the self-knowledge of this power) to raise Lazarus from the dead, yet he grieves deeply for his friend--he weeps for him. He weeps for himself, as well, on the night of his betrayal, with an anxiety so deep that his tears run red with blood. He must have known that he would be resurrected and glorified, that his death would be the active salvation for mankind--he is the Divine Son, isn't he? Even if he is just a mythic figure, of all mythic figures his faith must have been the most pristine, the most unshakable. And yet he suffers, deeply, almost beyond endurance.

It would be easy to shut down this paradox, to reduce it, to deny the Is-And-Is-Not nature of the story. Either Jesus' faith was strong and so he did not truly suffer, or he had no faith and he suffered because he was just another doubtful, ordinary man. But perhaps, there is another possibility. Perhaps there is a way in which faith and doubt coexist, and the experience of utter emptiness and the most poignant pain of longing are not symptoms of a lost faith, but a sign of its fruition, its completion in union with a Divine which, as macrocosm, suffers each pain and isolation and fear that shudders the frame of each microcosmic creature longing still to realize its own divinity.

The Christian path is to seek to become "Christ-like" ourselves, to "put on the mind of Christ," to seek Christ-consciousness. But what does this look like? Is it really the self-satisfied, warm-fuzzy glow of the ever-loving mother coddling us all our lives? Or is it, perhaps, what we see in Mother Teresa? A process by which inner doubt and suffering are transformed into loving action, not through faith but through the pure tenacity of the divine spark insisting that it manifest--a love that is truly selfless in having not even a God to justify it. That doubt can inspire faith, that suffering can be transformed into hope... Isn't this a glimpse of the Divine about its work?

Cross

       Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves
        and for your children. LUKE 23:28

Choked wailing, flung out with our
sweat-limp palms along the road,
and pulled back again, rushing gasp
of sand from beneath us--what good
is mercy now? No one can relieve him
of it, when even we are his--our rushing
forward to lift him, only his return
to himself--our cry beneath the weight
of it, his cry--we double over, unable
to tell for whose God we are weeping.

Modern Myths about Christianity Series

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A few years ago, I wrote another three-part series of posts in my old blog, Pulse Like Water, addressing some "myths" about Christianity that often circulate among modern Pagans. The posts were in large part provoked by reading a few "beyond-Wicca-101" type books (such as Currat's Wtichcrafting and Sylvan's The Circle Within) which still persisted in making broad statements about what Christianity can and can't be. At the time, I was still very strongly Christian and identifying myself as a member of the Catholic Church (mostly in an attempt to prove that not all Catholics are unthinking, patriarchal, anti-nature, intolerant jerks, and to live the example of Catholic mysticism as an acceptable and legitimate alternative).

The other week, while visiting my parents for my birthday, I had a conversation with my father about the difference between what it means to be a Catholic now, versus what it meant to be Catholic back when he was growing up in the isolated and impoverished back-end of the Pennsylvania coal region. He told me about his education in a Catholic school, where in "religion class" they actually debated difficult philosophical questions about the cold war, communism, violence and tolerance, instead of just preaching anti-gay, anti-abortion rhetoric. He told me that, when he first moved to Lancaster and began traveling often to Philadelphia on business, he was shocked at how conservative Catholics were expected to be. I guess that explains a lot about my own view of Christianity as much more diverse and more complex than most people believe it to be, or have experienced it as in their own lives. That conversation with my dad reminded me of these old posts that I wrote a while back, in which I took on various accusations often leveled at modern Christians and tried to explain how I thought they were inaccurate, misunderstood, or simply open to interpretation even among Christians. I cited a lot from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, as one of the few documents that does a fairly good job of outlining just what exactly the current theology and philosophy is behind certain Catholic beliefs and practices.

So I thought I'd post a few links to the three parts, to kind of "clear the air" before I go on to talk about other Christianity-related topics. That way, if at some point, I begin to talk about the feminist or panentheistic or internal consistency aspects of Christianity, I can refer back to these handy essays as examples of what I'm talking about.


Part 1: Something Borrowed, Something Blue

In this post, I address two of the most common "myths" among Pagans about Christianity and its fundamental flaws: that Christianity is inauthentic and inconsistent, and that its most basic teaching is that human beings are utterly cut off from the Divine.

• Myth # 1: Something Borrowed. Christianity "borrowed" or stole a great deal from the pagan culture it was attempting to replace, and to this day most things of value or benefit within the faith are not Christian, but pagan in nature.


• Myth # 2: Something Blue. The most tragic aspect of Christianity is that it teaches that God is unreachable and unknowable, wholly absent from the world and from humankind, which is isolated by its sinful nature.

Part 2: No, Faith, No Sin, No Giving In

In this post, I address the way terms like "faith" and "sin" have come to be so narrowly defined by the very people rejecting them, and look at how a broader and mode complex understanding of these words help to shed light on their theological implications for Christian believers.

• Myth # 3: No Faith. The Christian idea of faith is defined by absence--the absence of proof, the absence of thoughtful analysis, and the absence of any doubt or questioning. Neopagans do not need faith because they experience directly the Presence of the Divine.


• Myth # 4: No Sin. The concept of "sin" is unhealthy and is just a way of threatening and controlling others. Nature teaches us that there is no such thing as "sin" or "evil."

Part 3: I Can't Even Save Myself : So Save Yourself

In this post, I look at the very complicated idea of what "salvation" means from the Christian perspective--the process by which a person might be "saved" and the idea of "hell" as what they're being saved from--with a focus on the implications for Christian tolerance or intolerance of other religious traditions.

• Myth # 5: Christianity insists that only Christians can be saved and all other non-Christians are condemned to hell; this means that Christianity is fundamentally an intolerant religion eager to claim the privileges given to them by their Savior, Jesus Christ, who is the one and only legitimate savior of humankind (all others being false gods and demons).

What We Know & How We Know It - Part III

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Texts, Truths and Traditions:
A Study in Three Parts

In a recent post, blogger Robin Artisson, proposed this intriguing question:

"What if the entire New Testament was a construct, a forgery, a fake? What if Jesus never existed, and was instead a composite figure cobbled together from the myths of many other Gods that long pre-existed Christianity?"

The Part that Passion Plays

I've had some trouble with the transition into this third and final part of the "Texts, Truths and Traditions" series for a few reasons. First of all, as I mentioned in an earlier comment, these posts were originally written in direct response to Robin's opinions as he expressed them on his blog. His post, "Why a Return to Indo-European Polytheism is Needed," was itself rather disjointed--the first half addressed the possible forgery of Biblical texts and the questionable historicity of the person of Jesus, but the second half was largely dedicated to his own passionate views of "Truth" as reflected in an "Old Religion" centered on polytheism and the various deities of ancient Indo-European pantheons. Now, I find myself somewhat stalled, for in attempting to address this latter aspect of Robin's post, I find myself too quickly abandoning an honest discussion of the role history and literalism play in Biblical interpretation.

With that in mind, I think the best course would be to first take a look back at some of the ideas I've discussed so far and to put them into a broader context, focusing on the question, "What role do sacred texts play in a spiritual tradition?"

So, where have we come? In Part I of this series, we took a look at the relevancy of the historic figure of Jesus within the Christian tradition. I put forward the possibility that it is the idea of Jesus Christ, and not the literal, historical fact of his existence, which functions most prominently within Christianity and its varied and sprawling system(s) of belief. The idea of Jesus may include a faith in his historical presence in a particular time and place--in fact, it may be central to the theology of the Divine-manifest-in-man from a Christian perspective--but this is still a matter of faith, not of fact. The relationship that a Christian develops with Jesus as deity does not grow primarily out of archeological or historical research, but out of an engagement with Biblical texts and a personal participation in activities such as prayer and communion, which are understood for the most part to be interactions with God.

In Part II, we explored how the Biblical texts, as one of the source springs of Christianity, can be viewed historically as texts written by human beings that evolved in focus and interpretation over time to address the changing needs of various communities. Historical research continues to give insight into and evidence for various theological interpretations, but the theologies themselves continue to function in the realm of faith for the individual Christian. For instance, in her book Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, Sandra M. Schneiders looks at the historical and literary evidence to suggest that the Gospel of "John" was, in fact, written by a woman; however, a feminist theology of inclusion and respect does not hinge on this historical possibility, and if the authorship of the gospel were to be confirmed, it would likely have little effect on those who already adhere strictly to an anti-feminist belief system. Schneiders does not take on this possibility in order to convert all Christians to a pro-feminist interpretation, but to consider what new ideas, associations and possible interpretations grow out of such an interpretive perspective, as a way of both challenging and expanding upon the potentials for Christian tradition to support the need of a modern community concerned with gender-equality. Given this strange relationship between "sacred texts" and their historical context, it becomes increasingly important to look at how sacred texts in general function within religious or spiritual systems.

This is, perhaps, too large a subject to cover at the moment, especially if I intend to move on to address Robin's comments more directly. For now, I think it is important simply to recognize that texts can function in many different ways, and that the relationship between text and reader (not to mention writer, text and reader) is complex and multifaceted. Because the Neopagan community has, in general, so few texts that are considered "sacred" or "inspired" in the traditionally religious sense, it is easy to view all texts as functioning in a single and uniform manner, and thus to see any one aspect of that functioning as undermining all others. If a particular text fails to uphold itself on the level of historical accuracy, it can be easily abandoned for the latest book on the topic, which is sure to include all of the latest research. Starhawk's The Spiral Dance, a ground-breaking work and considered required reading twenty years ago, has been largely replaced in the Wicca 101 market by books which use similar poetic and psychological techniques, without resorting to unfounded beliefs in an historical matriarchal "Old Religion." Reading The Spiral Dance, while still sometimes considered essential reading for those interested in Wicca, is now less a spiritual task than a kind of historical work, looking back at the roots of Wicca and its subsequent development as a modern American religion.

On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of texts which hold spiritual value and are understood as "inspired," for the very reason that they do not claim to be historical. A good many Pagans seem greatly inspired by various science fiction and fantasy writers, whose works are free to delve into complex spiritual matters for the very reason that they do not talk about historical events of our own world that could be proved or disproved (my personal favorites are Tolkien, Le Guin and Pratchet). Likewise, many Pagans write and read a great deal of poetry, incorporating it directly into personal ritual or approaching creative writing as a magical act. The "sacred texts" of Neopaganism are, in some ways, as ahistorical as the spiritual beliefs that they address and express. While on one level this provides a cushion against the harsh materialist-literalist approach of historical and scientific "fact," I sometimes wonder if it also limits such sacred texts and their possible functions, pushing them outside the realm of real history and real time, so that they become just another kind of indulgent navel-gazing. Of course, Neopaganism as a self-identifying spiritual community is still so young, it may just be that we do not yet have the perspective to know which texts might come to play the role of both "inspired" and historical works...

In any case, Robin's final remarks in his original post provide an excellent example of the kind of passion that can grow within a person regardless of textual support. Indeed, some of the best know traits of Christian fundamentalists and creationists--their insistence on taking Biblical texts literally and on proving these texts to be "factually" true with often baseless speculations that make rather haphazard use of select bits of modern science and scholarship; their passion for the exclusive Truth of their own view and the uselessness of "foreign," "unnatural" or qualifying perspectives; their reliance on personal feelings of comfort, inspiration and fulfillment to justify their evangelism to others--are all echoed (if reversed) as Robin's critique of Christianity continues.

The heart of Robin's critique of (and disgust with) Christianity is not based on alternative authentic texts, scholarship or "factual" history at all; it stems, instead, from his passionate commitment to his own spiritual tradition. In trying to justify this passion in universal terms (rather than acknowledging it as personal, though still wholly authentic and fruitful), he resorts to some of the same techniques he has just finished criticizing. While Christians should abandon their beliefs because they are not based on "facts," he insists, "it is possible to believe and worship as our Ancestors did- modern Pagan religious reconstructions, from Germanic to Celtic, Greek, Roman, and Slavic, have been given much attention, carefully reconstructed in the spirit of the original faiths"--in short, the reconstruction of these faiths are, he claims, very close to being "factual" and therefore they can be trusted. (Of course, the Christian faith does not need to be "reconstructed" at all, since it is still a contemporary, living tradition, while the deities of reconstructed Indo-European faiths are even more obscure and difficult to study than the figure of Jesus--but this slips by unmentioned.)

Repeated exhortations to the "sanity" and "Truth" of the "Old Religion" of "Old Europe" (despite the widely-held view among many scholars and Neopagans alike that there was no unified Old Religion, per se) sound remarkably like Christian fundamentalists' claims that Christianity is the "original" and "True" religion of the human race (citing Genesis for support, of course), while the personal "comfort" Robin refers to repeatedly begins to sound eerily like the born-agains' stories of new-found security and certainty once they "found Jesus" and "accepted Him into their hearts." Even his story of ancient injustices and persecutions echo the Judeo-Christian mythologies of the struggling, repressed communities of believers that eventually gave rise to the traditions of martyrdom and sacrifice within Christianity. (And there is historical truth, if not exclusive Truth, to both of these identity-defining martyrdom mythologies.)

Like the Christians of fundamentalist and evangelical traditions, Robin's passion for polytheistic, Indo-European reconstructionist spirituality is not really based on what he can prove, but on what he feels passionately that he knows from personal experience and direct participation in the Divine. It is as moving as it is, at times, almost frightening. The same careful historical and sociological studies that have jeopardized the literal interpretation of sacred texts and forced modern Christians to confront the possibility that personal truth and "objective" truth may not be the same thing, have given rise equally to increased tolerance and open-minded personal faith, and to increased hysterical, xenophobic tirades against "insane" or "sick" alternative spiritual traditions. Modern Pagans are just as susceptible to this dual response to the intrusion of "facts" into the religious world as modern Christians are. It is a unique, but ubiquitous, aspect of a modern, globally-connected and culturally diverse world.

What We Know & How We Know It
Texts, Truths and Traditions:
A Study in Three Parts

Part I: Introduction & The Historical Person of Jesus
Part II: The Historical Nature of Biblical Texts
Part III: The Part that Passion Plays

What We Know & How We Know It - Part II

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Texts, Truths and Traditions:
A Study in Three Parts

In a recent post, blogger Robin Artisson, proposed this intriguing question:

"What if the entire New Testament was a construct, a forgery, a fake? What if Jesus never existed, and was instead a composite figure cobbled together from the myths of many other Gods that long pre-existed Christianity?"

Click here to read Part I: Introduction & The Historical Person of Jesus.

Part II: The Historical Nature of Biblical Texts

Which brings us to the second major issue that Robin's initial questions raised (and the one he focused most specifically on in his post). Even if we can set aside the question of the historical existence of Jesus, we find a difficulty around the Bible itself as it exists as a "sacred" text within the Christian religious tradition. Many Christians view the Bible as the "Word of God," and in this sense presumably treat it as a single, whole and static object, rather than as a collection of texts written by different people from different cultural perspectives and at different times. From here on in, I'm afraid the discussion will get a bit messier and won't be nearly as neatly and clearly laid out as the first half of my exploration, above. I hope you'll bear with me, nonetheless.

In his post, Robin spends some time rehashing various discoveries and theories regarding the historical development of the Bible as a collection of texts, in particular older and earlier versions of the four familiar Gospels. He quotes from an essay on "The Forged Origins of the New Testament," which seems to rely rather heavily on secondary sources written in the 1700s and 1800s, as well as statements from the Catholic Encyclopedia itself acknowledging the lacuna of definitive proof--in short, nothing new--while failing to cite any primary source evidence for the supposed forged documents themselves (here, I'll merely reminder readers of the familiar axiom: a lack of evidence is not evidence of lack). He also focuses almost exclusively on the relative age and authenticity of the gospels, without discussing the historical placement and analysis of the letters of Paul (which most scholars agree are the earliest records of Jesus, dating to as early as c. 10 C.E.), nor the tradition of Christian apologetics which was alive and kicking as early as c. 100-165 C.E.

Although it is true that our information about the historical person of Jesus comes almost exclusively from the collection of texts referred to as "gospels" (those texts which were written essentially for this intended purpose, to provide "the story of Christ's life and teachings;" the word "gospel" is a term applied generally to any such texts which propose to undertake this task, including the gnostic and apocryphal gospels), we have several authentic texts dating back to the first and second centuries that address the already developing Christian religious community and its beliefs, practices and traditions. (Here is an excellent resource for electronically published scholarly works on Biblical texts.) Since (a) we have already set aside the relative relevancy of the question of the historical person of Jesus, and (b) it seems clear that within these other available texts the role of Jesus Christ as a theological idea had already become central to the Christian self- and community-identity, and so it is unlikely that it was merely "invented" in the fourth century and inserted retroactively into the tradition, we can move on to the primary (and quite legitimate) concern: the complexities and contradictions found among these texts.

As Robin rightly points out, some of the earliest gospels (and even the codified versions of the four included officially in the New Testament) tell conflicting and often confusing narratives of the events in the life of Jesus. Certain doctrines and theological concepts that are now considered cornerstones of the Christian tradition (or at least select denominations of it) go unmentioned or entirely unsupported in these earliest documents. As he also points out, again quite rightly, "This may come as no news to many scholars of the Bible (and, it seems, to many Church scholars)..."

In fact, this whole discussion of the development of Biblical literature was covered very early on in my freshman year of college, and my degree isn't even specializing in Christianity or its historical development--it's a general Comparative Religious Studies degree. Furthermore, I would consider most of the people who took that class with me to be "average Christians" and other average people, few of whom went on to specialize in Biblical scholarship, theological scholarship, or even philosophical or religious studies of any kind (some of them were just fulfilling a "general education" requirement). I think this acknowledgment of conflicting versions and missing doctrines is generally much more widely known than Robin gives credit for--indeed, the only people who seem to find the historical development of Biblical literature, and all the complexity and lack of uniformity it entails, to be an obstacle to faith are (a) Christian fundamentalists, and (b) those who fundamentally oppose Christianity.

(Robin may object that he has spoken to Christians who were offended and/or skeptical of this viewpoint, but I would guess this may be because his presentation of it often boarders on a conspiratorial and sometimes even insulting tone, as it does in his post. I might counter that I have spoken to plenty of Christians who were fully aware of the historically diverse origins of the Bible, but then we might compare anecdotal evidence for hours on end and, as your friendly neighborhood scientist will tell you, anecdotal evidence is generally a very weak foundation for any argument. So let's move on.)

Christianity developed gradually and organically over time, just as most other religious systems in the world have developed (and just as Neopaganism is developing right now in modern society). The kind of organized, deliberate forgery and falsification that Robin suggests was, if not impossible, at least incredibly implausible, considering the wide-spread, structured social institution to accomplish such a feat simply did not exist until a good two to three hundred years after the supposed historical events took place and some of the first Biblical texts regarding those events (and the apologetic arguments regarding the theology of these events) had already been written and begun to circulate. This doesn't mean, of course, that particular individuals or groups of individuals didn't develop and pass on as "true" their own versions or stories of these events that were based less on "fact" as we understand it today, and more on the immediate philosophical, spiritual or imaginative needs of their local communities.

We see this process taking place even today within Neopagan communities, as certain Wiccan, Druidic and other occult traditions create, elaborate on and pass on "origin myths" about their histories. Wicca and Druidry, for instance, both base a great deal of their self- and community-identities on two admirable forgers, Gerald Gardner and Iolo Morganwg, respecitvely. It is a unique, perhaps even quirky, aspect of modernity that most Wiccans and Druids seem quite content to acknowledge the certain amount of "invention" at the root of their spiritual traditions (this is a trend Hutton treats in a number of his books), accepting that although these stories or sources may not be historically "true," they yet retain spiritual and social value as ideas, "invented" or not.

Even still, there are those within Neopaganism who indulge in the all-too-familiar urge to justify the authenticity of their beliefs and practices by making false or specious claims to ancient roots, unbroken traditions and even miraculous tales of heroism or martyrdom. If intelligent and well-informed modern individuals--living in a culture steeped in scientific "fact" and the careful academic study of history--still resort to such story-telling, is it any surprise that people two thousand years ago, in a culture utterly unfamiliar with the peculiarly modern notion of an objective and unbiased "history of what actually happened", would do the same? It takes no conspiracy theory of corrupt and manipulative religious or political leaders to explain such behavior. It is the result of ordinary people attempting to grapple with conflicting reports of difficult or painful events while seeking to understand how those events are philosophically, politically, spiritually or personally relevant. Knowledgeable, modern Christian believers are often fully aware of that different cultural and socio-political environments will lead to diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives on a single event, and so they can accept and work with conflicting accounts within a single "sacred text" in this light.

Robin may be right in saying that, were the Bible to be proven factually "wrong," many Christians would take little notice and remain unshaken in their faith. In my opinion, however, this is not a reflection of a general stubborn ignorance on the part of Christians, but because very few Christians actually believe the Bible to be historically factual in the first place (Christian fundamentalists being the exception, as well as the minority). Theological concepts about the "Son of God," (and the phrase "son of man," which does appear in Mark), the "Word of God," the Resurrection and even the Trinity are recognized as exactly that: ahistorical, theological doctrines. Indeed, most Christians would most likely argue that such doctrines grew gradually out of a continuing, communal interaction with the Bible as a living, revelatory sacred text (its historical nature notwithstanding). In other words, new "revelations" of spiritual and theological meaning continue to be possible because the text is a dynamic, self-revelatory witness to the Divine; the "seeds" may be present in the original gospels and letters of the New Testament, even if all of their implications were not fully laid out and explored from the very beginning or from every perspective or viewpoint included. The Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception, the doctrine of the eucharist, the various mystical and feminist implications of the Gospel of John and its ties to Neoplatonic philosophy, even modern "liberation theology" currently popular in Latin America--all of these can believably exist in potentia within the "inspired" (NB not "factual") recordings of historical events concerning the person of Jesus.

Although few Christians have the scholarly background to articulate it this precisely, I believe most Christians have an intuitive grasp on this non-literal and partly-ahistorical approach to the Bible, and are able to explain themselves if given the chance. Once again, I am excepting fundamentalist/creationist Christians from this statement, though they are sometimes an unfortunately loud and vehement minority. In the end, however, it seems that on the whole, the Christian community is both flexible and reasonable enough to continue to incorporate sacred Biblical texts as a functioning part of its religious system, regardless of continuing archeological and sociological/anthropological discoveries regarding their origins and historical context.

What We Know & How We Know It
Texts, Truths and Traditions:
A Study in Three Parts

Part I: Introduction & The Historical Person of Jesus
Part II: The Historical Nature of Biblical Texts
Part III: The Part that Passion Plays