“The truth about living in the universe is elusive, exciting, and mysterious, and it is in the pursuit of mystery that we find all that is worth having, including ourselves” (1)
-
Moyra Caldecott Women
in Celtic Myth (1992)
Friday was the
feast of Saint Francis. Today, as I walked in the woods and experienced the Autumnwood
coming to realization, I remembered walking with Francis, imaginatively, as my
guide and friend for several years in the late 1980’s, when I was fast
approaching the threshold of my Poet’s vocation. Last night I remembered that last December I
was reading Murray Bodo’s The Journey and
the Dream; a book that I had first received as a gift from a Franciscan
sister in 1988, and which I received as a gift again last Fall, again from a
Franciscan sister. The more recent giver
did not know I had read the book before; she thought it a fit exchange for
something I was offering her. But I’d
read this book before, and it became one of those fecund guides for my
spiritual footsteps for the next three or four years, from the late 1980’s
until the early 1990’s.
I’d long been
attracted to Francis. I first heard of
him when I was in High School in the early 1970’s, but never found out anything
much about him, except that he was a ‘Nature Mystic.’ I saw him as loving being out in Nature, with
birds flying about him and animals befriending him; just as I saw some of the
Pagan gods I admired at that time. Like
Augustine, he was someone with whom I related at a deep level. I understood their experience; if primarily
intuitively. Through my re-reading of The
Journey and the Dream last Yule, I witnessed
once again the hermeneutic of conversion in the guise of the mediaeval trope of
“rejection of the world,” and found myself moving beyond the symbolism and
implied significance of Francis’ story to a more naturalistic understanding of
what happened to Francis and to so many people like him—myself included. Today, as I walked familiar woodland paths,
inwardly and outwardly, I met Francis again and again at crossroads and down in
the vale near the Bridge of Meditation.
When I re-read The Journey and the Dream last December,
I was immediately drawn into the narrative – as into the company of an old
friend – from the first time I opened it and re-met the old familiar
sentences. You know that feeling when
you encounter an old friend again, and there is that immediate connection? That is what I felt. When I came to the chapter on Francis’ sojourn
in the cave; his experiences there and his struggle to become his truest self—I
stopped and fell into a deep and sustained meditation, listening as I descended
and rose again to a new disc by Stile Antico called Puer Natus Est. I then realized
my affinity for Francis; for in reading this text I was hearing an existential
tale—a story of self-discovery and self-realization, and I found myself wanting
to read more on caves, as they symbolize the path of descent into the Center of
Divine Darkness.
I have actually
visited caves and studied their geology since I first read Bodo’s excellent bio
of Francis, and I was really ‘in’ the story when he talked of Francis venturing
deep into the cave and finding himself lost of light. I was ‘in’ it, experientially; I have
memories of being in caves (commercial ones, at least), being alone and having
the lights switched off. As I read
Francis’ story, I felt as though I had entered a cave myself; my own Internal
Nemeton – but from a different entry point than I usually use. I sat still, in a meditative suspension I did
not seek, and it was a few minutes before I could go on reading.
Then, when Bodo
described Francis’ experience of “falling into a cavern” and being encountered
there by his ‘Lady,’ I realized this book was probably one of the sources for
my own idea of the “Internal Cavern” and the “Cave of the Heart.” I understood Francis, clearly, as a young man
seeking direction in life and coming to a fulcrum of self-realization and personal
revelation_ as I had been. There need
have been nothing supernatural about his experience at all. The kind of dreams he had are a common
phenomenon amongst meditative seekers of wisdom, and the visions and voices he
saw and heard could well have been the natural result of light deprivation and
perhaps even the inhalation of fumes in the cave. Seeing this, however, does not diminish the
import of his experiences; it merely serves to ground it in a
non-supernaturalist way.
As I progressed
through the text, I found myself reading a highly symbolic testimony to the
moment of self-transformation and self-realization that defined the rest of
Francis’ short life. That this moment is
framed in Christian symbolism is accidental to who he was and where and when he
lived; but the psychological process is familiar to anyone who has gone through
it_ I
recognized every step! This new
understanding of the symbolic and psychological nature of the experience was
aided by the fact that Bodo – though a devout Franciscan – did not write a
‘pious’ account of Francis—at least in the early chapters it was not (though it
became somewhat more so further along). The
book read like fantasy fiction!
Francis’ ‘Lady’ was
obviously (to me, now) a manifestation of the Transcendent in the
Immanent. She was a mirror – like the
Moon – of the light of the Higher Self.
Francis’ Lady – who comes to be known as Lady Poverty – is a
manifestation of his Higher Self coming through into his present existential
state. It is a ‘seeing through the veil’
to what he could be. She was not characterized as Mary or the Holy
Spirit; and I don’t remember if Francis ever tried to ‘type’ Lady Poverty as an
‘angel’ or some other manifestation of the Triune God. She was, however, clearly ‘coming to him’ as
a manifestation of his own psyche.
But alas, as it
sometimes goes with old friends who meet again after a long time, dialogue
opens each one up to the other, and they find they are perhaps not who they
once were, each for the other_
One of the biggest
surprises I had in re-reading this touchstone of my spiritual life was that I saw
how, at each stage of the journey, Francis’ peace and freedom came from a
rejection of his society and its structures and obligations, responsibilities
and presuppositions, and that there need have been nothing supernatural in
this. It is what would happen to any person when they throw off their society’s
‘impositions;’ they would experience relief and a kind of release from burdens
and cares. It was not a ‘true freedom,’
however, in the sense he believed it to be, as he then had to be supported by
the Church and by almsgiving, or he would not have survived; he would have
starved to death or died of exposure.
The ‘true freedom’
he was seeking – and that his religious worldview gave him reason to expect –
is not really possible in the world in which we find ourselves. We are social animals bound to our social
constructs, and cannot live outside them in any ultimate sense, though we can
find respite, sanctuary and resourcement in this life. We can retreat
from the world, we can construct our own spiritual worlds after our own
imaginative fashion, but we are already
socialized by the point we would make this choice (even as Francis was; he was
a teenager when he ‘left the world’), and thus tied, to a greater or lesser
degree, to the world. How to be in the
world and not of it, is a persistent ethical and spiritual question. Ultimately, only in ‘heaven’ could the
freedom and peace Francis sought be truly
realized. His proximate experience of it
was made possible only by alms and the generosity of the Church.
While realizing this
deflated the more naïve understanding I’d had of Francis when I was younger, I
still find myself fascinated with Francis and his story. Because he meant so much to me for so long,
it is interesting to meet him again, given my current perspective.
After the first few
chapters, Francis’ story became less about a young man seeking self-realization
and more about trying to live the ancient Christian ideal in a world that was
untransformed; at this point it did become a somewhat more pious story about
learning conformity to the standards of his society; doing penance and collecting
alms as a way of living, getting the seal of authority (the Pope) on his way of
life (the book is silent on the fact that the Pope who sanctions Francis’ path
was one of Crusade Popes who sanctioned wars in the name of ‘recovering’ he
Holy Land from the ‘infidels’!). While I
recognized the process of self-realization and the yearning for transcendence
in Francis’ story, beyond this his biography gets bogged down in the same kinds
of contradictions that often characterize religious life in general. How do you live out ideals in the everyday
ordinary world? How do you follow out
the ethical and philosophical implications of ideals worth embodying in
yourself without becoming a fanatic—or else falling from visionary heights into
cynicism and despair?
It strikes me now
that the ideals Francis was attempting to follow were dysfunctional on one
level; while I still admire them—so far as they go. They pointed to something that was no longer
viable; they alluded to a transformation in society that never took place—a
transformation toward which early Christianity was directing its
aspirations. But then the Jesus Movement
became Church; and the ethics of the Movement became the ideals of a select few
who could still try and live them out—but only with the economic support of
Church and society. An interesting way
of life: to live as an icon of an ideal that cannot be realized in the
here-and-now. But ultimately the iconic
life of Francis too often lends itself to the perpetuation of the status quo;
giving rich people a reason to feel good about themselves by giving alms and
helong the poor—rather than actually transforming the world into a place where
rich and poor are no more.
The ideals of
Francis were largely same as those that characterized the 1st
century Jesus Movement; poverty, chastity, obedience, aid to the poor, widowed
and orphaned—the usual cast of Christian ‘virtues.’ _And these are good ideals to have; so long
as poverty and discrimination, hatred greed and selfishness persist. What I came to wonder – through reading Bodo’s
book again – was why Christianity never
really matured beyond these 1st century ideals? The
ethics got frozen into an ideal; an ideal that could not be lived in an
untransformed society in true freedom.
The ethics of the ideal – taking care of the poor, etc. – are worthwhile,
but in a society in which Christianity became the religious status quo, the
original ideals of the Jesus Movement were made largely impotent; they became a
way of keeping poverty and other problems from becoming too severe, and those
who lived the ideals provided icons of what was lost; the ethical vision of
transformation that was embodied in the early Jesus Movement.
In the 1st
century, these ideals were ‘proleptic’ (to use an old theological term I
haven’t used in over 15 years); they were intended to inspire an ethical,
religious, social and political revolution in the hearts and minds of those who
followed Jesus as their Christ. Once
frozen, these ideals continued to inspire adherence, and led to the emergence
of monasticism within
Christianity. But the ideals of
monasticism, while virtuous in themselves and worthy of practice, became an
ideal that could never lead to a genuine, permanent change in society. The ideals of the original Jesus Movement
became a support mechanism for the status quo. _You can’t sell all you have and
give it to the poor unless you have a support network; unless you have someone
to support you. Francis could only live the enshrined 1st
century Christian ideals because the Church was rich enough to support him.
So for people to
‘go off to live the friars’ life,’ a hierarchical society must exist in which
there are rich people and poor. Rich
people to support the idealists, and poor people for them to serve and help.
I finished reading The Journey and the Dream at the end of
December 2012. I shelved it, and will probably
not read it again. Yet my ‘life with
Francis’ continues. There is no parting
of old friends, here. Though I
understand his life; his vision and his conversion and all that followed from
it – both positive and negative – in more naturalistic terms now than I did 25
years ago, I still find him a worthy companion.
The touchstones we share in common; including our love of silence and
solitude as well as our desire for justice, the alleviation of poverty and the
end of inequality and discrimination in the world, as well as the defense of
the natural world against exploitation and further destruction—all these things
tie us together, Francis and I, and I would have it no other way. I walked with him when I was following
Christ, when I was a practicing Pagan and a devotee of the Goddess, and now
that I am a Poetic Naturalist I walk with him still.
It is rare to find
someone you can share the journey and the dream with throughout the span of a
human life, and when you recognize who those mentors and friends are, you
should cherish them, and not let the bonds be torn asunder.
So mote it be.
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