Reveries


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Reveries

“When Jesus appeared on earth, he performed miracles and great wonders for the salvation

of humanity. And since some walked in the way of righteousness while others walked

in their transgressions, the twelve disciples were called.

He began to speak with them about the mysteries beyond the world and what would

take place at the end. Often he did not appear to his disciples as himself, but he was found

among them as a child.”

--Gospel of Judas

There is a wind, a pneuma, which blows through my heart at times, and it carries seeds which are dropped and planted there, and I want to share something with you about that experience and how it might relate to the first two verses of the Judas gospel. I want to tell you about what that wind has taught me, but to do so in a respectful manner I will have to circumambulate around the center of that certain mystery, which ever haunts me with all that is beautiful. I want to spiral inwards with you towards that center like a hawk circling ever closer towards its prey.

There was a time, you see, when like so many others, I ran after my life as though it were trying to escape me, and I could neither hold on to my life then, nor yet could I catch ahold of it. In fact, the faster I ran, the more distant my life became until it seemed that my life had fled from me altogether, and I was left to sit there like Derelicta before the gates of the temple, holding the ashes of my dreams and little else. Like Psyche in search of her beloved Eros I was lead through these calcinations into a bleak and desolate plain where I was greeted by the angels of death, and yet was I ever being infallibly guided by a vision of sounds and scents that returned me to myself again and yet again. There was the ecstatic sweetness of linden blossoms on hot and sleepy summers afternoons, and of lilacs and roses after a heavy rain. There was the sound of church bells on Sunday mornings, and you grew up waiting for them to mark the hours. There was the sound of trains, late at night, and you fell asleep with a delicious shudder at their mysterious rushing as you lay wondering as to where they were going. And you wanted to go with them, following faithfully after an inexpressible longing so powerful that it brought tears to your eyes, knowing that that longing was never to be filled—which, of course, only made it sweeter.

At any rate, I eventually came to associated these precious ephemera with the grace of substantiation; with the certitude and security of being embodied within time, and not only within time, but within an infinite ocean of time, stretching back and back and back across the ages. And, not surprisingly, it was my awareness of being situated at the crest of eternity that gave to me my first inarticulate conception of the divine. You could say, I became Saturn’s child, and the contemplation of countless millions of years already behind us and long passed away, to this day gives me the sublime comfort of being touched by the ubiquitous presence of death. That I should be so affected with intimations of the eternal through the most fleeting of sensual impressions strikes me now, that I could actually pause to think about it, as self-evident. The future, on the other hand, had always filled me with atavistic horror. It struck me as being crass, as crude, as base, as decidedly ugly and as unremittingly loud and tumultuous and blinding, utterly void of dignity or value or importance. My consolation against the future was the presence of the infinite vastness of time and the knowledge that it would carry me, and would do so without fail regardless of what that heinous specter of the unspecifiable future could impose upon me.

Indeed, I understood this erotically. I was in a romance with time and with death and even from my earliest childhood on, emptying myself through enfleshment—disappearing into the exquisite weight of matter and darkness—proved decisive. I despised the light, associating it with the masculine, and with all that threatened to strip me naked and defenseless, propelling me into the ghastliness of the present, and into the insanity of a superficial dimension characterized by hurry and delusions and the night terrors of a daemon that aspired to wrest us from the numinous by dint of sheer distraction.

But this daemon would pursue me without relenting, and if from the moment that I laid eyes on the wonder of Goethe’s Faust I identified completely with the character of Mephisto as well as with Milton’s tragic muse, that I would come to identify Christ with the principle of absolute evil was a forgone conclusion. That this was not in fact an opposition but a mere inversion of the alchemical mythos leading towards the same end never actually crossed my mind. I was impelled by the spirit of Mercurius to fight vigorously in defense of the garden of my heart as Knight errant to Hecate against all that embodied for me the pollution and perversion of the Sun only to find out thereafter, having won through to the sanctuary, that I had slain the Dragon, and not St. George. It goes without saying that the coagulation of full embodiment was far from me. In so far as I rejected the archetype of the savior, I refused the development of a shadow. It would be years before the conflation and commingling of light and darkness were ripened into separation. Meanwhile, I would become the thing I most hated, not realizing that my implacable and insatiable desire to transcend the world belonged to that portion of the spirit of earth that I had rejected, namely the son, and that it was the rejected light of the son that sought embodiment.

In short, I had, alas, to go from pursuing my life to fleeing from it with all haste and desperation. My life, however, never failed to catch up with me—to flatten me with its power. It is axiomatic that only those who fight against life until such time as they are roundly defeated and ultimately slain by it are worthy of coming to the feast. Cowards live ordinary lives and die as they have lived—like whitewashed tombs—and stupefaction is their justification, their reward, and the enmity directed against them as they sin against the spirit of life, for people suffer nothing apart from themselves. Such as they are utterly unworthy of the Kingdom of earth in their hearts. Some walk in righteousness while others walk in their transgressions. It is without import in either case. Such as these are salved with such trifles as wonders and miracles, as their eyes are sealed shut to the glory and their ears are deafened to silence and respect. Twelve are needed, through which the Wheels may act upon them until such time as they rise up against life and are definitively slain.

For the elect, life ceases to be something to run after or to run away from. Rather, life becomes a garden which unfolds around them as it will, in all of its richness and verdure. And so it is that we become gardeners, and the caretakers of our lives. We become stewards, ever increasingly aware of the fact that it is we who indwell the infinite vastness of our souls, just as trees which live out the span of their years in a forest where there is soil to grow them. And a wind comes and waves through our branches speaking of love and of memory, and the lord comes to us then, even as a child, and we notice him not, for there where wonder is vibrant with grace all wonders must cease. Only reverence remains.

And we become infused, steeped in the heart like fragrant tea and with deep stillness and we come to appreciate the star-like magic of simplicity and the hidden majestry of the ordinary—the vicissitudes of worry and care; the poignancy of being situated within a space blessed with the luminescence of time’s long slow passage, which ever brings depth to the fleeting nature of light, like the play of sunlight and shadow on wisterias curtsying against a tossed coverlet, careless as only and ever momentary illumination can be, ubiquitous as sound and smell. For what lies beyond the world is of it, and the world itself points thereto through the countless mementos of other’s lives, like flotsam offered up to the land by the tides of the inner sea. And behold, when time shall end, at the still point of the turning world, you become and ever are the fullness and richness of all that its inexorable flow contained.

by permission of Rev.O.H

Sarkany

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