Ancient Cave Art of the Divine Mother
For millenia, before the various manifestations of the "Sky God", the Mother was matrix: source, sustainer, destroyer, and resurrection... Her representations in cave art are now well known, though still under-appreciated. Cynics minimize the images as those of a "fertility" nature, and for those modern few who are more attuned to the "divine feminine", they seldom plumb the depths of the erotic mysticism implied in this ancient art... The "everyday sacred" and the Way of Divine Pleasure is the invitation extended by these images...
For millenia, before the various manifestations of the "Sky God", the Mother was matrix: source, sustainer, destroyer, and resurrection... Her representations in cave art are now well known, though still under-appreciated. Cynics minimize the images as those of a "fertility" nature, and for those modern few who are more attuned to the "divine feminine", they seldom plumb the depths of the erotic mysticism implied in this ancient art... The "everyday sacred" and the Way of Divine Pleasure is the invitation extended by these images...
The Goddess of Wilendorf
If one were to ask, "Who would you identify as the greatest, most Christ-like, Christian saint of all time?" (This question has been asked many times of many people.) The answer most often given, by both Christian and non-Christian alike, is St. Francis of Assisi. Francis, of course, is often a friendly face in gardens (as a simple concrete or plastic statue). He is well known for his poverty, zeal in re-building the crumbling ruins of chapels, and for his care of lepers. Lesser, he is admired for his devotional prayer and life "at the margins" of both church and society... but nearly no one, besides myself, considers him an exemplar of an erotic mysticism...
To be unaware of his erotic mysticism, though, is to miss the essential point of his spiritual evolution (rEvolution)... as a little brother of Jesus...
To be a fully functioning Christian (human!), one simply must evolve: grow, develop, and change: the Franciscan viewpoint is that of, and into, a truly radical personalism, informed by a corresponding radical sense of pansacramentalism: the Divine awaits in the everyday encounters of person-in-life... Francis, like the overwhelming majority of fellow believers, then and now, was for the greater portion of his life oriented by the traditional theological constructs rooted in the Fall of Man and Redemption by Christ...
"My leper brothers and sisters" became for Francis the means for complete ego-annihilation... Francis lived the Fall and the Redemption, both... but he didn't stop there...
As Jesus taught, so too, Francis began to teach, primarily through conversation and example, and eventually he tagged along with the Christian crusade of his time, to "wrest" the Holy Land from the Muslim "infidels"... He was, to put it mildly, shocked and spiritually devastated by the wanton violence of the Crusaders: replete with endless raping of women and young girls, the plundering of the possessions of sacked Muslim cities, and the horrific executions of Muslim faithful... all in the Holy Name of Christ... There are stories of Francis conversing with the dreaded Sultan and being given a free pass to visit anywhere he wished in the Muslim lands (for it was obvious to the Sultan that he had finally met a Christian)...
Eventually, Francis returned home to the hills around Assisi, to the cave of earth and trees that he called his little portion... But, he had contracted diseases and an eye-ailment while in the Holy Land, these, combined with his dark night of the soul, brought him to the bitter point of a certain and a lingering death... in brutal agony, his soul withered... still, his pledge of poverty had him lie naked on the barren earth... and the mice that ran over his body at night broke his spirit and will to live... It is precisely in this moment of utter spiritual and physical devastation that Francis evolved into the beyond of the Fall and Redemption story: and into the divine mystery of an erotic mysticism that united the Old Religions with the religion of the Christ... Francis awakened from his dark night into the brilliance of a brand new view: a radical awakening into the wonder of what the ancients knew intuitively: Oneness is our essential nature: the Divine and Nature and the Human all meeting in the Paradise of a Loving Mutuality...
Everyday Holy, with every moment an open door into a new sacred encounter, is the rapturous-revelation that is the Song of St. Francis (the Canticle of the Creatures)... expanding into every aspect of his life (our lives): a lived pansacramentalism that re-members the awe and wonder inspired by the nature-fertility-Mother-faith of the ancients and, like a master-gardener, Francis grafts the spirit of pan with the Christ-gift of everything sacred (a sacramental encounter of the Divine Being-Consciousness-Bliss with Nature and the Human)... The Song of Francis is the embrace of space / time / consciousness with everyone and everything... The Divine Beloved (Being, Consciousness, Bliss) is available (vitally yearning) for sacramental encounters in all of the minutes of our days...
Why then, do we live and struggle endlessly, living as empty shells of abandoned or negative possibilities? Why should our political, economic, cultural, and religious "debates" (lives) be so vapid and mealy-mouthed? I mean, seriously, God is Alive, and Magic is Afoot... so why can we not get Real...?
These reflections are not coming from a mind or spirit of philosophical abstraction. Rather, they are as it were, simple hungerings informed by thirty years of work and life with the homeless, many years of interior desolation, and then the sudden grace of discovery: infolding from eighteen years, as of today, of a pansacramental marriage with "my heart", Michelle... Pansacramentalism is a worldview, certainly, but it is at the very same time, an innerview that is both a response to the evidence of the Divine Presence, and an affirmation of the dignity exposed by the simplicity of daily awakenings: home, children, friends, work, play, sex, warmth, rest, conversation, study, reading, more conversation, meditation, celebration, contemplation, more sex... and on and on in the Sacred Circle of Holy Communion... ordinary time, the Way of Divine Pleasure...
If one were to ask, "Who would you identify as the greatest, most Christ-like, Christian saint of all time?" (This question has been asked many times of many people.) The answer most often given, by both Christian and non-Christian alike, is St. Francis of Assisi. Francis, of course, is often a friendly face in gardens (as a simple concrete or plastic statue). He is well known for his poverty, zeal in re-building the crumbling ruins of chapels, and for his care of lepers. Lesser, he is admired for his devotional prayer and life "at the margins" of both church and society... but nearly no one, besides myself, considers him an exemplar of an erotic mysticism...
To be unaware of his erotic mysticism, though, is to miss the essential point of his spiritual evolution (rEvolution)... as a little brother of Jesus...
To be a fully functioning Christian (human!), one simply must evolve: grow, develop, and change: the Franciscan viewpoint is that of, and into, a truly radical personalism, informed by a corresponding radical sense of pansacramentalism: the Divine awaits in the everyday encounters of person-in-life... Francis, like the overwhelming majority of fellow believers, then and now, was for the greater portion of his life oriented by the traditional theological constructs rooted in the Fall of Man and Redemption by Christ...
"My leper brothers and sisters" became for Francis the means for complete ego-annihilation... Francis lived the Fall and the Redemption, both... but he didn't stop there...
As Jesus taught, so too, Francis began to teach, primarily through conversation and example, and eventually he tagged along with the Christian crusade of his time, to "wrest" the Holy Land from the Muslim "infidels"... He was, to put it mildly, shocked and spiritually devastated by the wanton violence of the Crusaders: replete with endless raping of women and young girls, the plundering of the possessions of sacked Muslim cities, and the horrific executions of Muslim faithful... all in the Holy Name of Christ... There are stories of Francis conversing with the dreaded Sultan and being given a free pass to visit anywhere he wished in the Muslim lands (for it was obvious to the Sultan that he had finally met a Christian)...
Eventually, Francis returned home to the hills around Assisi, to the cave of earth and trees that he called his little portion... But, he had contracted diseases and an eye-ailment while in the Holy Land, these, combined with his dark night of the soul, brought him to the bitter point of a certain and a lingering death... in brutal agony, his soul withered... still, his pledge of poverty had him lie naked on the barren earth... and the mice that ran over his body at night broke his spirit and will to live... It is precisely in this moment of utter spiritual and physical devastation that Francis evolved into the beyond of the Fall and Redemption story: and into the divine mystery of an erotic mysticism that united the Old Religions with the religion of the Christ... Francis awakened from his dark night into the brilliance of a brand new view: a radical awakening into the wonder of what the ancients knew intuitively: Oneness is our essential nature: the Divine and Nature and the Human all meeting in the Paradise of a Loving Mutuality...
Everyday Holy, with every moment an open door into a new sacred encounter, is the rapturous-revelation that is the Song of St. Francis (the Canticle of the Creatures)... expanding into every aspect of his life (our lives): a lived pansacramentalism that re-members the awe and wonder inspired by the nature-fertility-Mother-faith of the ancients and, like a master-gardener, Francis grafts the spirit of pan with the Christ-gift of everything sacred (a sacramental encounter of the Divine Being-Consciousness-Bliss with Nature and the Human)... The Song of Francis is the embrace of space / time / consciousness with everyone and everything... The Divine Beloved (Being, Consciousness, Bliss) is available (vitally yearning) for sacramental encounters in all of the minutes of our days...
Why then, do we live and struggle endlessly, living as empty shells of abandoned or negative possibilities? Why should our political, economic, cultural, and religious "debates" (lives) be so vapid and mealy-mouthed? I mean, seriously, God is Alive, and Magic is Afoot... so why can we not get Real...?
These reflections are not coming from a mind or spirit of philosophical abstraction. Rather, they are as it were, simple hungerings informed by thirty years of work and life with the homeless, many years of interior desolation, and then the sudden grace of discovery: infolding from eighteen years, as of today, of a pansacramental marriage with "my heart", Michelle... Pansacramentalism is a worldview, certainly, but it is at the very same time, an innerview that is both a response to the evidence of the Divine Presence, and an affirmation of the dignity exposed by the simplicity of daily awakenings: home, children, friends, work, play, sex, warmth, rest, conversation, study, reading, more conversation, meditation, celebration, contemplation, more sex... and on and on in the Sacred Circle of Holy Communion... ordinary time, the Way of Divine Pleasure...
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