Signposts

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

5:40 a.m. I was watching “El Ministerio del Tiempo” last night, and this morning as I was remembering somebody in medieval times referring to “la santa iglesia” (the holy church), I had a thought. There was a time when people thought of it as the holy church. They weren’t thinking of a bureaucracy, nor of a dangerous powerful organization, but of a spiritual family of which they were a part. Everything decays over time, but I suddenly thought, in the beginning perhaps the Christians were thinking of it as just that, a shared mind. And then I remembered, “You experienced it in that way when you were a boy, not even thinking about it, but taking it for granted like the air you breathed. And evidently most of your contemporaries did not, although perhaps your mother did, and your cousin Ann Marie.” Maybe a couple of other aunts, come to think of it. There’s something important here, if we can dig it out, or rather if we can allow it in.

Jon?

You see here the power of an idea, and how it helps shape a person’s way of dealing with a reality that is expressed but not understood.

You’re going to say a lot more about it, I hope.

It is a recurring theme, with you, the church. You don’t feel part of it, and that is a sense of exile, in a way, yet you are loyal to the idea of it but you can’t participate in the practice of it, merely because of the way it is understood and because of the reality behind the reality you remember.

Pretty big “merely.”

Oh yes.

Nobody’s going to understand what either one of us has said here without some connectors.

Bullets, then.

• “These are my people.”
• The simplest of your father’s sisters.
• The cynicism that repels you.
• The group-mind as it frees people.
• Incommunicable experiences and their meaning as signposts and promises.
• The final ritual at Reiki I initiation; your sense of sacrament as you had expected and not received.
• The church in Scotland and your divided reaction.

That should be enough to get on with. This will come better if you piece it together than if you try to take dictation. Working the data helps you integrate, which is a process that associates context to an initial focus. Merely being told only provides the signposts.

Everybody else who reads this will necessarily be reading it, not constructing with me.

They have the ability to construct as they read, if they will read slowly and allow their minds to associate things from their own lives, and then ponder. It is something like meditation over texts that you had George Chiari learn in Messenger.

I may post that chapter online again. I learned a lot, writing it. I see now I was listening.

You were bringing through a message that your avatar-self couldn’t have formulated de novo, but that did come wrapped in your momentary consciousness. That is the process of  creation, in a nutshell.

I think I will re-arrange the bullets you provided, put this in a more logical order.

Do as you wish, but remember that spontaneity has its own logic.

But in any case, get going, as we are half an hour in.

That too.

I can feel it, I am going to learn something more than these fragments suggest, and I suppose it doesn’t matter what order I take them in.

[Because the next part is long, I will put it in Roman rather than italic, for easier reading, resuming the Roman/italic alternation thereafter.]

So, looking back:

• I can’t remember what it was called – attunement, maybe? – but the weekend Reiki I class that I took in 1998 culminated in us sitting in a circle facing inward, while the teacher went around laying hands on each person’s head in turn. When Carol Sabick put her hands on my head (I think it was Carol. It may have been someone else) I felt the energy flow, and I felt then what I had expected to feel, and didn’t, at my first communion at age seven and confirmation a few years later. I remember very well thinking that finally I had received a sacrament.
• And I remember visiting the chapel of Chimayo, in New Mexico, with Richard Leviton and his wife Judith, both of whom were into spiritual exploration, neither of whom were nor had been Catholic, both rationalists in a way I never was. I felt the simplicity and openness to spirt of the people around us – mostly native people of the area, mostly not tourists – and I felt a deep kinship with them, an understanding of them. They reminded me of my father’s sister Rose. But when I said to Richard and Judith, “These are my people,” I met only incomprehension and amusement, as if I were declaring my preference for the lower classes over the educated. (As in fact I do, in a way. The working class usually doesn’t accept me as one of them – to them I suppose I am a Suit, or anyway one who lives in a different world – but I recognize them as my father’s friends.)
• Michael Ross and I visited the church in Scotland – Pluscarden, I think the name is – that had been destroyed by Protestants in the 1600s or 1700s I suppose, currently being rebuilt by some Catholic group. This was many years ago, and I have forgotten detail, but I remember well my split reaction. As long as I was experiencing the sanctified space that can develop when people have prayed sincerely together, I was in touch with something within me that is in tune with that medieval world. But when we came to a sign of contemporary usage, a wall rack of pamphlets such as I think I remember from my youth (though I can’t place where the rack would have been), and more when we came face to face with a priest in robes, my reaction was one of recoil. (As you say, Jon, a sense of exile mingled with a sense of loyalty. I hadn’t thought of it that way.)
• And finally the group-mind as it freed people. (I realize I have proceeded other than one by one, but I have covered the other bullets.) this is speculation, but I wonder if the church as an entity, not as an organization, came from the earliest Christians experiencing a liberation from their previous isolation. This would have come about not in the context of anything they could name out of experience, except maybe close family-feeling, so they wouldn’t have a name for it. It may have seemed to them that they were sharing in the mind of the Christ, and in fact that may be a true enough way of describing it. They were no longer isolated. When two or more were gathered together, there was the Christ, as Jesus had promised. And this sense of being one part of a greater whole would certainly have transformed their lives, from fragment to part of a reconstructed whole.

[Jon:] you see how your examination in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way rather than a strictly logical way brought you to a more integrated understanding?

I do. This also reinforces the sense I have had for some time, that some of what we need we have rejected in the past (or, in some cases, have never been exposed to), in the way that rationalists are going to need to explore astrology and the other mantic arts.

And mention Chesterton.

Yes, re-reading The Everlasting Man, I see clearly how this luminously intelligent man is prisoner of his ignorance of some things, rejecting things for reasons that are inexorably logical from his premises, but were nonetheless valid in ways he did not discern. I keep telling people to read him (though few if any ever do) because of his luminous intelligence, but I think they suspect me of wanting to turn them into Catholics. The fact is, you don’t break new ground by re-settling old, even if the land has been abandoned and the former houses have fallen down. But it is helpful when you are moving across the Cumberland Gap into unpeopled Kentucky, to remember the North Carolina that shaped you.

We haven’t finished with this, I imagine. Scarcely started, in a way, maybe. But our hour is up and I have a pretty good idea which of us is going to have to do the typing. Point us in the right direction, Jon: What shall we title this?

“Santa iglesia” might stir people up, get their attention.

Or turn them off.

How about “Experiencing another reality”? that may mislead them enough to let them read it.

Smiling too. Okay, till next time.