The black pearl that creates all value

The relationship between religion and magic(k) is something I reflect on quite a bit. To put it simply, I've often felt that magic is like a piece of grit that the 'pearl' of religion grows around. Except in terms of how we value those things, I see it as reversed—magic is the pearl, the wound, the glimmering gem of Absolute Reality, the Actual Piece of Earth… and religion is like the scar tissue that cohered around it, or the box that it is put into to "protect" it which often has the opposite effect (of dis-embedding, uprooting the Piece or Process of Earth from its ecology). There are things that both enchant and grieve me about forms of organized religion. When it comes to "high liturgy" (the type of ceremonial that you see in Christian Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, as well as forms of Buddhism/Hinduism that are highly sacramental etc.) my feelings are further complicated.  Much of it is because the relationship to liturgy in the West/modern neo-liberal world is overly skeptical and I both empathize with this, but also am deeply saddened by it because it is part of a larger current of thought that completely misses the human value of ritual and embodiedness and their critical role in sacred time/space. I don't want to digress too much now. I'm actually just prefacing a poem that I want to share. I don't typically share poetry on this blog but this might be something you'll see more frequently as it's always been a deep part of my inner world, but one that I keep very private. With all my talk on this blog of mythic remediation I realize that I should try to share more of this language-art with the world.

Anyhow, this was written while I was in the middle of writing my thesis this past spring, which was at the end of two years of being very immersed in the academic study of Christian History. It might help you to know that my thesis focused on issues surrounding the symbolism of Mary (the Mother of God) in the early Christian Near East. Part of this is her coupled relationship to the Holy Spirit and the various "heretical" traditions in Syria/Palestine that conceived of the Holy Spirit as female/feminine. So this poem is a distillation of thought into feeling, a frustration with logic, with intellect…a lament for something lost. And the lament is most poignant for me because I know it's actually not lost at all.

***

There are many "secrets" in religion.
They are like pearls entombed in layers of architecture
or wounds on a tree that have long since scarred over,
where sap flowed hundreds of years ago.
They all derive from the first secret—the True Name of that which Is.
We want its power. Yet we crave its mystery. We long to whisper it, to dissolve into it. But what would we become if we no longer desired this?

Some of the secrets are sad. They're not all empowering.
In fact some mask the darkness, the Nothing.
Maybe they even censor it
(as they cense it with furls of thick, aromatic smoke)
Though it's the last thing that needs censoring.

Maybe one of the things religion enshrines is the Void. It keeps it in a golden box.
Inside is a gate. Anti-matter. Infinite space. The high-priest cracks it open for you, you peer inside. It feels like you're looking through a square-shaped hole in your universe and down through the vaulted ceiling of another one. Through one of those holes at the apex of the dome of old churches. Those are called the holes that the Holy Spirit comes through.

It's both dazzling and dark. There are stars that look like they are thousands of miles down.
Perhaps it leads to another galaxy or dimension. Usually we aren't allowed to pass through it and live.
But you also feel a rush of wind. Cold and crisp, it smells like woodsmoke in the winter. It's like breath. There is some sort of respiration that occurs through this little hole, hidden away in the Temple. A breathing between worlds.

From that same gate comes meaning. It escapes out in wisps, like incense, and overshadows us. It possesses and dispossesses.
It makes us see many visions. It helps us understand.
Whitehead says that God is that which invests the whole world with value.
The sacred is that rupture in the surface of things where something is perceived. We call that something "another reality", but really that is a misnomer, because that "something" is what allows us to even define reality. Thus, from almost the moment of its apprehension, God already begins to recede.
We wrote poems, lamentations. Come back.
That was language.
The hermit thrush's song means "a sign of the spirit is perceived".
Is the song itself the sign, or that which names the sign?
In That Place the Sign and what's Signified become one.
Mirrors do that, too. They collapse image and imagined
(this is why icons are sacred in the East)

I say that what if Whitehead's God is the Void?
Non-being is what gives all things meaning. Every atom, every electron, every molecule and cell moves away from nothing, toward itself. Toward others like it. (Btw, Bucky says "love is metaphysical gravity")
God or the uncreated Void or the Tao is that which It propels us both away from it and toward it.
in the process of propulsion, we see the sign of the spirit.
thus the spirit makes its imprint on the world like this, because it is That Which Makes All Things Vectored.
But the apophatic theologians and mystics were right because they know that you can only know it from its footprint, the track in the sand.
Tracks might be the only way we know any history. This is green hermeneutics.

The womb is a microcosm of that Gate.
The threshold between being and non being.
Where we all come from. That place that weaves together body and soul from the skeins of the universe, spun from stars, from immeasurable light.
But it's wombs all the way down, even past biological life.
It's the process of creation and destruction. It's what transforms things.
You can't say whether it exists or not. Whether it's uncreated or created.
So despite what they tell you… It's the Holy Spirit.
Shekhinah, which is both genders, and neither, because s/he is that which engenders.
She is the Dark Mother that holds you like black earth holds the thick root of a tree.

They tell you that matter can never be created nor destroyed. Does that mean that all created things are actually uncreated? That everything is the "Son" that has always existed with the Father?

Maybe once, even the universe passed through a gate.
The gate has no location.
But we must pretend it does, in order to approach it.