A Call For a Blake Year

Today is the (unofficial) Feast Day of (unofficial St.) William Blake, the late 18th century poet, artist, Gnostic, and civil rights supporter.

He is perhaps best known to high-school lit survivors as the author of one of the great anthems of the Incarnation, Jerusalem, on the legend that Joseph of Arimethea brought Christ to England as a child;

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

Blake is our hero, our voice, our champion in the advocacy for Imagination. I am calling for a Blake Year, a commitment by the greater Gnostic ecclesia to read, debate, and exegesize, to dig deep into our richest cultural resource. Let us build a Jerusalem of insight among the dark mills of chattering blogs. Who's with me?

Advent: The Holly King and the Oak King

In Celtic mythology, Midwinter represents the victory of the bright Oak King over that of the dark Holly King. The night of Midwinter represents the pinnacle of the Holly King's power, and each subsequent night gives incremental way to the sun's ascendance. Thus is the year divided; the tides of Holly and Oak, ebb and flow, wax and wane.

This division is echoed in the western Liturgical Year; Easter and Advent, the Ascent and the Incarnation. Culturally, Advent (could) protect us from the premature onslaught of Christmas. It serves to separate our thinking and our spiritual "space" from the rest of the year with a simple and profound message; the Light is coming. Brace yourself.

Of course the Light is here, the Light is always here. But as we benefit from the Rituals of the Incarnation, Yule and Hannukah and Christmas, so to do we benefit from a deliberate and mindful preparation. What of the year do we carry forward, and what is best left behind? It's not a question of "Jesus is coming, look busy" but rather a line that invites us to cross it. Advent offers us a valuable interstitial season, a period of reflection and setting aside. All the baking and shopping and decorating, and our cultural impulse to do so, I think has less to do with a response to a commercial imperative than with an instinctual understanding that winter changes us, that there is a promise of Light in the Darkness, and that to perceive that is both a gift and a miracle. And we want to be ready, as we should.

Apocatastasis Revisited

We are stardust
We are golden
We are caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden...

After considerable reflection on this issue, I returned to the event of my own gnosis in the summer of 1986. Restless and unable to sleep, I went for a midnight walk along Sunset Beach in Vancouver. I remember the reflection of the stars on the water, people crabbing in the gentle Pacific surf, trousers rolled like eliot. A large heron, alighting to the grey sand, glided past my head, wingtip missing by millimetres. And in that sound that was not a sound, more a simple compression of warm night air, I heard the Voice of the Divine, and I knew. For me it was Basho's frog, or the clack of a broom against a wooden chair. I heard the tumblers of the universe roll and click into place.

What I knew in that moment is the suddenness, the immediacy of magic in the world; constant, present, incessant, infinite and luminous.

Of course we are all reconciled with the Divine, of course we are all reunited with the Pleroma – we none of us have ever left the Father, the Fullness. Our anxiety, our separation, is merely dokos, the veil of deception that is the kosmic work of archonic forces. The Kingdom of God is within you.. Lift a stone and I am there; split a piece of wood and you will find Me there. The moving power of Gnosticism has always been the freedom – the artist's freedom, the lovers' freedom, the freedom of rebels and heretics – that derives from such intimate insight; perhaps epiphany is realizing that something is wrong, whereas gnosis is understanding that something is entirely right.

Crisis in the Anglican Communion: A Lesson for Gnosticism?

Is there a lesson for Ecclesiastical Gnosticism in the current conflict within the Anglican Communion? The world's third largest Christian denomination is facing very real schism between the evangelical, literalist, conservative "Global South" and the liberal, inclusive majority within both the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church USA. The conservatives are well funded and have vocal supporters in North America, many of whom have joined archconservative schism-oriented groups such as the ACN and CANA. Interestingly, the Pareto Principle is at work: 20% of the Anglicans worldwide (North America) control 80% of the money. If there is to be a split, we will see two very, very different churches emerge; one very dogmatic, Nicene, and Lutheran/Calvinist (Robert Duncan-ism), the other existing-Western-Anglicanism embracing a kind of compassionate crypto-Gnosticism (JS Spong-ism). The conflict is heartbreaking, with much hyperbole and stone-throwing and it saddens me greatly – and I'm just an outside observer. But millions of people are showing up each week to figure out all this spirituality and religion stuff, and instead they get this.

At the center of the conflict is the issue of gay rights.

That, at least, is the stone in the water; the concentric issues are actually more interesting (to me, anyway; gay rights is a given). The big question at play seems to be praying next to someone who disagrees with you. For the most part, the liberals are willing to share a Church with the conservatives, all the while hoping that they will choose a more compassionate position, whereas the conservatives are calling for the liberals to pick up that vinyl-floppy book in front of them and read the thing, even the dull bits. Repent, or we're outta here.

Now it would seem that we as Gnostics would not be so vulnerable for two reasons;

1) The issue of gender and orientation are not relevant to gnosis; unlike Christians we hold to the pre-existence of the soul, and are therefore not defined by our bodies. Therefore neither gender nor orientation are a bar to the Gnostic Sacraments of baptism, confirmation, eucharist, matrimony, orders, penance, or unction.

While it is not unthinkable that "a" Gnostic Church would bar someone from the sacraments based on gender or orientation (the French Gnostics didn't ordain women until the 70s, and there was much conflict and schism) such a Church could not do so as a Gnostic Church, but only by employing Christian tradition, proof texts etc. In other words, a Gnostic Christian objecting to ordination of gay clergy or marriage could not honestly do so as a Gnostic, but might genuinely do so as a Christian. That may seem tricky, but remember that Gnostic Christians are both, not neither.

2) Scripture is not held in Gnosticism to be inerrant but rather inspirational. As a general rule we make no distinction between the insight gained from The Gospel of Philip and that from Leaves of Grass. You can generally tell a Gnostic that Leviticus says x is a stoning offense, and Timothy says so too, and you're likely to be told Leviticus objects to shrimp cocktail and reminded that Timothy is a blatant forgery.

And yet.

Because individuals define Gnosticism in their own way – one could argue that it is the individual's responsibility to do so – there is a tremendous amount on nuance and discrepancy even within these two basic assumptions. What that results in is this: I am not a Christian, nor do I believe in an historical Jesus. I also do not believe in reincarnation as it is commonly understood, nor do I believe that anybody named Thomas had anything whatsoever to do with The Gospel of Thomas. And yet all of these are minority opinions within our tiny, tiny little religious community. And I would not hesitate for a moment to practice my religion in the same service, the same room, the same Church, with someone who held all those points to being a core of their religious identity. Further, I'd be very surprised to find a Gnostic unwilling to take communion with me on the grounds that we differ on those or other core issues: Gnosticism is about being integral to your own gnosis. Once you have that kind of clarity, one is not easily threatened by views which may seem at first examination to contradict one's own. In fact such debate and exploration is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, not only welcomed but sought.

There is, however, a tragic external force at play: the divisive "culture war" in which we are out-hated and woefully outgunned. Individuals in regions traditionally conservative face intense pressure daily to acquiesce to ambient homophobia and xenophobia. For those walking the already precarious line that is Gnostic Christianity, the temptation to succumb to ubiquitous opinion on gays, immigration, censorship, Islam, must be both staggering and exhausting, and I imagine one must often feel compelled to choose between a "Christianity of the heart" and the Christianity of the pulpit, the Christianity of history. While I imagine I would choose to stand for my own integrity, could I fault myself for falling into the judgmental certainties of prevailing culture?

Apocatastasis

"Of what a nature is the resurrection! And the image must rise again through the image. The bridegroom and the image must enter through the image into the truth, which is the apocatastasis."

– The Gospel of Philip

Apocatastasis: Restoration.

This was an interesting idea in theology, the idea of universal salvation; that at some point everything will be reconciled with the Divine. I have been doing rather a lot of prayer and reflection on this topic recently, focussing on the following questions;

Is this a Gnostic idea?
Certainly the Gnostic authors of Philip thought so.

If gnosis is critical for salvation (from ignorance), do all ultimately attain gnosis?
Obviously the complement arises: if those without gnosis are saved, then gnosis is not in fact necessary for salvation.

And if all do not ultimately attain gnosis, does this mean that those who do not are not saved?
Well obviously. Just drawing out the logic here.

We do not have the "out" of literalist reincarnation available to Buddhism and Hinduism; the idea of reincarnation is a little to "convenient" and doesn't allow for the non-linear nature of time, and smacks of speciational and societal chauvinism (It's always "I was a farmer in 17th century Ireland", never "I was a ground squirrel in Saskatoon in the thirties"). Therefore we do not literally see those who die in ignorance stepping back on the wheel to try again. And given that gnosis requires the capacity for critical reflection, what of those who die in infancy?

And if all can not attain gnosis, say, for example, the mentally disabled, asthmatics, or the Dutch, and therefore they are not saved, does this make Gnosticism elitist?

Could such elitism erode compassion, and our obligation to compassion?

And of course, if gnosis is not in fact necessary for salvation from ignorance and restoration with the Pleroma, then what is it for?

In Christianity, apocatastasis is more commonly known as universalism, and is a heresy. After all, if all are saved anyway, what's with all this Church stuff? The very idea is bad for business. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

The brilliant Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, while admitting that doctrine was doctrine, held out hope for universal salvation. He found solace in Hegelian dialectics, which basically states said that everything outside God is a problem, therefore all our thoughts are flawed anyway, so what do we know? Certainty has uncertainty in its DNA. Balthasar hoped that the redemptive statements in the Christian Gospels would serve to counteract the various decrees of eternal damnation; and felt that it was one's compassionate duty to do so. His position is thoroughly bludgeoned by uncharitable orthodoxy, however, which clearly states that hoping the Church might be wrong about something is pretty much drilling holes in the boat.

My entire line of questioning stems from an assumption that the fundamental role of gnosis is soteriological; as though gnosis were a train ticket, no fare, no ride. Perhaps a better line of inquiry stems from identifying gnosis itself with apocatastasis: real enlightenment is reconciliation with the Divine.

Clearly calls for more research, and reflection. Damn my lack of education!

Update
This came to me last night: my instinct agrees with considerable chunks of Gnostic Scripture, that upon death all are reunited with the Divine. So perhaps that gnosis is the only way – or maybe jus a way – to experience such reunion while still alive. My thinking here is fuzzy, but at least my gut is getting a compass reading.

So, When Are You Going To Make Bishop? Update

Upon reflection you're all right and I was wrong. "Creepy" was an inappropriate and disrespectful term, and I've removed it from the post with my sincere apologies to Bishop +Hoeller and my sisters and brothers in the EG. I was concerned about the criticism (not my own) of Ecclesia Gnostica, for which I have enourmous respect, and felt that such criticism could be easily addressed. My word choice was juvenile, and I am sorry.

J+

Prisoner of Narnia: CS Lewis in the New Yorker

I grew up with Lewis, of course, although he made nowhere near the impact on my young imagination that Tolkien, or even Lucas, did. I do look with amusement at how the Cath Traddies have canonized the kinky old bastard, seeing as his theology was shallow to the point of trite, his imagery vastly more Pagan than Christian, and his repeated rejection and distrust of Catholicism.

I think they like him because he was vocal opposition to an atheistic materialism which, quite frankly, came down with the Berlin Wall but neglected to mention its extinction to the tweedy Chesterton-worshipping "evil empire" Traddies of today. I do respect that he embraced and centralized what he called his Joy – his own gnosis, and his sense of the Mystery. I eagerly await the film and shall no doubt go all fanboy on you on its release.

A lengthy snip from the article here:

[Fantasy] evoked in Lewis an emotion bigger than mere pleasure—a kind of shining sense of goodness and romance and light. Lewis called this emotion, simply, the “Joy.” With it came the feeling that both the world and the words were trying to tell him something—not just that there is something good out there but that there is something big out there. [...] The Christianity he knew in childhood, by contrast, seemed the opposite of magic and joy: dull sermons and dry moral equations to be solved. [...] A bright and sensitive British boy turned by public-school sadism into a warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert. It sounds like the usual story. What was special about Lewis was that, throughout it all, he kept an inner life. Joy kept him alive—and it is possible that the absence of happiness allowed an access of joy. [...]

It was through the intervention of the secretive and personally troubled Tolkien, however, that Lewis finally made the turn toward orthodox Christianity. In company with another friend, they took a long, and now famous, walk, on an autumn night in 1931, pacing and arguing from early evening to early morning. Tolkien was a genuinely eccentric character—in college, the inventor of Lothlorien played the part of the humorless pedant—who had been ready to convert Lewis for several years. Lewis was certainly ripe to be converted. The liberal humanism in which he had been raised as a thinker had come to seem far too narrowly Philistine and materialist to account for the intimations of transcendence that came to him on country walks and in pages of poetry. Tolkien, seizing on this vulnerability, said that the obvious-seeming distinction that Lewis made between myth and fact—between intimations of timeless joy and belief in a historically based religion—was a false one. Language, and the consciousness it reflected, was intrinsically magical. One had to become religious to save the magic, not to be saved from it. (It was, ironically, the same spirit in which the children of the nineteen-sixties felt that the liberal humanism in which they had been raised failed to account for the intensities of another kind of trip—and that led them, too, to magic, and to Lewis and Tolkien.) All existence, Tolkien insisted on that night ramble, was intrinsically mythical; the stars were the fires of gods if you chose to see them that way, just as the world was the stories you made up from it. If you were drawn to myth at all, as Lewis was, then you ought to accept the Christian myth just as you accepted the lovely Northern ones. By the end of the walk, Lewis was, or was about to become, a churchgoer.

This was a new turn in the history of religious conversion. Where for millennia the cutting edge of faith had been the difference between pagan myth and Christian revelation, Lewis was drawn in by the likeness of the Christian revelation to pagan myth. Even Victorian conversions came, in the classic Augustinian manner, out of an overwhelming sense of sin. Cardinal Manning agonized over eating too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own bakery. “The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

It seemed like an odd kind of conversion to other people then, and it still does. It is perfectly possible, after all, to have a rich romantic and imaginative view of existence—to believe that the world is not exhausted by our physical descriptions of it, that the stories we make up about the world are an important part of the life of that world—without becoming an Anglican. In fact, it seems much easier to believe in the power of the Romantic numinous if you do not take a controversial incident in Jewish religious history as the pivot point of all existence, and a still more controversial one in British royal history as the pivot point of your daily practice. Converted to faith as the means of joy, however, Lewis never stops to ask very hard why this faith rather than some other. His favorite argument for the truth of Christianity is that either Jesus had to be crazy to say the things he did or what he said must be true, and since he doesn’t sound like someone who is crazy, he must be right. [...]

Lewis insists that the Anglican creed isn’t one spiritual path among others but the single cosmic truth that extends from the farthest reach of the universe to the house next door. He is never troubled by the funny coincidence that this one staggering cosmic truth also happens to be the established religion of his own tribe, supported by every institution of the state, and reinforced by the university he works in, the “God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford,” as Gladstone called it. But perhaps his leap from myth to Christian faith wasn’t a leap at all, more of a standing hop in place. Many of the elements that make Christianity numinous for Lewis are the pagan mythological elements that it long ago absorbed from its pre-Christian sources. His Christianity is local, English and Irish and Northern. Even Roman Catholicism remained alien to him, a fact that Tolkien much resented. [...]

He writes, instead, as real writers must, a real book for a circle of readers large and small, and the result is a fairy tale that includes, encyclopedically, everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in his favored mystical English winter-and-spring landscape. Had he tried for less, the books would not have lasted so long. The trouble was that though he could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully, allegorized. Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure. [...]

The talking animals who live in Narnia wait desperately for the return of Aslan, the lion-king, who might restore their freedom. At last, Aslan returns. Beautiful and brave and instantly attractive, he has a deep voice and a commanding presence, obviously kingly. The White Witch conspires to have him killed, and succeeds, in part because of the children’s errors. Miraculously, he returns to life, liberates Narnia, and returns the land to spring.

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth. [...]

Lewis takes as his presumed opponent a naïve materialist who believes in progress and in the realm of common sense and the factual and verifiable, and who relegates imagination and myth and ritual to a doomy past. Lewis has a easy time showing that progress is dubious, that evil persists, that imagination has a crucial role to play in life, that life without a shared ritual and some kind of sacred myth is hardly worth living. But, trying to explain why God makes good people suffer, Lewis can answer only that God doesn’t, bad people do, and God gave bad people free will to be bad because a world in which people could only be good would be a world peopled by robots. Anyway, God never gives people pain that isn’t good for them in the long run. This kind of apologetic is better at explaining colic than cancer, let alone concentration camps.

– Adam Gopnick, Prisoner of Narnia

So, When Are You Going To Make Bishop?

Somebody asked me this the other day, and I found the question very telling. First off, why not? I look great in purple. You get the amethyst ring, the big hat, and a righteous-looking crozier. You get stuff addressed to "Your Excellency" in the mail. I have been known to be in turn witty and diplomatic and charming (and utterly full of shit) and know just enough Latin to impress the pants off someone who does not.

Except that Holy Orders are not like the Boy Scouts. It's not a badge or a sash to wear (although I think I'd clean up at the Miss Gnosticism pageant, for the sash and tiara alone) – it's a vocation. And honestly, I don't think the episcopate is mine.

I have a tremendous respect for a teeny tiny minority of the Wandering Episcopate; as Bishop +Hoeller once wrote, most of these people you wouldn't want in your living room. When I look at the work undertaken by those I respect – Bishops McCann, Miller, Hoeller, del Campo, and others – I'm inspired and comforted by the fact that they are out there, helping craft a respectful, integral ecclesiastical culture in which contemporary Gnosticism can continue to flourish and mature. But I do not feel we as a Gn community would really be served by adding any more. If there were, say, a twenty year moratorium on episcopal consecrations, I can't see any downside*

*except for the EG, who need another Bishop soon; the fact that they have only one Bishop for a church of their size may appear slightly cultish from the outside. I know they're not, but optics, people, optics.

It's far too easy (and too common) to throw together a website, the St. Sophia Independent Old Liberal Orthodox Catholic Templar Church of the Gnostic Magdalene, and get your episcopal consecration from the tarot-card reader at the bus station. Even if the form and matter are present (which are frequently questionable) the intent does not seem to be up to scratch.

I do respect the right for individual Bishops to define for themselves the role, but as I define it, when I look at people like The Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, and the kind of stick-handling required for the job – to be at once pastoral and compassionate while preserving central tenets and unity – well these people are breathing a pretty rarified air that I fear would divorce me from Priestcraft as I am growing to understand it.

What I love about the Priesthood is the accessibility, and the opportunities it allows me for listening. I find intensely rewarding the work of being down here in the trenches, cheerleading, sharing resources, administering the Sacraments. It's all humanity, and no politics.

So here I am, a simple Priest, over a month behind on my RGIA materials, hip-deep in my manuscript, a dozen e-mails behind in correspondence, shopping around for a new Mass space (we were always being double-booked at the Truth Centre), and going through the incorporation process to make the Church legal in British Columbia... oh, and raising four kids and renovating a hundred-year-old house and performing miracles for clients – suffice it to say that prolonged reflection of my assuming episcopal duties on top of that leads to imminent autodefenestration.

I think I look better in black, thank you.

The Cathar Diet

I read recently that a baker in the US got a half million dollar advance because he named his northern italian cuisine cookbook "The Da Vinci Diet". Cute.

For about a dozen years now I've followed the Cathar diet: I'm an organic-and-local vegetarian*, but I eat fish. My diet consists of good bread, fresh eggs, good cheeses, wild salmon, tuna, red wine (I favour oaky Languedoc Merlots and local Cabernets), organic root veggies and fresh herbs. (and um, coffee and chocolate) I don't eat a lot of leafy greens but I do make an awesome organic seared-tofu-in-black-bean-sauce and goat cheese salad.

I'm not a health freak, but I do work out and I don't smoke (because it's gross to other people. Smack addicts are more considerate because they only shoot themselves up) and I think that soft drinks are Satan. SATAN! Seriously if you have to give up cigs OR Pepsi, keep lighting up, my friend.

The biggest upside I can think of is that when I took a recent poll on Jeremy's site on my ecological footprint it turns out that I'm only using up one-and-a-half planets, (150% of my allowance, meaning all the world's resources divided by 6 billion or so) or owning half a slave. This is way below North American average, which I think works out to something like six and a half planets per person.

Plus, tasty food.

*although some have postulated that the Cathars were vegan, abstaining from eating any animal products whatsoever. You can take my moral high-ground, just leave me my brie.

My Hero

I have a few people who inspire me, largely by scaring the bejeezus out of me with the fervor of their conviction. One of these is my "um-sister" (my half sisters' half sister, my father was married to her mother) Aviel, who is a gifted artist and calligrapher. She has a better publicist than I do, but I still think I've had more death threats (although I believe hers, whereas mine have been pretty laughable). She is a blonde haired blue-eyed Jew, an Orthodox feminist, a female scribe in a context that does not allow for female scribes, an artist with shattered hands.

Aviel keeps me on my toes, challenges my assumptions, serves as my indispensable on-call gematria source, and font of weird internet links. She is likely the first woman in Jewish history to hand-write the sacred Torah scroll (for a progressive bunch in Seattle who have NO IDEA just how special she is or what her work demands of her, physically, spiritually, and emotionally). I am intensely proud of her, inspired by her gorgeous work, and in awe of her courage. VisionTV is airing a documentary about her Wednesday the 16th at 10 Eastern, and I encourage everyone to catch the broadcast.

She also has a blog which contains many words that sound eerily like Klingon, but also some thing which are fun to say like "mezuzah" which, alas, is not a musical instrument despite the fact that "mezuzah" would be a damn fine name for a musical instrument.

Anyway, please take an ecumenical dip into the fascinating world of Judaism (there would be no Gnosticism without Judaism) and check out the documentary. There'll be a Gn and Jx post soon...

Día de los Muertos

Calavera de la Catrina by José Guadalupe Posada

That night, we drive into Lagoa to a small Italian café on the sidewalk. The sky is alive with lightning, the night silent and rainless and offers only this incredible spectacle. The flashes are the purest amethyst, and we gasp and laugh and are made immortal with each strike, every eight seconds or so, for over an hour. Synapses of light. Skeleton fingers, spermatazoa. Quetzal serpents of light. The sparks worm their way into the fabric of our bodies, electrifying our cells and summoning songs of pre-human scale to rush in our blood. I turn and kiss Zandra on the cheek: "I feel like we just got married". She laughs at this, agreeing. Later we walk past the floodlit graveyard, cheerful with bright flowers. The dead here are still considered part of the family, are visited and spoken to and consulted, cared for.

– The Brasil Diaries, April 2000

This is the day of Mictecacihuatl, once Aztec guardian of bones, now Santa Muerta, patroness of those who live in the borders; smugglers, black marketeers, and those living under assumed identities. 3,000 years ago, she had an entire month, the month of August, but now she has a day of bread and flowers and sugar skulls, of candlelit cemeteries loud with playing children, keening widows, and gentle guitars. I see glints of her in my Aztec wife's eyes, and in they eyes of our daughter and son. I do love this quiet syncretism, grateful to hang on to my spooky for one more day past Halloween. Whereas last night I felt loss at those that I have known and known to die, today I feel a sweet nostalgia, all those little stories pulling at the side of my mouth, sad but somehow charming. The secret realization of having been blessed, undeserving and unexpected, but blessed nonetheless.