The Roaring Inside of Us

In her 1978 book Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, poet Susan Griffin explores the connecting points between feminism and ecology. Over the years that followed, ecofeminism emerged as its own political and spiritual perspective, arguing that the way a society treats women is often deeply rooted in the way it treats nature (and vice versa). Granted, 18 of the 28 years since the book’s publication a Republican has lived in the White House and today our society seems even less inclined to connect the dots than ever. Which is probably why if anything the message of ecofeminism is more urgent than ever.

The other day I was pondering how Christian mysticism’s greatest and most enduring weakness has been its ambivalence toward both nature and the feminine. This is not news; it was that very weakness that led me to give up on Anglicanism in the mid 1990s and wander into the Neopagan fairyland for seven years. The fact that I’ve grown disillusioned with Neopaganism’s ability to seriously address the concerns of ecofeminism does not mean that I have abandoned those concerns. I’m just a bit more desperate today than I was a decade ago: back then, I saw Neopaganism as a beacon of hope. Now I see it as a movement that has become compromised by its own internal lack of ethical focus, which means those of us who care about both mystical spirituality and ecofeminism are not going to find much help from that movement.

I think the argument can be made that different religious traditions, over the ages, have adopted differing strategies for dealing with the question of how "external" nature relates to "internal" spirit. Here are a few of those strategies…

• To be spiritual means to flee from nature
• To be spiritual means to struggle with nature
• To be spiritual means to master and control nature
• To be spiritual means to celebrate nature
• To be spiritual means to seek harmony with nature
• To be spiritual means to obey nature

Broadly speaking, I think we can say that Christianity has historically functioned primarily within the first three strategies; while Neopaganism tends to function more within the last three. While it is tempting to see this as evidence of Christianity’s failing and Neopaganism’s moral superiority, I think it stems mainly from the relative age of the two faiths. In other words, if we could truly resurrect paleopaganism, we would be shocked at how much the pagans of antiquity fled from, struggled with, or sought to master nature. Christianity was born into a milieu that was anti-nature, anti-woman, anti-body. And for two thousand years these perspectives have dogged the faith.

Fast-forward to the twentieth century. Along comes Neopaganism, a love child of European romanticism and its encounter with indigenous shamanic traditions from the world over. Both of these antecedents have made it possible for Neopaganism to be, at least in theory, a faith of celebration, harmony, and perhaps even obedience to nature (which I think has its ethical problems, but that’s another post for another day). But Neopaganism lacks a truly sacrificial or contemplative center, which is why less than fifty years on it is ethically diffuse — far more dominated by spellcraft or commerce ("Here, buy a crystal or a silver pentacle! Never mind the cost this has to the earth") than by the kind of transformational mysticism that characterized paleopagans like Plotinus or Proclus (and that live on today not in the writings of Silver Ravenwolf or Dorothy Morrison, but rather in the Trappists and the Jesuits).

So Christianity has a mystical tradition, even though it is ignored by the Protestant mainstream and attacked by conservatives, both Catholic and evangelical. But at least it is there. Meanwhile, Christianity’s failure to seriously engage with the concerns of romanticism, environmentalism, or the encounter with shamanism has meant that as a tradition it has been incapable of responding to the crying need for a new ethic of human-environmental relatedness. Neopaganism at least pays lip service to such a new ethic, but again I think inherent problems within Neopaganism are preventing it as a tradition from truly engaging with the spiritual crisis we are facing as a species in an environment under duress of our own making.

The question I am left with: as the inheritors of a 2000 year old mystical tradition that speaks of profound inner beauty, how do we now unleash the roaring inside all of us,  so that we who contemplate in the tradition of Julian of Norwich or John of the Cross can integrate the profound mysteries of our faith with the emerging need to express that faith in ways that honor and harmonize with nature, rather than flee from or struggle with her?

More About Magic…

My friend Liadan writes to me: 

I’ve read your article ("Do You Believe in Magic?"), but I don’t think it really says why you don’t believe magic is "necessary."

She goes on to describe two instances where she used magic and found it "very useful," describing two dire situations — one involving her mother’s experience of a serious illness, the other concerning a threatening natural disaster — both of which ended happily after a spell was cast. She concludes,

If magic is unnecessary, what else could have been done?  Prayer didn’t work here.  And I am Christian. I don’t think I did anything wrong, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do.  I prayed in advance for advice if God didn’t want me to do this.

Once again, I go back to what Lon Duquette says: "I can only change one thing with magick — myself." Liadan, I am so happy that you experienced two wonderful miracles, first with your mother’s healing and the second with the averted firestorm. I hope and trust that you will understand that I have no desire to criticize you or attack your experience, even while in all honesty I can only say this: that I believe the spells had no influence on the force which manifested those miracles.

 You admit that you "prayed in advance for advice" and yet you claim that "prayer didn’t work here." Says who? How can we know that the miracles are not the result of the prayers, rather than the magic? Of course, I could just as easily play the skeptic and say, why should we believe that either prayer or magic  has any influence on the physical world? After all, somebody else in the same situation as yours may have said prayers and cast spells, only to experience the loss of their loved one or the natural disaster. Why does your prayer/magic work while theirs didn’t? Is God capricious? Or, perhaps, is there a deeper force at work here, a force that no human effort (magical or otherwise) can control or even influence?

Does prayer only "work" if the results are exactly what we expect or demand? That’s a mighty small God, who is merely a puppet whose strings we pull to manifest our desires. What happens when God answers our prayers, only not as fast as we would like (which is what appears to have happened in both your scenarios)? Or, more difficult still, what happens when God’s answer to our prayers may not be what we had hoped? Some people pray — or do their magic — and the disaster happens anyways. Christianity teaches that this is an opportunity to trust in the sovereign goodness of God that extends far beyond our own finite hopes and desires. But magical philosophies seem to say that if a spell doesn’t "work," then the person who cast it did something wrong. Frankly, I think that’s a terrible worldview. That means if your mother had died — or your house had gone up in flames — it would have been all your fault, since you didn’t do the magic right.

I’m sorry, but I can’t worship a God (or Goddess) who is so petty.

It’s a plain fact of reality: with all the prayers and all the spells in the world, we don’t always get what we want. So either we have to trust that the Divine has everything under control (which is what I understand mysticism to advocate), or we have to keep trying to learn a better or more effective spell, which is what magical systems seem to be saying.

 To me, when I can approach impending loss or disaster from a place of trust, I find that prayer is more than sufficient. I can say to God, "Hey, this is what I REALLY want…." But once I speak my mind in my prayer, then I can release my wanting into a deeper trusting. And in that depth of trust, sometimes a miracle happens, and sometimes it doesn’t. I know I can’t control the outcome.

Magic, by contrast, seems to be a continual effort to attempt to control what we just can’t control. It’s a direct violation of the serenity prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. 

I believe that when we live according to the principles of this prayer, we do not have to rely on magic to make things happen. Instead, we can relax into the serenity (trust) that allows us to face those things which are too big for us to control; and we can find empowerment to take on those things which are within our ability to influence; with a deep wisdom to help us discern the distinctions between those two spheres. All of this creates a deep psychic space where true freedom and real love can flourish.

And in that space, I maintain, magic — at least of the cast-a-spell variety — is unnecessary. 

Once again, please know that I am so happy for you that miracles happened in your life. As a person who seeks to live by faith, I take great comfort in knowing that the miracles I’ve experienced come from a source that is far, far bigger than I am.

Do You Believe In Magic?

N.B.: This post is a follow up to last night’s entry, The Sinner’s Prayer. If you haven’t read that one, you might want to go back and check it out first.

What’s fascinating about magic is the subtle interplay between three ingredients: the will/heart of the magician, the form of the magic/spell that is performed, and the changes (or lack thereof) that occur in either the physical or spiritual environment.

In all fairness to evangelicals, I suspect few if any really believe that reciting the Sinner’s Prayer actually "changes" God. Theologically speaking, evangelical Christianity would assert that God has freely offered salvation to all people because it is in God’s pleasure to do so. Reciting the Sinner’s Prayer, therefore, amounts to saying "Yes" to this grand offer.

What the Sinner’s Prayer changes, therefore, is not so much God, but the sinner. Yes, it opens up the doors of heaven (at least, as evangelicals see it). But ontologically speaking, the doors of heaven were already opened — that happened with the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. So, from the viewpoint of orthodox evangelical theology, it’s more correct to say that the Sinner’s Prayer opens up one’s heart to the ability to walk through those always-open doors.

Frankly, approaching evangelical theology from this perspective makes it far more less objectionable, to my mind. I’m still catholic enough to insist that salvation is more of a communal than individual event, but I’ll save that for another day.

Now, compare all this to this wonderful little saying found at the website of Lon Milo DuQuette, who is a leading Thelemitte magician (and a truly lovely and funny man): "I can change only one thing with Magick — myself."

So I still think the Sinner’s Prayer functions like a spell, but like DuQuette’s magic, it’s a spell that only changes one thing: the person who’s working the juju. God, the universe, everything else remains as before.

• • •

Lon DuQuette can get away with his rather bold statement because he is an acknowledged authority of ceremonial magic, i.e. magic-with-a-k. If just about anyone else asserted that their magical ability only enabled them to change themselves, they would be dismissed as weak, inefffectual magicians. But for someone of DuQuette’s stature to make this statement, is to shine a light on all of the pompous and overblown language that characterizes so much of the ceremonial, neopagan, and Wiccan communities: that despite all of magic(k)’s grandiose claims to change things, at the end of the day the only "thing" magic really changes is one’s self, or perhaps one’s consciousness. Now, just as the change of heart that the Sinner’s Prayer signifies is believed by evangelicals to "change everything" in the sense that it facilitates a new life in Christ (i.e., being born again), so too the practitioners of magic will insist that the self-change or consciousness-change that magic effects literally changes the world — often tied into metaphysical beliefs such as that the self is one with the world, or creates the world, or the world is merely a projection of the self, and so forth. For simplicity’s sake, I’d like to distinguish between two understandings of magic: "primitive" and "high" (these are arbitrary terms I’m using, and may or may not correlate with other usages of these terms in the world of magic/magick).

• Primitive magic is the idea that casting a spell effects real, observable, and perhaps even measurable changes in the physical environment: I cast this spell, and a gorgeous someone falls in love with me, something s/he never would have done if I hadn’t cast the spell.
• By contrast, high magic is the idea that casting a spell effects real, observable, and perhaps even measurable changes only in the self/consciousness of the magician, which might have subsequent impact upon the environment: I cast this spell, and I become more self-confident around members of the opposite sex, and that enables me to make friends and eventually experience a romance with someone special — something I never would have done if I hadn’t cast the spell.

Now, apply this to the Sinner’s Prayer:

• A primitive magic approach to the Sinner’s Prayer would hold that reciting the prayer (with the correct heart intention, of course) literally gets God to stop condemning the soul to hell, and instead save the soul, as evidenced by Christ’s and the Holy Spirit’s presence in that person’s life.
• A high magic approach to the Sinner’s Prayer would maintain that God is not changed by the reciting of the prayer, but the sinner is; this change results in the sinner opening his or her heart to the presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit, thereby accepting God’s freely given gift that had been offered, but left unopened, as it were, until the moment the sinner recited the prayer.

So, where am I going with all this? I’d like to contrast both primitive and high magic with mysticism.

• • •

Mysticism is sacramental, rather than magical, in nature. As I see it, both sacramental theology and magical theory celebrate the presence of wonders in the world. But whereas magic places the emphasis on the actions of the mortal self, sacramental theology keeps the focus on the mighty acts of God. Sacramental theology makes no sense in those forms of Wicca, neopaganism, or ceremonial magic where there is no belief in a transcendent God distinct from the universe (or the self). But to those who do acknowledge such a transcendent reality, the difference between sacramental mysticism and magic might be seen this way (again, using the Sinner’s Prayer as my example):

• Primitive magic: I recite the Sinner’s Prayer (with the correct heart intention, of course) to get God to save me.
• High magic: I recite the Sinner’s Prayer to open my heart to Christ’s/the Holy Spirit’s presence and to accept God’s freely given gift of salvation.
• Sacramental mysticism: God loves me. Whatever I do (or don’t do) in response to that love simply pales in comparison.

It’s a fine line indeed that separates mysticism from magic. Most mystics would still insist that, no matter how insignificent our response may be in relation to Divine Love, a response is necessary nevertheless, to complete the circle as it were. The gift of the Eucharist is not complete until the wafer and wine are consumed. The proper response to mysticism is not total, infantile passivity! So in this way, mysticism dances with high magic. But even if it’s fuzzy logic that disinguishes the mystical from the (high) magical, nevertheless both approaches to the spiritual world have their distinct centers of gravity. Mystical spirituality endeavors to keep its center firmly focussed on the love and action of God, while acknowledging that in this physical world of ours, some sort of response is necessary, and that response will look like a magical act, even though it is an action taken in the cascading light of a love over which we mortals have absolutely no control.

This helps to explain infant baptism: many evangelicals reject infant baptism because they think you gotta understand it and assent to it in order for it to have meaning (i.e., in order for the magic to work). But in sacramental terms, since the focus is on God’s love rather than on human response, baptising infants makes perfect sense. After all, God loves babies just as much as God loves adults! 

Now, to finish this post I’ll answer the question found in its title: do I believe in magic? Well of course! But that’s like asking me if I believe in loving my self. Well, I think it’s a good thing to love one’s self, even if Christian theology has often been rather unhelpful in this regard. But I also believe that self-love is only possible in a world where love radiates out from a higher source. Christian theology has historically been so hard on self-love because it tries to get people to unhinge egotism and hold the self in the higher light of Divine Love. And so it is with mysticism and magic. If magic can be compared to the art of self-love, then mysticism celebrates the love of the wholly other, transcendent God, whom we nonetheless can experience immanently since the wholly transcendent God is also wholly present. To immerse our lives in the mystical light renders magic both possible but also unnecessary.

Deification on the Web

Last night I wrote about an article on contemporary writings on deification published in the scholarly journal New Blackfriars. I said if you’re interested in mysticism, you ought to be interested in deification. Well, it occurred to me that some folks might want to know a bit more about this obscure theological topic, so I did some poking around online, and found these resources:

• Our True Final Hope: The Theosis / Divinization / Deification Web Page by Jon Zuck
• Theosis at Wikipedia
• Reclaiming Deification in the Latin West by Matthew Tsakanikas

I’ve only had a chance to skim over these articles, so read at your own risk. But they look pretty good.

Deification on the Web

Last night I wrote about an article on contemporary writings on deification published in the scholarly journal New Blackfriars. I said if you’re interested in mysticism, you ought to be interested in deification. Well, it occurred to me that some folks might want to know a bit more about this obscure theological topic, so I did some poking around online, and found these resources:

• Our True Final Hope: The Theosis / Divinization / Deification Web Page by Jon Zuck 
• Theosis at Wikipedia 
• Reclaiming Deification in the Latin West by Matthew Tsakanikas

I’ve only had a chance to skim over these articles, so read at your own risk. But they look pretty good.

New Blackfriars on Deification

I was doing some research on the Jesuit author George Maloney today and I found something fun: a periodical called New Blackfriars, which is a scholarly journal published by the English Dominicans. If you go to the Blackwell Synergy website, you can download PDFs from the January 2006 issue — sort of a “free sample” online. The articles that are there for the plucking include such tasty topics as:

• “The Last Catholic King (James II)”
• “Mechthild of Magdeburg: Women Philosophers and the Visionary Tradition”
• “Are There Any Catholic Theologians? “
• “What Do We Mean by ‘God’?”
• “What is Infallibility For?”
• “The Consummation of the Christian Promise: Recent Studies on Deification”

That last article is the one with the Maloney reference, which enticed me to the site. I downloaded it and read it this evening. It’s a splendid survey of recent theological writing in the English language either directly on the subject of deification, or dealing with closely related theological topics. The article considers both scholarly as well as more “popular” works (I use the word popular in a relative sense — none of the material included here is going to be picked up by the Rick Warren crowd anytime soon). If you’re interested in the subject of deification (and I’m assuming that most readers of this blog are probably interested in Christian mysticism; if you’re interested in Christian mysticism then you ought to be interested in deification, whether you know it or not), this article is a great overview of some of the more exciting recent writing that’s available on the topic. Best of all, the article itself is free for the downloading; you can save it to your hard drive as a PDF file, or if you just want to read it you can see it in HTML by clicking here.

A Phone Call From An Old Friend

I got a phone call from an old friend yesterday. Although I’ve known her for over twenty years, like so often seems to happen it was a friendship that had grown a bit dormant — living 600 miles apart and each with our own families, we  just fell out of touch, even via email. I hadn’t heard from her (or reached out to her) in probably about four years. Which means that the last time we had any contact, I was still a Pagan, and had not yet begun my journey back to Christianity.

But she emailed me recently, and said she wanted to talk. We bounced around a few emails trying to nail down a suitable time, and yesterday we finally had a chance to connect. We chatted each other up about our spouses, our kids, the frustrations and sorrows of caring for aging parents, and the obligatory clucking about how bad the current administration is.

And then came the inevitable. "So, I wanted to talk to you about your decision to become a Catholic."

We had a good conversation. I think she wanted a bit of reassurance that I hadn’t turned into a neo-fascist, and like all good friends was concerned about my happiness. I think the natural course of the conversation answered all her questions. Eventually the focus shifted away from me and our chat opened out into a very nice conversation about her church (she’s a Unitarian) and about the challenge and necessity of practicing religious tolerance in a world where such a virtue often seems in too short a supply.

I teased her a little when she first brought up Catholicism. I said, "Boy, I’ve learned one way to get old friends to reach out. Just change your religion, and publicize it through your blog!" We laughed, and I hope she didn’t feel like it was a barb at her. But it’s true: I continue to get a trickle of emails and phone calls from old friends and acquaintances with whom I’ve fallen out of touch. They’ve either read my blog, my conversion story on Beliefnet, or finally got the memo through the grapevine. And then they get in touch.

Of all these old friends who get in touch, it is naturally the Pagan ones who have the most emotionally complex reaction to my spiritual wandering — after all, far more people leave Catholicism to become Pagans, than the other way around! Some Pagans sadly seem to take it personally, and need to criticize either me or Catholicism, and I’ve had more than one old friendship take on a distinctively chilly tone when the conversation didn’t go the way my friend seemed to want it to (I make no apologies for becoming a Catholic; nor do I refuse to be anything other than happy with my decision, even while I remain willing to speak up about the ways in which I disagree with the church).  The worst was when one Pagan-author friend started to play therapist with me, trying to uncover what my subconscious problems were that resulted in me becoming a Catholic. When I pointed out that I was in therapy throughout my entire conversion process and that I really didn’t appreciate friends trying to therapize me or the assumption that embracing Catholicism had to be dysfunctional, she ended the conversation in a huff. Thankfully, though, most of my renewed-old-friends, like the one who called yesterday, just want to check in and make sure I’m still me. Those conversations typically go beautifully and I feel refreshed by them.

I guess there are a few lessons here. One is to try to do a better job at nurturing old friendships. Another is to really work on loving people right where they are, remembering that for some people my shift in religious fidelity may be threatening or puzzling. While it is not my job to take care of other people’s discomfort with my religious choices, neither does it make sense to respond to other people’s concerns with anything other than compassion, optimism, and gentle good humor. Ironically, the ethics of polyamory actually helped me out here. Polyamory works best when lovers continually reassure one another, particularly when new lovers are brought into the network of relationships. The point is as beautiful as it is simple: keep telling those you love that you love them, that even when things change you still love them, and that just because you’ve begun to love someone new that doesn’t mean you’ve stopped loving your pre-existing lover(s).

Now, my situation is different of course, primarily because my "new lover" isn’t a person but a faith tradition, and furthermore, when I became a Catholic I actually did change my relationship with Paganism. I am no longer Pagan-identified. But unlike so many former Pagans who renounce or disavow Paganism, I have chosen to remain Pagan-friendly. I really don’t have any criticisms of Paganism that I hadn’t already held for quite some time while I was still Pagan-identified, and if anything, my relationship with Paganism is better than ever, since I have enough distance now to allow me to appreciate what is beautiful about Paganism without feeling conflicted over its flaws. All of this, of course, allows me to reassure any and all of my Pagan friends (at least, those who will listen) that I am still their friend, I am not going to try to convert them, and that I have only good wishes for Pagans and their community — even though I am now Catholic.

Keep telling those you love you love them, and keep reassuring them even when things change. It’s a beautiful thing.

The Sinner’s Prayer

If you’ve had any contact with American evangelical Christianity at all, you’ve probably encountered the so-called "Four Spiritual Laws." It comes from a tract written fifty years ago by the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ; these days you can even find it online. All derived from an evangelical reading of the Bible, the laws can be summarized like this:

1. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
2. Humanity has sinned and is separated from God, and therefore we cannot know and experience God’s love and plan.
3. Jesus Christ is the only remedy for our sin.
4. We must accept Jesus as our personal savior in order to receive, know, and experience God’s love and plan.

Both the tract and online versions of the Four Spiritual Laws culminate with a prayer that a person is asked to pray in order to accept Christ as savior and thereby be born again. This prayer, and other prayers like it, have come to be known as the "Sinner’s Prayer." It appears in all sorts of tracts, as well as in books, Christian rock CDs, websites, and anywhere else where somebody is trying to squeeze two thousand years of theology into a simple formula.

Here’s a version of the Sinner’s Prayer found at Wikipedia:

Father, I know that I have broken your laws and my sins have separated me from you. I am truly sorry, and now I want to turn away from my past sinful life toward you. Please forgive me, and help me avoid sinning again. I believe that your son, Jesus Christ died for my sins, was resurrected from the dead, is alive, and hears my prayer. I invite Jesus to become the Lord of my life, to rule and reign in my heart from this day forward. Please send your Holy Spirit to help me obey You, and to do Your will for the rest of my life. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.

Readers who have closely followed my disillusionment with Neopaganism and my subsequent return to Christianity will recognize that a chief source of my alienation from the Pagan community had to do with the prominence of spellcraft. A spell, of course, is a ritual enactment by which one focusses and directs magical power. Magical power, as an old friend of mine once put it, is "the force we use to get God (or Goddess, or Nature…take your pick) to do something that He/She/It otherwise might not or will not do."

Now I have always been uncomfortable with the Four Spiritual Laws and the Sinner’s Prayer, not only because my natural theological orientation is much more catholic than evangelical, but also because I think it is misguided to try to shrink the entire thrust of Christian spirituality into such a, well, manageable synopsis. Frankly, I don’t think the glory of Divine grace can be so easily summarized, let alone acted upon. Because, at the end of the day, the Four Spiritual Laws and the Sinner’s Prayer pay lipservice to Divine action, but ultimately keep the spotlight focussed on what we humans do, to "receive" (read: manifest) God’s grace.

And this leads into the insight I had this morning. I’m reading a manuscript of a forthcoming evangelical book, and the author offers his own critique of the Sinner’s Prayer, seeing it as a  human effort to try to control the uncontrollable reality of Divine Grace. And as I read what this author had to say, it hit me — hard, right between the eyes — as to why, ultimately, I’m uncomfortable with this prayer and the theology that lies beneath it.

It’s because it’s a spell.

Never mind that Christianity professes to be a non-magical or even anti-magical religion. Institutions and communities can behave just like individuals: paying lip service to a particular value or viewpoint while acting in contradictory ways. No matter how much evangelical Christians may insist that their religion has nothing to do with magic, when they recite their Sinner’s Prayer as a means of triggering God’s salvation, they are casting a spell. Maybe it’s even the ultimate spell.

Before reciting the Sinner’s Prayer, they were headed for hell.  After reciting it, they’re bound for heaven. The Sinner’s Prayer "spell" worked the "magic" of getting God to permit the sinner in question to spend eternity in heaven. Without that "spell," it would have been hell for the poor soul. Granted, evangelicals will insist that it is not the words of the prayer itself that "work the magic," but rather the condition of the heart of the person doing the praying. But any Wiccan priestess will likewise tell you that a spell is useless without the focussed intent of the person casting the spell.

Evangelicals who read this may howl in protest, in fact, I’d be surprised if they didn’t. But an old saying asserts that if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like one, it is one. And so it is with the Sinner’s Prayer. It functions like a spell, it persuades Divine action like a spell, and therefore it "creates results" like a spell. It is a spell; a Christian spell.

Okay, so obviously I still don’t care for spellcraft, and Christians who indulge in the practice are to my mind just as spiritually misguided as any teenager who reads Silver Ravenwolf and then sets about using candles and chanting to get herself a boyfriend. Meanwhile, I think the theology that underlies the entire evangelical view of salvation as a private/individual experience engineered by the process of "accepting Christ as one’s personal savior" is suspect. So, I disavow this Christian spell both because I disavow spellcraft in any form and because I disavow any Christian theology that tends toward facilitating a Christian practice of spellcasting — in other words, that sees God as a resource to be manipulated for personal gain (even if the "personal gain" is nothing more than eternity in heaven).

 To end this on a more positive note, what then do I affirm in place of the spellishness of the Sinner’s Prayer? Not hard to answer: I affirm the radical, prodigal overflow of God’s grace, and the utter impossibility that we mortals can do anything to change or shape that flow. I affirm the splendid love that flows out of mystical spirituality that is based on mutual self-giving, and is wholly unconcerned with the power dynamics that underlie the will to magic. And I affirm that sacramental spirituality beautifully expresses such a flow of divine grace in a way that magical spirituality (whether Christian or otherwise) can never come close to touching.

Here’s to the amazing, freely-given miracle of God’s lavish, loving grace! No Sinner’s Prayer required. 

Les Alyscamps: The “Pagan and Christian Cemetery”

Near the Rhône River in the south of France, in the city of Arles can be found a Roman necropolis called Les Alyscamps, the name itself a corruption of the Latin  Elisii Campi ("Elysian Fields"). Although I’ve never been there, I understand it is a beautiful place, as evidenced by the fact that both Gauguin and Van Gogh painted there. According to the early-twentieth-century historian of Christian folklore John W. Taylor, a wonderful legend grew up around this particular cemetary to facilitate the cultural transition from Roman Paganism to Christianity that occurred in the region in the third century. Arles was settled by Greek mariners in the sixth century BCE, and so Les Alyscamps had probably been a Pagan burial site for the better part of a millennium by the time Christianity arrived on the scene. The first Bishop of the region was named Trophimus, and as he  gathered a community of Christians around him, one practical question that emerged was, where should the members of the young church bury their dead? Many would have loved ones and family members interred at Les Alyscamps, but as Christians their hope was to be buried in ground that was disctinctively sanctified to their faith, not to the Pagan gods. According to folklore, Trophimus walked to the graveyard one summer evening, lost in thought as he mulled over this question that struck at the core of the faith (any anthropologist can tell you how in nearly every culture funeral customs lie close to the heart of religious and cultic practices). As he walked along the gorgeous tree-lined avenues of the necropolis, legend holds that Trophimus saw a light shining in the darknesss — and Christ himself appeared to the bishop. As Taylor puts it,

Kneeling among the tombs, as if identifying Himself with those whose bodies were resting underneath the soil, the Saviour was seen by St. Trophimus to raise His hands and to solemnly bless the Pagan burial-place. Henceforth no doubt was felt as to the reality of this heavenly consecration. On the spot where our Savior knelt St. Trophimus erected an altar… Whether this is the record of an actual vision or the poetical way in which [Trophimus] described to [his church] the light which God had given him, there can be no doubt of the result. Christian tombs lie side by side with Pagan, and  tradition tells us that so eager were many Christians for burial here that — something like the body of Elaine, which was sent down the river to the court of King Arthur in the Arthurian legends — bodies of saints from distant countries came floating down the Rhone in funeral barges, seeking for reception in the holy ground which Christ had consecrated.

Taylor himself calls Les Alycamps the "Pagan and Christian cemetery."

What I find so powerful and beautiful about this legend of inter-religious hospitality is that Christ knelt to give the Pagan dead his blessing. It’s kind of like when the president of the United States salutes the military: a practice instituted by Ronald Reagan, and technically a violation of military protocol, for as the civilian commander-in-chief the president is to be saluted, but need not salute in return. While I’m not much of a stickler for armed services protocol, this practice always annoyed me (truth be told, because just about anything Reagan did I found annoying). But now, thanks to this wonderful French legend, I must grudgingly look at the Reagan salute in a new light. Christian theology would hold that Christ need not kneel before anyone — not even the 1st Person of the Trinity, since he is "one with the Father before all worlds, God from God, light from light, true God from true God." Christ need kneel before no created thing, and yet Bishop Trophimus sees the Son of God kneeling to give a Pagan cemetary his blessing.

Wow.

If we are willing to put any credence in this tradition at all, an obvious question emerges: why should Christ only bless this particular piece of ground? Why not bless any and all Pagan cemetaries? And perhaps — just perhaps — this could be seen as a precedent for how Christ would have Christians relate to Pagan faith and practice, in many other areas of life as well: not with fear or hostility, but rather with a gracious and humble blessing?

It’s worth contemplating. 

Thanks to Wikipedia and John W. Taylor’s charming if not entirely reliable history of western Christian folklore, The Coming of the Saints, for the source material for this post.