The Kingdom of Heaven

a puddle in my driveway

These are definitely surreal times, unreal times. I mean that literally and sincerely: these are days completely disconnected from the Real. If you think I am speaking directly to current events, though, you would be wrong. Current events, as I read them, are precisely the result of our disconnection from the Real.

As a biodynamic farmer, I am fortunate that at this season of the year I don’t have the time to get entrapped by social media and its discontents. I simply have too much to do—crops to plant, animals to care for, honeybees to monitor, pastures and woodlots to manage, a cool room to build, fences to move, a hedge to build, not mention attending to the needs of my wife, my aged mother, and my children. This doesn’t mean that current events don’t weigh heavily upon my soul. They do.

Like many clamoring for change, I have long been discontent with things as they are. I even wrote a book about it, Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. Central to my project is not the overthrow of civilization, but its transfiguration (hence the title). I also hold that such a transfiguration resides solely in learning how to see.

As I said, current events have been weighing heavily on my soul (as they have with so many of us). Even when I’m in the garden. At this time of the year, my farming rhythm is to rise at dawn and pull weeds for two or three hours before attending to the animals and taking care of my mother. Often while I’m weeding, snatches of song or random phrases repeat themselves in my mind. Often the lines come from songs which are not necessarily on my playlist—like the times I have been haunted by ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” or by any Taylor Swift song!... O tempora! O mores!—sometimes they’re lines from scripture or poetry (“Let mans Soule be a Spheare….”). But Saturday, the phrase that kept arising was “The Kingdom of Heaven.” And this one, contrary to the usual way this works out, I was saying out loud, “the kingdom of heaven...the kingdom of heaven.” This is no surprise, of course, since Sophiology as I conceive of it is an attentiveness to the splendor that shines through all things and reveals the inherent goodness of Creation. This is, as I have long argued, what we should be training people to see through education (but don’t) and in religion (but don’t, really), in our economics (we really don’t), not to mention art (when we’re lucky) and science (rarely).

As it happens, while I was weeding Saturday, I received an email from my publisher at Angelico Press. He was sending me the proof copy of an edition Angelico is doing of Thomas Traherne’s Centuries, for which I wrote an introduction (the book should appear very soon). He wanted me to proof my work (written last December) where I found affirmation not only of my repeated phrase but a reminder of why I’m doing this in the first place:

Traherne’s work can in some regards be read as an exegesis on Matthew 6:22: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”

But beholding will prove ineffective unless one possesses the requisite inner disposition to have it bear fruit. And for Traherne, that requisite inner disposition can only be found in becoming childlike. Indeed, Traherne takes Christ’s admonition in Matthew 18:3 as delivered: “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Traherne articulates what he takes to be the primal human condition in his most anthologized poem, “Wonder”:

How like an Angel came I down!

How Bright are all Things here!

When first among his Works I did appear

O how their GLORY me did Crown!

The World resembled his Eternitie,

In which my Soul did Walk;

And evry Thing that I did see,

Did with me talk. (lines 1–8)

That we are not accustomed to maintain such a childlike disposition, Traherne attributes to not knowing how to see, which is primarily the result of a skewed set of values and the failure of an educational system that encourages and fosters illegitimate ways of seeing:

“The first Light which shined in my Infancy in its primitive and innocent clarity was totally eclipsed: insomuch that I was fain to learn all again. If you ask me how it was all eclipsed? Truly by the customs and manners of men, which like contrary winds blew it out: by an innumerable company of other objects, rude, vulgar, and worthless things, that like so many loads of earth and dung did overwhelm and bury it: by the impetuous torrent of wrong desires in all others whom I saw or knew that carried matters and concernments that covered and drowned it: finally by the evil influence of a bad education that did not foster and cherish it.” (Centuries, 3.7)

Not much has changed since then in the wasteland of this our kingdom.

We are, all of us, trapped in an unreal world emblamatized above all things by the internet and distilled to potency in social media. We cannot trust what we see, yet let our adrenaline drive our emotions to rage and hatred. Whatever is to come, without learning to see again we will be doomed to the eternal return of violence, hatred, and retribution. As is only too apparent, “from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matt 11:12). But the Kingdom of Heaven is also at hand, attainable. Even now.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

You are Here: The Tutelar of the Place

A few days ago, I walked out of my house to do some clean-up after building a manger for my goats when I saw a car slowly driving by and the driver point to various things on the property for his passenger. I went over to introduce myself and the driver, a recently retired sailor from the navy, told me he used to visit my farm when he was a child in the 1960s and 70s to stay with his great uncle and aunt. He told me about many of the features long since disappeared: where the water pump was in the kitchen, the woodshed behind the pump house, the tool shed behind the barn. His face lit up as he revisited his childhood. It reminded me of Dylan Thomas‘s poem “Fern Hill”:

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

Witnessing his reverie somehow welcomed me into it.

He also told me about an Indian burial mound that had been on the property. This certainly took me by surprise. He said that the University of Michigan had excavated the site in the 1930s or 40s and that he and his relatives often found arrowheads on the land, typically when breaking up the soil for planting. I had heard this from the previous owner, and while I haven’t found any arrowheads yet, my youngest son did find a silver Indian ring when he was watching me dig postholes a couple years ago. My wife even found a scholarly article describing the site:

from John R. Halsey and Janet G. Brashler, "More Than Grave Lots? The Jack's Reef Horizon in Michigan," Archaeology of Eastern North America Vol. 41 (2013), pp. 145-192

The next day, my wife and a few of our children started to look for the site. We found a few candidates, most of them just off of our property (the farm has been broken into smaller plots over the years). Nevertheless, we felt obligated to honor the sacredness of the place by honoring those whose spirits still guard over it. The following day, my two youngest and I made a medicine wheel of stones and offered gifts of tobacco, a snail shell, a quartz cluster, a turkey feather, and some burning sage along with Catholic prayers (Nicholas Black Elk, represent!) and requests that the invisible inhabitants pray for some of our friends currently struggling, as well as promising them we would hold the land as sacred and treat it in just such a way.

Nicholas Black Elk teaching a child to pray the rosary.

The spirits inhabiting Stella Matutina Farm and environs are clearly the tutelars of the place, even though the august minds of the University of Michigan colonized their remains nearly eighty years ago. Indeed, my wife and I have always been mindful of the importance of a sacramental relationship to the land. We named our farm “Stella Matutina” in recognition of the sacredness of our vocation as biodynamic farmers (we took the name, meaning “The Morning Star,” from one of the titles of the Virgin Mary). The Welsh Catholic poet and artist David Jones was very mindful of the presiding spirits that bestow qualities upon place, as he writes in his poem (which I include in my collection The Heavenly Country) “The Tutelar of the Place”:

She that loves place, time, demarcation, hearth, kin, enclosure, site, differentiated cult, though she is but one mother of us all: one earth brings us all forth, one womb receives us all, yet to each she is other, named of some name other…

... other sons, beyond hill, over strath, or never so neighbouring by nigh field or near crannog up stream. What co-tidal line can plot if nigrin or flaxhead marching their wattles be cognate or german of common totem?

Tell us of the myriad names answers to but one name: From this tump she answers Jac o’ the Tump only if he call Great-Jill-of-the-tump-that-bare-me, not if he cry by some new fangle moder of far gentes over the flud, fer-goddess name from anaphora of far folk wont woo her; she’s a rare one for locality.

Certainly, of all the things it has lost, the sacredness of place is among the most disastrous products of (post)modernity. It’s as if we are disembodied heads, cut off from reality while we mistake data and rhetoric for the Real. The internet and social media only exacerbate this unfortunate development. Scholar W.Y. Evans-Wentz was mindful of this long, long ago when he wrote his doctoral dissertation, which later appeared as The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries:

Let us, then, for a time, forget that there are such things as libraries and universities, and betake ourselves to the Celtic peasant for instruction, living close to nature as he lives, and thinking the things which he thinks.[1]

What would happen if we undertook such an experiment? I fear that many who embrace such a vision do so in the abstract. They seem to like the idea, but prefer to keep it theoretical. Call them “armchair distributists” or “communitarian-agrarian daytrippers.” This is an un-incarnated ethos. Let it take on flesh.

In answer to our invisible, but nonetheless poisonous condition, Jones finishes his poem with a prayer:

When the technicians manipulate the dead limbs of our culture as though it yet had life, have mercy on us. Open unto us, let us enter a second time within your stola-folds in those days—ventricle and refuge both, hendref[2] for world-winter, asylum from world-storm, Womb of the Lamb the spoiler of the Ram.

A regeneration of culture can only happen with a regeneration of our relationship to nature and the presences which make it sacred.

Michael's latest book is Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses, including one on The Metaphysical Poets.

[1] W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (Oxford University Press, 1911), 19.

[2] “ancestral dwelling”

Congruence: Cosmology, the Soil, and Judith Butler

illustration for the broadside of 'The World Is Turned Upside-Down," c. 1646

(Post)modernity is weird. You know it, I know it. But we seem to ignore it, feeling, I assume, that we can’t do anything about this unbelievable weirdness. (Aside: I know some people don’t like the term “postmodernity”—I’m thinking about you, Scott Dodge!—but I find it useful. Think of it as modernity + the internet. Because the internet has changed everything.)

Probably starting with nominalism and traversing through the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the sexual revolution, and the Capitalist-Marxist dialectic (the combatants of which perpetually vie to see which will be named the most evil system ever perpetrated on humanity), modernity eventually succeeded in alienating human beings from the cosmos: the awareness that the stars and planets influence us; that angels and demons inhabit the universe and seek to engage in human life; that minerals, plants, and animals possess spiritual lives and characteristics of their own that also touch us in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways.

But, wait, there’s more! Modernity simultaneously alienated us from the Divine. Resistance seems to have been futile. Even the Protestant Reformation, as Brad Gregory has so deftly shown, functioned as a prime agent of secularization. (And, I know I harp on this, but the Catholic Church’s acquiescence to this acosmological paradigm through divorcing the church year from the agricultural year has been nothing but detrimental to flourishing. It’s like living with a ghost.)

And not only do you get alienation from the cosmos and God! Act now and you also get alienation from the soil (you know, the place where food comes from)! And don’t even get me started on the FDA equating hydroponics with organic farming. Because of our alienation from the soil and from nature, I contend, we no longer know the basics of biology (here’s a great article on the topic). It’s pretty clear that we don’t. Monsanto (Home of the Frankenfood!) is not helping in this regard.

Added to our estrangement from the cosmos, God, and the soil, we have now arrived at the ultimate horizon: estrangement from our own bodies. (Oh, René Descartes, what hast thou wrought!) Thank you, Judith Butler. Only I don’t mean “thank you” thank you. The beginning of the transhumanist project is here, brothers and sisters (meant, of course, in the broadest possible context), and children are the lab rats. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

As an English ballad of the 17th century explained, we live in a world turned upside-down. (Interesting that the ballad was written in response to the Puritan “war on Christmas” that preceded secularization’s volley by several hundred years).

We do have a cosmos: the internet (and social media). We have a soil (synthetic chemicals and pharmacology). We have a god (our own wills and emotions—vaguely understood as possessing “rights”). What can I say? People have an addiction to poison.

I admit that I am increasingly pessimistic about where we are headed. I imagine it will be somewhere between Orwell’s Nineteen-eighty-four and Huxley’s Brave New World. We have yet to acknowledge the level of the hypernormalisation to which we have all become enthralled. Brainwashing (also known as the engineering of consent) is something that happens to other people.

There is an alternative, of course. We could try to live in congruence with nature and the supernatural (you can’t have one without the other: it’s a symbiosis). Worldviews that emphasize the spiritual over the material or the material over the spiritual are simply two sides of the same pathological coin. They have done nothing but wreak havoc over human flourishing. Sophiology, with its attentiveness to both the natural world and the supernatural world that shines through it, offers one such alternative: and a very sane and healthy one at that.

To be continued…