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Writer's picture: Michael MartinMichael Martin

At long last, Jesus the Imagination, Volume Six: Flesh & Spirit is in print and available. Below is my introduction to the volume which features work by Christopher Bamford, Therese Schroeder-Sheker, Jonathan Geltner, and Ramon Elani among others. You can purchase copies wherever books are sold.


INTRODUCTION: FORGETTING THE BODY


I had no idea, when I announced the theme for this volume of Jesus the Imagination, that the idea of “flesh and spirit” would so characterize the entire year for me. In April of 2021, my wife started having extraordinarily heavy periods, with fist-sized blood clots, and which would repeat every two weeks. She was growing anemic. We had heard that women having received the new COVID vaccines had been experiencing similar problems, but my wife wasn’t vaccinated. Then, in a New York Times article—that has mysteriously disappeared—we read that many other unvaccinated women were having similar experiences after being in contact with the recently vaccinated. My wife’s symptoms eased a little after a couple of months, but never went away, and eventually she saw a doctor. Then, after a series of specialists and procedures and tests, we discovered that she had cancer of the uterus. My wife proved herself very brave. She wasn’t afraid of dying. To our great relief, we discovered just before Thanksgiving that she was cancer free: we had caught it early. To God alone be the glory.


Simultaneously with this challenge, we found that a young woman close to us was pregnant by rape. Strange phenomena accompanied this revelation—once dark spirits invaded her room waking her from sleep (she was staying with us at the time) and she asked me to bless her room. I did, but later that night a spirit (or spirits) attacked my wife as she slept—and I blessed the house again. My wife went to sleep and I prayed the rosary, which Valentin Tomberg describes as an “all powerful weapon” against evil. But when I completed my prayer and fell asleep, I was attacked, feeling myself pushed down into the mattress and unable to speak or move for several moments. I had my wife anoint me and we prayed Psalm 68, and we have had no such unwelcome visits since. To avoid her violator, the young woman went into hiding and had her baby far, far from her home and family. She is extraordinarily courageous.


I know much of what I have written thus far may strike some as incredulous, or even inappropriate for the introduction to a literary journal. I am fine with that, as I have nothing to prove or explain. I have seen what I have seen. Quod scripsi, scripsi.

I raise these very personal issues here for a couple of reasons. First of all, as I have mentioned, they hold import on our theme. But most importantly because they bear witness to the words of St. Paul in Ephesians: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:12). My family, your family, the world—all of us have been contending with spiritual wickedness in high places: a wickedness that no longer is content to slink in the shadows, but, in its extreme arrogance, now allows itself to preen in the light of day for all to see. Among other forms of wickedness, we have seen the manifestation of what the prophecies of Fatima foretold: “The final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about Marriage and the Family.” I have seen what I have seen.


One scripture I have turned to again and again during this year has been Mark’s account of the healing of Jairus’s daughter. In the story, Jairus comes to Jesus because his twelve-year-old daughter is stricken with a malady, “My little daughter is near death,” he implores the Lord. “Please come and place Your hands on her, so that she will be healed and live” (5:22). En route to the little girl’s bedside, a crowd presses around Jesus and a woman who has been afflicted with an issuance of blood for twelve years wishes to approach Jesus to heal her from her infirmity. “She had borne much agony under the care of many physicians and had spent all she had, but to no avail. Instead, her condition had only grown worse.” She tried trusting the science. Perhaps out of desperation, all other avenues exhausted, she turns to Jesus:

When the woman heard about Jesus, she came up through the crowd behind Him and touched His cloak. For she kept saying, “If only I touch His garments, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped, and she sensed in her body that she was healed of her affliction.

At once Jesus was aware that power had gone out from Him. Turning to the crowd, He asked, “Who touched My garments?”

His disciples answered, “You can see the crowd pressing in on You, and yet You ask, ‘Who touched Me?’”

But He kept looking around to see who had done this. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him trembling in fear, and she told Him the whole truth.

“Daughter,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be free of your affliction.” (27-34)

Jesus then comes to the house of Jairus and, accompanied only by the girl’s parents and the apostles Peter, James, and John, enters the now dead girl’s room, where he utters the Aramaic phrase, “Talitha koum!”—“Little girl, I say to you, get up”—and the girl is restored to her parents. To prove she is not a ghost, Jesus tells them to give her something to eat.


I have often (and I mean for decades) puzzled over the curious fact that the girl in the story is twelve and that the woman’s problem (and it was definitely a woman’s problem) also was measured in twelve years (in Matthew’s version, which is far shorter than Mark’s, the girl’s age is not mentioned). In fact, I have many times asked priests or theologians what they thought the significance of the number twelve in the story is (I even dreamt such an interrogation this last week). No one could ever give me an answer. I have speculated that perhaps it has something to do with a Jupiter cycle (which lasts twelve years), but that doesn’t seem to quite fit—Jupiter, the Greater Benefic of the astrologers, gives abundance, growth, and fecundity—and the women of the story are suffering from exactly the opposite.


After much thought, I have decided the story has something to do with a woman’s power to give birth (and contrary to the opinions of the possessed, only women possess this power), which the little girl had not yet come to and which had been disfigured in the woman. Jesus restored both of them—that is, he restored their bodies, their flesh, to their proper functions: the woman to the regularity of her cycle, and the little girl to the arrival of sexual maturity: the former’s cycle had become overactive, we could say, while the latter feared its inevitable appearance. And I think it unavoidable but to conclude that Jairus’s daughter and the woman were spiritually and physically united by way of their afflictions.


We have seen much of this in our current culture: a mania regarding the most beautiful miracle of the reproductive cycle in women—so mad as to suggest that such is not even confined to women; so mad as to suggest that the terrifying prospect of puberty should be blocked or redirected even before it arrives. Such are the symptoms of a humanity in the grip of spiritual sickness: a spiritual sickness that impacts the flesh. Only a god can save us.


The English writer D.H. Lawrence spent his entire literary career wrestling with this question. He saw the attitudes of the West toward sexuality as pathological for the most part, and sought to offer an alternative in his imaginative explorations of the subject. I admit that I don’t find his conclusions very satisfying, but I admire his courage in facing the questions which confronted him. Early in his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence ventriloquizes through his characters a kind of dialectic on the spirit and the body. One, Lady Bennerley, suggests the body is the problem: “So long as you can forget your body you are happy,” she says. “And the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So, if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without knowing it.” Clearly, our own civilization now suffers from precisely this desire to “forget our bodies,” though with obviously disastrous results.


Lady Bennerley is countered by brigadier general Tommy Dukes who proclaims, “Give me the resurrection of the body![…] But it’ll come in time, when we’ve shoved the cerebral stone away a bit, the money and the rest. Then we’ll get a democracy of touch, instead of a democracy of pocket.” Unfortunately, for all his rhetorical aplomb, the good general is a tremendous disappointment—all talk and no action, supportive of the sensual but asexual: a proper image of the British intelligentsia Lawrence excoriates in the novel.


But Lady Constance Chatterley, married to a (literally and figuratively) impotent Lord (he is essentially dead from the waist down), finds inspiration in the phrase “Give me the democracy of touch, the resurrection of the body!” though she doesn’t exactly know what this means at the time.


Lawrence was, like Milton and Goethe, a Christian who practiced a Christianity “for his own personal use,” in Goethe’s phrase. His desire to see the face of God united to his desire to see the Real of eros between a man and a woman, we might say, were the two most important facets of his psyche. These realities coalesce in much of his work, particularly in his poem “The Church”:

If I was a member of the Church of Rome

I should advocate reform:

the marriage of priests

the priests to wear rose-colour or magenta in the streets

to teach the Resurrection in the flesh

to start each year on Easter Sunday

to add the mystery of Joy-in-Resurrection to the Mass

to inculcate the new conception of the Risen Man.

Give me the resurrection of the body. Give it to us all.


Michael Martin

Stella Matutina Farm

14 July 2022

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Writer's picture: Michael MartinMichael Martin

I have been making a lot of cheese.


Over the past two weeks, I have made roughly fifteen pounds of farmer cheese, a mild variety that requires only vinegar for separating the curds from whey, about three pounds of ricotta (which is made by almost boiling the leftover whey), five pounds of queso blanco, and five pounds of manchego, my absolute favorite, though it won’t be aged enough for at least a month. I’ve also been making butter when I get a chance. It’s pretty easy to tell we have a cow, a Jersey named Fiona.


Fiona gives about three gallons of milk a day (we milk by hand, btw), which is far more than we can use, and that’s why we offer a milk share through our CSA. Even though we have eight shareholders, we still have far more milk than we can use. Which is okay with me. I hope to get enough cheese and butter stored by Thanksgiving to last us through the winter. But it takes time. Making soft cheeses is relatively quick—just a few hours including hanging and drying—but making aged cheeses is an all-day affair, and this is without considering the aging process, which can last anywhere from one to six months (even more in the case of Parmesan).


We also raise honeybees on our farm. Right now we’re down to two hives, but we’ve had up to six. Bees are hard. If I lost a quarter of my animals over the winter, I’d think I was an abject failure; but if a beekeeper loses a quarter of his or her bees, he or she will invariably say “I only lost a quarter!” Varroa mites, GMO crops and glyphosate (not on my farm, but I can’t keep the bees inside a fence), and the DNR spraying for mosquitoes (IN NOVEMBER!!!) provide incredible challenges to the beekeeper. Nevertheless, we usually manage to put up enough honey to last us through the year; and I’ll be pulling the last of the honey for our use next week, just before the goldenrod goes into full bloom and the honey starts to smell like damp socks (I’m not kidding). After the honey harvest comes in, I’ll try to put up another five gallons of mead that will probably be ready around Twelfth Night


All of this, of course, coincides with the way the agricultural year begins to wind down in the Northern Hemisphere at this time of year. I have to get out to the gardens and pull the field onions and potatoes (including sweet potatoes), and get ready to process our surplus animals, not to mention that I need to prepare for the coming hunt of the deer this November. Being part of Creation requires this of me. I’m a farmer.


It is almost impossible, at this time of year, for me to not think of Waterloo Township, the hilly Michigan countryside where I live, as a land flowing with milk and honey. Because, quite literally, it is.


On the other hand, so, at least potentially, is every other piece of land. We all know the biblical promise:

And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3:7-8)

The land the Israelites came to, however, was not as fertile as one might think: through the help of God, they made it so. As Ellen Davis writes in her wonderful Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, the wager of the Israelites in their partnership with God is characterized by the requirement “to imagine their land as blessed precisely in the fragility that necessitates and therefore guarantees God’s answering attention.” [1] There is no reason to believe the same isn’t possible in any other geographical context.

Meanwhile, I have been haunted by something I bumped into while I was preparing Jesus the Imagination, Volume 3: Christ-Orpheus for publication. It was a reference to early Christian liturgies, before the codification that always accompanies State approval and morphs into a late-classical version of the “best practices” sloganeering that so infects academia and business today. Apparently, milk and honey were used sacramentally in liturgies just as much as bread and wine were. [2] I will definitely be following up on research in this direction when time allows, but I do know of people experimenting with the reintroduction of milk and honey as sacramental elements in modern liturgical settings, clandestine though they be. At first I didn’t like the idea, I must admit; but it’s grown on me.

Clearly, the image of milk and honey (both products of the female of their respective species) bears an appreciable amount of sophiological heft. And this is as it should be. It’s what’s missing. And for a culture essentially waging war on both the feminine and fertility, it has never been more needed. So much of this is described in the celebration of divine and human eros that is The Song of Songs:


Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat the fruit of his apple trees. I am come into my garden, O my sister, my spouse, I have gathered my myrrh, with my aromatical spices: I have eaten the honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends, and drink, and be inebriated, my dearly beloved.” (5:1)

Our own culture exhibits an incredible degree of insanity regarding farming. The assumption that agriculture can thrive without animals is one aspect of this nightmare only a bureaucrat could devise. And the promotion of insect protein and, yes, that acquired via cannibalism (but a softer, gentler cannibalism) to replace that from animals (including their milk) would be laughable were not the Archons pursuing it so aggressively.


So think of me, gentle friends, eating farmer cheese with basil, tomato, salt and pepper, sipping on a draft of fresh mead. Think of the feminine and fertility and how scarcity is the myth that tries to replace fecundity. For there is a richness to life the Archons will never comprehend.


Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God.” (Amos 9:13-15)


Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

1. Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge, 2009), 27.

2. Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy (Grand Rapids, 2009), 20.

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Writer's picture: Michael MartinMichael Martin

Stella Matutina Farm

As I go about my days of farming, I often pore over ideas, images, or lyrics from my experience as I execute my various tasks, whether I’m moving an electric fence, seeding daikon (as I did this week), weeding, or what have you. It’s more reverie than anything: not completely deliberate, and not completely random. Somewhere in between. Lately, besides the English ballad “Tam Lin” (which you can check out here in a rendition by the very talented Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer) and the Anglican hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (which hear in this jangly version by the delightful Rain for Roots), I’ve been ruminating on the scene in Blade Runner 2049 in which the replicant Detective K (played by Ryan Gosling) confronts and arrests the replicant Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista). Morton, a former military grade replicant, is at that point a “protein farmer,” that is, a farmer raising insects for their highly nutritious larvae. Yum.



There is no accident why this image has invaded my pastoral meditations. The Corporate-Governmental Archons have been in full publicity mode, enlisting celebrities from Nicole Kidman to Angelina Jolie to promote the wonderful possibilities of introducing insects into the Western diet as a replacement for those environment-destroying cattle, pigs, and chickens. The New York Times, ever at the vanguard of the bequests of the Archons, even ran a story recently arguing that the taboo against cannibalism may have been an overreaction. My God.

Apparently, this move is supposed to be “environmentally friendly.” Well, I call “bullshit.” Jettisoning husbandry in favor of an animal-free agriculture is the way of death. As any biodynamic farmer could tell you, animals belong on a farm and contribute to the fecundity of everything—the plants and soil as well as the wild creatures (including insects) in the meadows, woods, and waters, not to mention people. Certainly, factory farming is antithetical to this fecundity, but the agricultural project of Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and their minions (talk about a “basket of deplorables”!) is just as toxic and even more demonic. The Netherlands’ Mark Rutte and Cananda’s Justin Trudeau (and what the hell, pray tell, is really going on behind the Maple Curtain?) are all in on the globalist agro-scam, hiding behind a nitrogen emissions reduction fig leaf. Sustainable farming is not what they are promoting: they are promoting a continued power grab that went into high gear in early 2020 when the greatest wealth transfer in history began in earnest and corporations capitalized (the exact word) on societal anxieties and destroyed and plundered millions of small businesses with the help of their bureaucratic henchmen in governments around the world (but particularly in the West). Again, as any decent organic or biodynamic farmer knows, transitioning to these sustainable methods from conventional ways of working takes time, 7-10 years according to Vandana Shiva, so going cold turkey, as happened recently (and tragically) in Sri Lanka, can have very predictably disastrous results. Guess what: the Archons know this. Also guess what: it’s what they want. In theology we call such entities demons.

Besides vegetables, we raise a decent amount of protein on our farm. Though veggies are part of our CSA, we mostly raise meat for ourselves—including beef, lamb, pork, chicken, duck, and goose. To that we supplement our diet in winter with venison and rabbit. Humans, some might be surprised to learn, are also part of the circle of life. We do, however, offer eggs for sale and the possibility for a share in our dairy production. Our little Jersey cow, Fiona, gives about 3 gallons of milk a day on average (more when she freshens) and even when all nine kids were at home this would have been more than we could handle. Now with only four still at home... you get it. We make various cheeses (I made some queso blanco and ricotta this morning), butter, yogurt, ice cream, kefir and so forth, and milk proteins are a great staple of the diet. We also have insects on our farm, foremost among them our honeybees. But we don’t eat them.

Interesting that this all occurred to me the week of Lammas and the Transfiguration, two feasts that mark the beginning of the first fruits and harvest cycle. Today, for example, just before the blessing of fruits (in our case, grapes, cucumber, zucchini, peppers, onions, and tomatoes) in observance of Transfiguration during house church, we read these lines from “The blessing of the straun” found in the Carmina Gadelica:

Each meal beneath my roof,

They will all be mixed together,

In name of God the Son,

Who gave them growth.

Milk, and eggs, and butter,

The good produce of our own flock,

There shall be no dearth in our land,

Nor in our dwelling.

In name of Michael of my love,

Who bequeathed to us the power,

With the blessing of the Lamb,

And of His Mother.

Please don’t be fooled. Nature is not a realm of scarcity. Rather, nature is superabundant. There is an excess of life on a farm and on this planet. Those who say otherwise in the rhetoric of scarcity are trying to sell you something: a kind of slavery.

Protein farmer? How about protean farmer.


Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

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The Center for Sophiological Studies

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