The Ecclesial State of Exception

It started, as many things do, with an observation I dropped on social media:

Hypothetical: imagine you belonged to a Church that not only failed to condemn the greatest evil of our times but actively supported it. What would be the proper response?

I have a gift for controversy (I know, BIG SURPRISE), so the comments that followed were as telling as they were predictable: everything from the CatholicCon citation of “the Magisterium” (whatever that really is) to the defense of the “Church founded by Jesus Christ” (claimed, predictably, by Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants without exception—though often excepting each other in that designation, at least provisionally). Surprisingly, to me anyway, most people seemed to think that I was indicting only the Catholic Church, to which I more or less belong, in this statement. But, hey, I’m an ecumenical guy: I was including all the churches. But I did not have the average believer in mind; I was thinking about the institutional churches, meaning the guys who run things. And, before you get on your Christian feminist high horse, just know that I hold women bishops—and even that one non-binary Anglican dude—as responsible as their male counterparts. Because they have all failed to condemn the greatest evil of our times. Full stop.

Of course this begs the question, What is the greatest evil of our times, Mr. Sophiologist? I think it’s obvious, don’t you? We have been witnessing and, for the most part, to my absolute dumbfoundedness, ignoring what can only be called crimes against humanity and which have resulted in perhaps millions of excess deaths across the world. Millions. In addition, we have seen a shocking rise in miscarriages, fetal abnormalities, stillbirths, and infants born with heart problems; not to mention the untold number of healthy young people “dying mysteriously” from heart ailments and stroke. And this is early days: we still don’t know how many young people will be rendered sterile from playing pharmaceutical Russian roulette. The outlook is bleak, indeed. We’re heading for Children of Men territory, but, I fear, unlike the book, this is all by design.

And the Churches are silent.

This was really driven home to me when the Vatican ruled that only the fully-v@xxed would be allowed access to its churches and museums—and mandated the shots for all employees. The game was over for me, however, when Pope Francis proclaimed that getting vaccinated is “an act of love.” That was it. Even though I still consider myself Catholic (in a very small-is-beautiful, medieval or 17th c. rural Anglican kind of way), I don’t know if I can ever step foot in a Catholic church again. This is painful for me.

And, no, the Orthodox have been no better, just less organized. So don’t even start with me.

Such acquiescence to State power can only be assumed, I assume (as various Orthodox bodies, for example, do vis a vis Russia and Ukraine). Indeed, the history of all the Churches screams this in the highest register. Yet, we, the faithful, are addicted to Church power and authority as much as the Churches are addicted to that of the State. Church history is the history of capitulation. And this, need I remind anyone?, is antithetical to the very mission of the Church. I was just reading as much in one of my most trustworthy guides, H.J. Massingham’s The Tree of Life:

“Newman wrote in The Arians of the Fourth Century, ‘The Church was formed for the express purpose of interfering with the world.’ ‘Compromise,’ wrote Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, ‘is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire.”…. [The Church’s] spiritual impotence and inertia were indeed so complete (with the partial exception of the campaign against negro slavery) that it is to be wondered that Huxley ever bothered himself to flog the prostrate form of the dormant donkey. A conventional pietism, a set of moral precepts, or, what Tawney called the inculcation of ‘such personal virtues as did not conflict’ with plutocracy, were its alternative to it where it did not, as in the Enclosures, actually co-operate with it.’”

Ouch.

I could have done with some ecclesial interfering with the world over the past few years. We got just the opposite: the world interfering with the Church (remember when Christmas and Easter—not to mention services altogether—were canceled by State decree?). But, really, this is longstanding practice, despite pious gestures and holy-sounding press releases. (You can read more about the uneasy relationship of Church and State power in my comrade Guido Preparata’s forthcoming book, Church and Empire).

It is no secret that billions upon billions—maybe even trillions—of dollars have changed hands (from bottom to top) over the past three years. Yet, I haven’t heard a peep about the “preferential option for the poor”—from any ecclesial bodies—even once in regards to this wholesale theft. For shame. For absolute shame.

I find it telling that academia has been almost unanimous with the Churches in its worship of State and corporate power. Talk about strange bedfellows! It’s not really a surprise to me—I’ve been inside academia for decades and know what a cowardly and sniveling citizenry it embodies on the whole. Case in point is the excoriation various academic “thought leaders” unleashed on Giorgio Agamben when, get this, in February 2020 he warned about the coming “state of exception” that would accompany the various v@x passports, lockdowns, and loss of civil liberties then being proposed under threat of the “pandemic.” As he then wrote, “We might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a justification for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext for broadening such measures beyond any limitation.” Well, he was right and all the sniveling cowards (never his equals) who tried to take him down were wrong. Dead. Wrong. But, like Church leaders, they never apologize. They know how the game is played.

In the face of such corruption and complicity, as I have mentioned before in this blog, the only recourse I have found is to have house church, complete with the Eucharist. I’m sure this excommunicates me from the Catholic fold, but—I’m sure you know the phrase—“Here I stand. I can do no other.” Some will say this will condemn me to hell. But, really, who needs a god who would do that to a suffering servant? Only the god of very small men would command such a thing.

I still believe in a Universal (Catholic) Church, but more and more I feel it has to be an underground, invisible Church, disseminated throughout the world like an enlivening enzyme or agent, transformative, transfigurative, sophianic.

Church and State 1.0

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit and The Regeneration Podcast. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

Protein Farmer

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_

Blesses All Creation: The Eucharistic Gesture of Thanks

I am really not one to post “The Thanksgiving Blogpost,” a move that I recoil from by nature, repulsed as I am by the maudlin, the saccharine, and the melodramatic. But this year is an exception. You’ll see why.

First of all, I am thankful that our farm had a good year. We had pretty decent weather, for the most part, and though we had a lot of rain, we were spared any flooding in our lower garden until November (which I hope will have subsided by planting time next spring). The previous year was a bad year: flooding, drought, and late and early frosts. Somehow, we avoided a wildfire. I attribute this year’s success, in part, to our cow, Fiona, and the manure with which she has enriched our compost and our supply of BD 500, horn manure preparation. We’ve only kept goats, chicken, and hogs before getting Fiona in summer 2020, and the difference in soil/compost quality is marked. I also think this has something to do with this being our sixth year at this location. In the documentary The Biggest Little Farm (which I recommend EVERYONE see), my biodynamic forebear Alan York observes that the seventh year on a BD farm is when the farmer really starts to see miracles. So I look forward to next year.

I am also thankful that we had a tremendous storm in mid-August, and though we didn’t have power for most of two weeks, the house and barn weren’t damaged. Many trees fell, mostly black walnut and pine, and my chainsaw was put to the test. But now we have firewood to last through the winter. It’s worth the two weeks without power: a windfall in every respect.

In addition, I am thankful for losing friends. I know this sounds weird, but losing friends has been somehow liberating. It’s not as if I cut ties with long-standing friendships (I don’t think I have), but I have fallen away from “friends” I became acquainted with through social media—people I have actually communicated with in-person or on the telephone. I imagine Aristotle would call these “friendships of utility.” My wife has told ever me since she’s known me what a lousy judge of character I am, but I’ve been this way since childhood. I must have picked up this quality in the stars on my way down. Often over the years, I have pondered Jacques Derrida’s invocation of Aristotle—“O my friends, there is no friend”—in the former’s book Politics of Friendship (the “politics” part I think I might finally be starting to understand). Likewise have Dougie Maclean’s words in “Caledonia” haunted me: “Lost the friends that I needed losing / Found others along the way.” All is well.

I am likewise thankful that I can cure and smoke my own bacon and make mead from the honey provided by my bees. These things actually require no explanation.

I am thankful for house church. The pandemic has taught me one thing about church hierarchies: they’re useless. With churches closed and bishops acquiescent to government power, we had no choice but to take things into our own hands. Literally. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t delve into here, other than to say what a blessing it has been.

But the thing I am most thankful for is the healing of my wife, Bonnie. This requires some explanation.

In April of this year, right around Easter, Bonnie came to me and told me she was having pretty extreme menstrual cycles—blood clots the size of her fist, among other things. And her cycles were coming every two weeks and not every four. At first, we thought it might be menopause—we are in our fifties after all—but after a week or so reports started to appear that some women who had received the mRNA v@ccines had been reporting similar effects. Only Bonnie hadn’t had any injections. Then Bonnie showed me a news story saying some unv@ccinated women who had been in contact with those recently v@ccinated were manifesting some of the same symptoms. A couple weeks later, I heard from a close friend, a woman just a couple of years younger than Bonnie, and she said that she, also unjabbed, started experiencing the same issues after her husband was v@ccinated. “Why is it my husband gets the shot,” she jokingly texted me, “and I get the side-effects?” The two are one flesh, I suppose.

We didn’t know what to think—what scientist or physician would even investigate?—but the entire thing looked to be more than coincidence. Bonnie’s symptoms continued for a couple of months (as did our friend’s) before settling down, though the sheer volume of blood she was losing made her anemic. She treated herself with homeopathy and herbs (as she has done all through our life together), and then she made an appointment with her gynecologist just to check on things.

The doctor found that her uterus was uncommonly large. We knew this already after having been told of it by a doctor attending Bonnie when she delivered our seventh child in an emergency c-section (all of our previous children had been born at home with a midwife). Then followed a series of tests and procedures before we finally discovered that Bonnie had cancer of the uterus, rare enough, but even rarer for women whose wombs have so much experience.

We found this out in late September, just before our farm’s Michaelmas festival. Bonnie immediately increased the alkalinity of her diet. Our food is pretty clean anyway, but she forged ahead and altered what needed to be altered in her diet (she has so much more willpower than I do). Last week, Bonnie had surgery on the damaged organ that had bestowed so much life, so many lives; the surgeon also biopsied a lymph node and an ovary that both seemed a little misshapen.

Needless to say, this has been challenging for all of us in the family Martin. I tried, successfully for the most part, to avoid imagining what I would do if things turned out for the worst—how to run the farm by myself without my beloved partner, how to homeschool the last few children (the youngest just turned eleven), and how to survive in a psychological and spiritual wasteland. But I did my best to be present to the moment and not give in to fear or despair.

But this story has a happy ending. Tuesday of this week, just as I returned home with my two youngest boys from basketball practice, Bonnie received “the phone call.” She took the call on our porch (out here in the wilderness of Waterloo Township we get terrible reception) while the rest of us ate dinner. When she came in, we all looked at her. “It’s good news,” she said: the cancer was gone and it wasn’t in the ovary or lymph node. Bonnie, who had not cried or expressed dismay through the entire ordeal, finally broke down in tears. And so did I. And this is that for which I am most thankful.

Below is a song Bonnie and I recorded (the only one) about twenty-three years ago. I only remember it was then because our eldest daughter. Mae, who is soon to turn twenty-four, was a baby at the time and we only had two hours to drive to the studio, record, and get home before Mae needed to nurse. The song, written by Bonnie, is about the birth of our son, Tommy, and a dream Bonnie had the night before he was born. In the dream, Bonnie saw a woman in a blue mantle like a shepherd’s cloak. She was holding a staff or crook and directing a herd of white horses that would charge up and down the sides of a valley, their hooves thundering. When Bonnie awoke, she was in labor: the thunderous sounds of the horses were her contractions. Her womb has always been a miraculous vessel. On the song, Bonnie plays twelve-string guitar and sings (she has the voice of an angel) while I accompany on mandolin and six-string guitar. I have no idea who put it on the internet, but it’s also available on Spotify for some reason. O my friends, the world, this eucharistic and sacramental reality, imbued with sophianic splendor, is a strange and beautiful thing.

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.