Vernacular Sacraments

As anyone familiar with my work would know, mine is an inherently sacramental worldview. That is, I see divinity as capable of disclosing itself and administering grace through the material elements of the cosmos. This disclosure comes by way of the natural world and its subsidiarities—the arts, liturgy, scripture, and so forth, and even the realms of speech and ideas. The disclosure, of course, is not assured, nor is it programmatic. It doesn’t happen in every circumstance. But we have all experienced it.

For sacramentally-minded Christians (I’m thinking primarily of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican iterations), the primary locus for such a phenomenon is the Eucharist, with Baptism and Chrismation /Confirmation standing in close proximity. So, possessing such a sensibility, I found myself very disturbed when bishops of every stripe denied the Eucharist to millions (perhaps billions) of Christians throughout a sizable amount of the past two years, even to the point of canceling masses, feast days—Christmas and Easter not the least of them—and removing the “Sunday obligation” and accompanying mortal sin that allegedly comes from skipping church. When the bishops finally decided the political coast was clear, they reinstated the Sunday obligation. But by then they’d lost me. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

The madness even reached the point at which many Catholic parishes (and I’m sure the same is true with the Orthodox and Anglicans) unvaccinated parishioners were barred from the sacraments, in what seems to be the most blatantly unchristian move imaginable. The Vatican (not that I was surprised) even instated a vaccine mandate for all employees and visitors. I even know an Episcopalian priest who was denied a post as a pastor for being unjabbed.

Now that we know for certain (as many did much earlier, but were decried as “anti-science” or conspiracy theorists) that the vaccines are worthless at either preventing infection or spread (and that “it would have been much worse without” canard is absolutely risible if not contemptible)—and we know for certain they lead to harm or death for some people—such clerical moves prove themselves only to be tragic, but a tragedy that has devolved into farce. But no one has apologized from what I’ve noticed. No one.

Having been accompanied on most of my life as a Catholic Christian by the specter of child sex abuse (one of the pastors at my boyhood parish was one of the most notorious abusers in the history of American Catholicism) I am very familiar with the evils of clericalism and have for many years had some serious doubts about the fairytale that the Holy Spirit selects the bishops, cardinals, and popes. In fact, when my book Transfiguration was in production in 2018 and the McCarrick scandal erupted—a scandal Rod Dreher and my friend Larry Chapp had known and warned about for years but were ignored—I wanted to change the subtitle from “Notes Toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything,” so filled was I by outrage and shame. But I didn’t, alas. Then Notre Dame burned during Holy Week of 2019. And this was all before the world was turned upside-down in 2020.

After living in the shadows of a church gone mad in the midst of a society gone mad for nearly a year, having missed the celebration of Christmas and Easter by governmental decree greeted with clerical approval—and with school-age children still at home—I decided to take matters into my own hands: we started a house church, replete with the celebration of the Eucharist (and one baptism). This was nothing I ever imagined myself doing; it was not something I desired or sought. But I definitely felt the spirit of the Lord beckoning me to not let my children starve from the Eucharist due to the politics and fears of weak or malicious men.

It is my understanding that Ivan Illich thought this was where the Church was headed and that he thought it a welcome development. Illich speaks much about “vernacular” phenomena—in gender, work, and so forth—in his work and it made me start thinking about the notion of vernacular sacraments, which is what I see to be the issue here. But I don’t really feel the need for the rhetorical appeal to authority on this score. The children need to be fed.

Surreptitiously, this morning I found a Substack post by my friend, Tara Ann Thieke, in my junk folder (sorry, Tara! I don’t know what happened!) in which she shared these words of comfort on the Eucharist by our mutual friend, Rudolf Steiner: “An understanding of the world is only present today when a transubstantiation is carried out at an altar.” This line well-captures my gradual movement into the realm of house church: for I know this is the only way to understand the world, and I refuse to have my children denied it.

Of course, some may say that churches have stepped back from vaxx and mask mandates and requirements. Well, good for them. Still haven’t seen any apologies. I know a good number of my friends are disappointed in what I’ve been doing, but not one of them has said so to me personally. But when you know you know. But none of that concerns me now. Friendship has its place, but that doesn’t concern me now. What concerns me is standing in the light of God, dependent on His grace which is freely given and not dependent on a set of credentials or licensure. This may mean I’m excommunicated. But that doesn’t concern me now.

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.

In Memoriam: Christopher Bamford (1943-2022)

I don’t recall exactly when I first heard the name “Christopher Bamford,” who died Friday morning after a very long battle with cancer, but I do know it was when I was in my mid-twenties and starting to explore the world of ideas that eventually led me to a deeper search for Wisdom and to which I have devoted my life. I recall listening to cassette tapes someone loaned me from the Lindisfarne Association and hearing poet, literary critic, and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine’s admiration for Bamford as a philosopher. I also remember his introductions to other speakers at Lindisfarne (though I don’t recall what he said or who he was introducing). I had no idea how my path through life would be as a fellow traveler with Chris on the path to Wisdom.

I never met Chris in-person, though we did correspond over the last few years; but I did see him once. At the time, I was a Waldorf teacher at a teacher training course at Sunbridge College in New York and visiting the Steiner Books bookstore. For decades, Chris served as editor-in-chief at Steiner Books and his office was in the back of the bookstore. I saw him come out of his office, chat for a second with a clerk, and then disappear into his office. That was the extent of our physical contact. Not too impressive of a meeting. Still, he transformed that press into something impressive and, as my friend and Regeneration Podcast co-host Mike Sauter observes, Chris’s introductions were often the best parts of the books!

Prior to his work at Steiner Books, Chris founded the Lindisfarne Press and published or republished a number of exceptional books on what could be called implicit and explicit sophiological themes. We have a copy of Celtic Christianity: Ecology and Holiness, an anthology put together by Chris and William Parker Marsh that my wife bought before we were married—and I had a copy of Lindisfarne Letter 13, the original source of the book, though I have no idea what’s happened to it. Chris also shepherded the Esalen Institute/Lindisfarne Press’s Library of Russian Philosophy project, which saw new translations and retrofitted earlier translations of some of the great texts of Russian Sophiology, including works by Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov. Seriously, I do not know how I would have become myself without the ready availability of these thinkers in English. They were absolutely formative.

When I was working on my own anthology, the casebook The Heavenly Country (2016), Chris was exceedingly generous in allowing me to use a number of passages from Steiner Books/Lindisfarne books, including long excerpts from Bulgakov’s Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology and Steiner’s Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses. And without charge!

Around that time, I was surprised when Chris expressed interest in attending the Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything conference at my farm in Summer of 2016, though he didn’t make it. It would have been nice. Alas.

Great interview made for the film The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner.

In addition to his gifts as an editor, Chris was also a gifted translator, and his translations of Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz (uncle of the Polish Noble Laureate) are exquisite. In one of the email exchanges I had with Chris (in November 2019—just before the world went completely mad), he told me about a new translation project:

“I am more than half way through translating the complete Angelus Silesius Cherubinic Wanderer and will one day be looking for someone to read through it with a red pencil. “Silesius, of course, takes one deep into Eckhart, Tauler, Suse and the Friends of God territory…. the depths of which almost defy contemplation…”

I hope he was able to finish it. I’d love to read it. Earlier that year, he sent me a translation of one of Novalis’s Spiritual Songs:

Few know

love’s secret,

feel insatiability

and everlasting thirst.

The holy supper’s

celestial meaning

remains a riddle

to earthly senses,

but whoever has drawn

life’s breath

from warm, loved lips,

whoever’s heart holy fervor

has melted in quivering waves,

whoever’s eyes have ever lifted

to measure

heaven’s unfathomable depths—

that person will eat his body

and drink his blood

forever.

For who has guessed the earthly body’s

higher meaning?

Who can say

he understands the blood?

Once all is body,

ONE body, then swims

the blessed couple

in celestial blood—

O! that the world sea

would grow red

and rocks rise up

in fragrant flesh!

Then the magic meal would never end

nor love ever find satisfaction.

You can never have the beloved

inwardly enough, enough your own.

Transformed by ever gentler lips

the companion becomes

more inward, ever closer.

Warmer pleasure

thrills through the soul.

Thirstier, hungrier

grows the heart:

love’s bliss endures

from eternity to eternity.

If ever those fasting

once tasted,

they would abandon all,

and sit down with us

at longing’s table

that never grows empty.

They would never know

love’s unending fullness

and praise the sustenance

of body and blood.

But I think Chris’s greatest contribution was as a writer of deeply insightful, philosophically open, and spiritually profound prose. His book An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West (2003) is as moving and enlightening a book as I have read. In fact, when I was teaching an undergraduate course entitled “Truth and Inquiry” at Siena Heights University in Michigan a few years ago, I used it as a textbook. Its table of contents, in fact, acts like a mirror in which I see my own interests and loves reflected—Sophia, the Eucharist, Hermeticism, Celtic Christianity, the Grail, Novalis, Romanticism, the Rose Cross, the Troubadours, and “Deserts and Gardens,” perhaps the best essay I’ve ever read on the Rosary. He writes with incredible felicity and grace—reading him is a pleasurable experience.

In June of 2020, Chris wrote me regarding a few publishing projects he had in the works, including a follow-up to An Endless Trace. In his words: “The Great Life: Learning to Live between Worlds. This a companion volume to An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West. My old friend and co-creator of Lindisfarne Press, Will Marsh, is presently doing a final copy edit etc. Manuscript should be available by Fall.”

I forwarded the email to my publisher, who was very interested, but I don’t think Chris ever followed-up on it. It may be that he became too ill. I certainly hope it finds a publisher...and soon!

While I never had the grace to call Chris my friend (though, as you can see, he was very kind to me), several friends and acquaintances of mine did, including one of my very best friends, Therese Schroeder-Sheker, who has known Chris for decades. Over the past few years, as we knew Chris’s condition was not improving, I would get occasional updates on his health.

When Therese called me a few days ago and told me Chris was nearing his transitus, I joined her and others in keeping vigil over the leave-taking of this extraordinary and kind soul. In my place, I worked on a guitar arrangement for “And did those feet in ancient time” (also known as “Jerusalem”)—I’m sure Chris, who loved Blake as much as I do, would appreciate it, or at least the effort. I also reread some parts of An Endless Trace. I fear that if I begin quoting the book, I may just copy the whole thing, so beautiful is the prose and filled with truth and goodness the content, but I will suffice with a selection from “Deserts and Gardens”:

“I discovered this viriditas and the healing field of the soul implicit in the Rosary at a very difficult period of my life. It was one in which, forced by circumstances I was powerless to change, I was metaphorically brought to my knees and taught that life is meaning—always, inevitably, and necessarily filled with meaning, whether I recognized it or not. I learned that life always knew best, and was wise, and would always lift me up and carry me, whether I wanted it to or not. I learned, too, that all I could do was respond, with gratitude, praise, and reverence for whatever life brought. I learned that this was healing. I learned it with a force of revelation through the Rosary at the feet and in the presence of Mary Sophia.”

I am certain that revelation is a space which Christopher Bamford now inhabits in as full a way as possible.

Thank you, friend. I owe you so much.

Godspeed.

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.

Michaelmas and the Battle Against Evil

"The Vision and Inspiration" by Louis Maurice Boutet de Monvel

“Michael is interpreted as meaning ‘Who is like God?’ and it is said that when something requiring wondrous powers is to be done, Michael is sent, so that from his name and by his action it is given to be understood that no one can do what God alone can do: for that reason many works of wondrous power are attributed to Michael. Thus, as Daniel testifies, in the time of the Antichrist Michael will rise up and stand forth as defender and protector of the elect. He it was who fought with the dragon and his angels and expelled them from heaven, winning a great victory. He fought with the devil over the body of Moses, because the devil wanted to keep the body hidden so that the Jewish people might adore Moses in the place of the true God. Michael receives the souls of the saints and leads them into the paradise of joy. In the past he was prince of the synagogue but has now been established by the Lord as prince of the Church. It is said that it was he who inflicted the plagues on the Egyptians, divided the Red Sea, led the people through the desert, and ushered them into the Promised Land. He is held to be Christ’s standard-bearer among the battalions of holy angels. At the Lord’s command he will kill the Antichrist with great power on Mount Olivet. At the sound of the voice of the archangel Michael the dead will rise, and it is he who will present the cross, the nails, the spear, and the crown of thorns at the Day of Judgment.” ~ from Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend [1]

Ever since my days as a Waldorf teacher, the festival of Michaelmas has held a special place in my heart as well as in my family’s celebration of the Christian Year. At the Waldorf school where I once taught, the children form the “body” of the dragon, partially hidden under various interpretations of “dragon skin” made from bed-sheets and, led by a student wearing the dragon’s “head” (some sort of headdress) process around the precincts of the schoolyard until they meet St. Michael (usually a community member in angelic swag) who then transforms the beast. I’m not sure if all Waldorf schools still do this, as they have become increasingly allergic to anything remotely Christian (and, I am sad to report, most Waldorf teachers these days only have a superficial familiarity with the work of Rudolf Steiner), but my family has carried on the tradition at Stella Matutina Farm, the place where we reside, for the last six years. A wonderful community of people join us, and our celebration gets bigger every year.

Our celebrations have a very medieval folk-Christian/pagan vibe to them, as not only do we have St. Michael and the Dragon but we also feast and make merry, often with mead or metheglin I have made—with the help of my bees!—on the menu. My younger children look forward to it for weeks.

Michaelmas at Stella Matutina Farm, 2019

But conviviality is not the only thing we celebrate at Michaelmas; we also celebrate the intersection of the Church year with cosmic realities.

Rudolf Steiner paints a beautiful imagination of this reality. For Steiner, the cosmos (the Creation, that is) speaks to us, but only if we have ears to listen and eyes to see. As he points out, Michaelmas—as well as the harvests that accompany it in the northern hemisphere—is anticipated in the Perseid meteor showers (Perseus another great fighter of monsters) that occur in late July and August. For Steiner, this symbolizes St. Michael’s victory over Satan and his angels as well as the introduction of meteoric iron into the atmosphere that can steel the resolve of perceptive individuals attentive to what happens on both heaven and earth. “If,” Steiner says,

“a man enters thus into the enjoyment of nature, the consciousness of nature, but then also awakens in himself an autumnal self-consciousness, then the picture of Michael with the dragon will stand majestically before him, revealing in picture-form the overcoming of nature-consciousness by self-consciousness when autumn draws near. This will come about if man can experience not only an inner spring and summer, but also a dying, death-bringing autumn and winter. Then it will be possible for the picture of Michael with the dragon to appear again as a powerful Imagination, summoning man to inner activity.” [2]

This Michaelic strength can be seen politically as well. St. Joan of Arc, to cite a famous example, was directed by St. Michael to save France from the corruption of the Burgundian machinations with England that oppressed French sovereignty. At her trial, her interrogators asked whether God hated the English. “She said that as to love or hate that God had for the English, or what He would do for their souls, she knows nothing; but she is well assured that they will be driven out of France, except those who die there; and that God will send the French victory over the English.” [3]

Joan was an illiterate peasant girl (only nineteen at her death), a “useless eater” as some would say. That she fearlessly confronted the amassed power of the medieval Catholic Church without so much as quaking is evidence of Michaelic iron in action, echoed recently by an army of construction workers in Australia.

Michael’s battle with the Dragon is always already happening. Again Steiner:

“Then men will come to understand these things, to reflect on them with understanding, and they will bring mind and feeling and will to meet the autumn in the course of the year. Then at the beginning of autumn, at the Michael Festival, the picture of Michael with the Dragon will confront man as a stark challenge, a strong spur to action, which must work on men in the midst of the events of our times. And then we shall understand how it points symbolically to something in which the whole destiny—perhaps indeed the tragedy—or our epoch is being played out.” [4]

As I’ve mentioned before, the Celtic churches had a deep reverence for St. Michael, and invoked his protection with startling regularity:

“I beseech you by the tenth order on the compact earth; I beseech praiseworthy Michael to help me against demons.

“I beseech the people of heaven with bright-armed Michael; I beseech you by the triad of wind, sun, and moon.” [5]

The “tenth order” mentioned above has another name: mankind.

It is my profound hope that the Feast of St. Michael will become more and more richly and enthusiastically observed in this post-Christian epoch. For his moment, as always, is now. Invoke his aid, and fear not.

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. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. Watch for his Sophia in Exile, due momently from Angelico Press.

1. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, 1993), 2 volumes.

2. Rudolf Steiner, The Four Seasons and the Archangels (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1984), 15.

3. The Trial of Joan of Arc, trans. W. S. Scott (Associated Booksellers, 1956), 123.

4. Rudolf Steiner, The Four Seasons and the Archangels, 21.

5. From “The Litany of Creation” in Celtic Spirituality, ed. Davies and O’Loughlin (Paulist Press, 1999), 298.