Rewilding the Church

In biodynamic farming (of which I am a longtime practitioner), a salient principle is that the individuality of the farm, in addition to crops, domesticated animals, pastures, and orchards, should also contain water—streams or ponds, for example—and wild places, such as woods, coppices, or meadows—which are the homes of a great variety of flora and fauna. The idea here is to practice biodiversity. As Alan York, the late, great master of biodynamics says in the film The Biggest Little Farm (which everyone should see), “Diversity, diversity, diversity.” Don’t plant just one variety of peach tree—plant thirty. Don’t raise only one kind of domestic animal—raise as many as feasible. On our small ten-acre farm, which is bordered on two sides by a State wilderness area, we grow more than fifty kinds of vegetables in garden, not to mention the small orchard I planted. We also raise a dairy cow and her calf (their names are Fiona and Seamus, if you want to know), heritage hogs (American Black Guineas), honeybees, chickens, and ducks. We also forage from the woods and meadows: mushrooms, blackberries, huckleberries, black walnuts. We house our hogs under oak trees in order to fatten them on acorns and we practice sylvo-pasturing with our chickens and cows to some degree. We heat our house with timber from our woods (mostly from trees damaged by storms) and add venison and the occasional wild turkey or rabbit to our diet. Trying to demarcate the lines between the wild and the cultivated here is an almost meaningless activity. In short, we are part of nature and nature is part of us.

Some of my friends are advocates of the “rewilding” movement, a “conservation effort focused on restoring sustainable biodiversity and ecosystem health by protecting core wild/wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and highly interactive species.” I like the idea, but, as with so many conservation groups, the rewilding movement is not too keen on the human species in their quest for a “dynamic but stable self-regulating and self-sustaining ecosystems with near pre-human levels of species diversity.”That’s a red flag for me.

I like something about this concept of rewilding, but I think humans need to be part of the picture. As with arguments about “overpopulation,” it seems some of the avid rewilders think too many people are crowding out native species—but they never volunteer to undertake the heroic work of making more room by their own absence. Overpopulation, that is, is a problem of other people.

But I get it. What I think we need is a rewilding of the human race, not necessarily to a return to the days of hunting and gathering and cave-painting, but in reintegrating our relationship to nature—in much the same way a biodynamic farm combines cultivation and wildness.

And part of this rewilding of the human race, for me at least, includes a Rewilding of the Church.

Some people like to think of Christianity as originally an urban movement, one that initially flowered in cities—like Jerusalem or Rome or Corinth or Alexandria—and that this urbanity is part of the religion’s DNA, as if the guy who started the whole thing wasn’t a carpenter from the sticks and his first followers weren’t rural fishermen and shepherds. Maybe Christianity is an urban phenomenon, but that urbanization has impoverished it. But even the earliest urban Christians were far more embedded in nature than we are; and for a long time throughout Christian history elements of the Church resisted the hegemony of the urban Church, nowhere more clearly than in the Celtic Church. As H.J. Massingham (whom I more and more regard as a saint and prophet) writes, “Thus religion, learning, the arts and crafts, agriculture and the contemplation of wild nature as the manifestation of God, were integrated as aspects of one whole.” [1]

This is what a rewilding of the Church would accomplish. But how do we get there? What I have to offer is speculative, but still based on long years of contemplation and practical work in the world, both as a scholar and as a farmer.

First of all, as I wrote recently, the idea of a house church is very useful. As my friend Chris recently informed me, it should properly be called art of “the independent sacramental movement.” It was a group I did not know existed, let alone that I belong to! As I have mentioned previously, the frustrations we experienced (and continue to experience) with the Church in the Time of COVID became too much for us to bear, and my younger children, we felt, (my youngest is ten) needed to be immersed in the sacramental world. It’s not that I no longer consider myself Catholic (I do), but I have had a pretty plastic notion of Catholicism for a good long while that extends to the Eastern Orthodox and Anglican branches of the family tree. In fact, the original subtitle for my The Submerged Reality was “Ecology and Ecumenism” (or something to that effect). The Year of This Our Contagion required me to interrogate this understanding even further, to the point that it seemed to me that one of the main roles of the episcopacy—of whatever jurisdiction—is characterized by holding the sacraments hostage, or at least by holding that threat. I know this is controversial.

My model and inspiration for this rewilding concept is the ancient Celtic Church, which was not only almost entirely rural and connected to the wild, but was equally distant from the meddling of hierarchs far-removed from the day-to-day working out of the faith in actual, living communities. These communities were suspicious if not dismissive of the authority claims of ecclesial power structures, though they certainly had their own trusted bishops (Patrick and Aidan, for example). Being in Ireland and Scotland at far remove from Rome or Byzantium in an age before postal service, let alone mass communication, the influence of popes and cardinals was almost a non-issue.

Rewilding the Church could have a profoundly vivifying influence on a faith ossified by centuries of the corruption and abuse so endemic to bureaucracy. Imagine Christians living a sacramental life in all of its dimensions—Eucharistic as well as in relation to the natural world. As my friend Chris (who is studying for the Episcopalian priesthood) recently told me, “I’d bless rivers, fields, woods… everything.” Amen.

My thought is that the faithful should feel free to take things into their own hands. I know—this is controversial. Eventually, bishops may catch on—but they’d have to stop being middle-managers and, like Aidan and Patrick, get a little dirt on their hands. I fear, however, that they will probably respond like Dr. Leo Marvin (in the film What about Bob?) when Bob Wiley teaches Leo’s son Sigmund how to dive.

Here comes the bishop!

Such a rewilding, an absolute and sincere sophianic gesture, could save Christianity from its rapid decline as it holds onto the structures that no longer function. The structures, the hierarchies of whatever jurisdiction, are not the Church. We need to remember that. Now is the time.

Steve Winwood in the wild.

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.

1. H. J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 47.

The Vulnerable and the Powerful

There are lots of ways in which one could describe the cultural metamorphoses of the past year. “The Year of Plague,” for example, or “The Rise of the Archons” (much more accurate than “The Great reset”) would be good choices, though I also find delight in calling it “The Revenge of the Nerd in the Pastel Sweater.” But I think the most accurate description would be to call this “The Time of the Vulnerable and the Powerful.”

That might seem pretty simple and straightforward, but it’s not. Since the beginning of lockdowns and various mandates and restrictions, I have been more concerned about the threats to working people and the working poor than I have been about the threat or spread of illness. Not that I’m not unconcerned about illness. My eighty-four-year-old mother, a vulnerable though scrappy auburn-haired Irishwoman who suffers from dementia, lives with me and I was concerned early on that she might get ill. Thankfully, she hasn’t—not even a cold—but living on a farm, eating organic food, drinking clean water, and being around children with sketchy hand-washing habits all the time seems to have bolstered her immune system. When she was in a nursing home before she moved in with us six years ago, she was ill all the time and in the hospital almost quarterly—the caretakers thought she’d die within months under our “unprofessional care.” It’s more than possible that she would have died, of loneliness if not illness, had she still been in the hands of “the professionals” over the past year. But I have also seen friends and family members profoundly impacted, if not permanently damaged (time will tell), from the psychological ramifications of the past year’s events. This is to say nothing of the countless numbers of people who lost businesses (my favorite music store in a nearby town not the least among them) or livelihoods due to the issue of our times.

I know many people, dedicated people of all faiths among them, who know we have a mandate to protect the vulnerable and the powerless. Psalm 82 is explicit about this mandate, employing the imperative tense:

Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.

Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.

They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness:

all the foundations of the earth are out of course. (3-5)

All the foundations of the earth are out of course.

What bothers me, though, is how this desire to protect the vulnerable has resulted in the surrender of the wills and intellects of so many to the dictates of governments, NGOs, and other professional international bodies and authorities. The result is that many who profess a concern for the vulnerable now look as though their real allegiance is with the powerful. And don’t think the powerful haven’t noticed. We all know about the great transfer of wealth (bottom to top) that occurred over the past year. But people seem to be okay with that in order to have the illusion of safety. They might grouse, of course, do a little social media posturing, but nobody seems to care enough to act against, or at least to resist, the ever-increasing power and insatiable appetites of the archons.

So I guess my problem is that I don’t see how giving the powerful more power protects the vulnerable. Shouldn’t the vulnerable be the ones gaining more agency and power? They’re not. And now even those in the middle—not the most vulnerable (though still vulnerable) but lacking in any kind of power—are likewise under threat from the powerful.

For these and other reasons, I prefer a kind of Christian anarchism, similar, but not identical, to that of my Amish neighbors (I write about this in my book Transfiguration) that while it doesn’t completely destroy the concept of power at least dilutes it by distribution—a very communitarian/distributist ethos. We don’t have that. Still, as I have been arguing for a long time, we can inculcate such a sensibility at the micro-level. That is, not by trying to change “The System,” but by changing ourselves and our relationships to the worlds around us.

Power is a tool of Satan (it was what he used to tempt the Master), though people, as they mobilize and think in groups, tend to like the idea of a strong authority. It gives them a feeling of security (how often that word comes up as of late!) The ancient Israelites, looking around the cultures of the Levant, saw that their neighbors had strong kings, and, in their mimetic desire, the Israelites wanted one, too. After their begging and pleading (or, better, whining) Yahweh gave them enough rope to hang themselves, but not without a warning:

“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” (1 Samuel 8:11-18)

They hung themselves, and we are pretty much following suit. This is also why I think those Catholic traddies out there styling themselves “monarchists” (particularly those in the New World) are completely full of you-know-what and cling to their bogus idea of “Christendom” out of an impoverished notion of what it means to be a Christian. Jesus didn’t come as a king. His kingdom is not of this world (and by “this world,” please don’t make the mistake of thinking he meant the created world—he was talking about the realm of Satan and those in league with him to gain control over the vulnerable and everything else. I’m sure you can find fitting examples in your social media feed). People have often asked me over this past strange year what we should do. In fact, I hear from people on this topic almost daily. To quote J.C. Crawford’s legendary introduction to the MC5 on their classic album Kick out the Jams (I am from Detroit, after all), “The time has come for each and every one of you to decide, whether you are gonna be the problem, or whether you are gonna be the solution.” You must choose, brothers and sisters, you must choose.

But I don’t think this is a political problem at all (politics, actually is the problem). As my beloved Simone Weil observed, “It is not religion but revolution that is the opium of the people.” Ours is a spiritual problem, and a pressing one at that. This kind can only be cast out by prayer.

It is in this register that I believe the invocation of St. Michael the Archangel, called by Valentin Tomberg “the Archistrategist,” is more than appropriate at our moment. The Celtic tradition relied upon the intercession of the archangel, as in these lines from the Welsh “Litany of Creation”:

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

Together with Michael, I beseech you by land and by sea unceasingly; I beseech you respectfully by every quality of God the Father.

I beseech you, O Lord, by the suffering of your body, white with fasting; I beseech you by the contemplative life, I beseech you by the active life.

I beseech the people of heaven, with Michael, for my soul; I beseech the saints of the world to help me on earth.

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

Note the yoking of the contemplative and active lives.

Another useful prayer is the Byzantine Akathist to Michael the Archangel. We prayed this prior to one Michaelmas festival in our barn a couple years ago. It is intense. Here’s a passage:

“Standing before the Throne of God, O Archangel Michael, you are entirely in the heights and yet you are not far from men and women below on the earth. You ever fight against the enemies of mankind’s salvation. It is fitting, for all who wish to reach the long-desired homeland of Heaven, to call on you with one accord:

“Hail, leader of the thrice-holy hymn of the angels.

Hail, ever-ready advocate and guardian of those on earth.

Hail, mighty defender of those who speak truth and live by mercy.

Hail, for in a strange manner, you struck down Pharaoh with his faithless Egyptians in their ponderous pride.

Hail, for you gloriously led the Jews in their wandering through the wilderness.

Hail, for you quenched the flame of the fiery furnace of Babylon for the three youths.

Hail, Michael, Supreme Commander with all the hosts of Heaven.”

There are other prayers, of course. Besides Psalm 82, there are also St. Patrick’s Breastplate and, obviously, the secret weapon of the rosary—and many others. If you want to align yourself with power, this is the place to look, not to archons growing fat and rich on your fear.

Fear, to speak plainly, is a luxury of the faithless and if unchecked it only spreads like a cancer. As you can no doubt see, it has metastasized all over the planet. But this is not a luxury the Christian can afford. We cannot avoid that messengers of Satan will torment us, with fear as much as disease; it is part of the human condition this side of the Parousia. Saint Paul found this out through experience, not theory:

“...I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:7-10)

We are all vulnerable, praise God. So take up your armor of light.

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 Garden.

Celtic Christianity and Sophiology

John Duncan, St. Bride (1913)

Celtic Christianity has haunted my soul since my early youth, from at least the time when at the age of eighteen I bought a Celtic cross from the gift shop of The Detroit Institute of Arts and which has hung about my neck for most of the intervening forty years. That cross was the seed. Over a decade later, my wife and I chose Claddagh rings as wedding bands—for one, because they were relatively inexpensive and we were poor, and, more importantly, because Celtic spirituality spoke to our souls in a profound way. In addition, my five eldest children all have Celtic names—Brendan, Dylan, Thomas Gwynn, Mae, and Aidan—and Brendan was baptized with water from the Chalice Well in Glastonbury.

Inspired by the lives of the Celtic saints, in my first or second year as a Waldorf teacher I wrote a play, The Journey of St. Brendan the Navigator, for my students to perform. Our school’s eurythmy teacher, Brigitta (Bridget to us Celts) helped me turn it into a kind of Miracle Play, with my class performing the parts of Brendan and his monks, another class as the whale upon whose back Brendan and his companions celebrated Easter Mass, another class as the island of birds, and so on. The teachers even participated, and my dear friend Mary Jo played the role of the wise hermit Brendan met on the Isle of the Blessed. I still recall her face and gestures as her character told Brendan and his crew the time had not yet come to settle upon those shores. I wrote the play out in long hand, and I’m not even sure if I still have a copy, alas. Nevertheless, the entire thing was one of the most beautiful moments in my thirty years of teaching. It felt as if light filled the room. No one was untouched.

Certainly, among other things, what really appealed to me then (and continues to) is the synergy between the angelic and natural orders in Celtic spirituality. The Celtic churches, so difficult to perceive clearly through the mists of history, moved in such an awareness. The legends of the Celtic saints—Patrick, Brendan, Brigid, and Columba for example—are rich with a natural world barely touched by agriculture. It is also interesting to note that Celtic monasticism with its extraordinary emphasis on asceticism and learning arose in a geographical area almost complete devoid of urban centers. It may be precisely because of this that Celtic monks participated in the wildness of Creation in a manner almost entirely unknown in other contexts. The exquisite Welsh “Litany of the Creation” (c. 7th century) voices this beautifully:

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

I beseech you by water and the cruel air; I beseech you by fire, I beseech you by earth.[1]

This sensibility inhabits so much of the liturgical, devotional, and mythic language of Celtic Christianity that it is hard to miss, as in this excerpt from one of the more powerful prayers in the Christian tradition, St. Patrick’s Breastplate, also known as The Deer’s Cry:

I arise today Through the strength of heaven; Light of sun, Radiance of moon, Splendour of fire, Speed of lightning, Swiftness of wind, Depth of sea, Stability of earth, Firmness of rock.

In Celtic spirituality, all of Creation participates in Divinity. As Christopher Bamford writes in the introduction to his outstanding collection (edited with William Parker Marsh), Celtic Christianity: Ecology and Holiness, what we find in Celtic spirituality is “a continuity in cosmic process, that extended from its inception, Creation, to its conclusion, Deification.” [2]

When St. Patrick was asked by the Irish pagan royalty who this God he spoke of was, he had this to say:

“Our God is the God of all men, the God of heaven and earth, of sea and river, of sun and moon and stars, of the lofty mountain and the lowly valleys, the God above heaven and in heaven and under heaven; he has his dwelling round heaven and earth and sea and all that in them is. He inspires all, he quickens all, he dominates all, he sustains all. He lights the light of the sun; he furnishes the light of the light; he has made springs in the dry land and has set stars to minister to the greater lights. [3]

The Celtic Church was its own unique individuality, not Roman and not Byzantine, and not encumbered by the bureaucratic complications of hierarchical administration and the annoyances and interferences of ecclesial busybodies. (Those interested in this topic may want to check out F. E. Warren’s The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church, first published in 1881). The Irish Church, in particular, had no martyrs to speak of and was characterized by “its pastoral way, its uncomplicated fervour, the dislike of its representatives for all manner of officialdom and organization [which] was precisely what the men of Rome so disliked.” [4] The Celtic ethos took seriously Christ’s admonishment to “Preach the Gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). That sounds like my kind of church.

This all sounds a lot like Sophiology, too, of course, and for good reason (and I haven’t even mentioned the important place of women in Celtic religion and culture). And Sophiology, I claim, is the default position for Judeo-Christian ways of being—ways of being long since compromised by the designs of religious politicians and ecclesial people of power to the point of almost absolute disfigurement. As Margaret Barker argues, in the context of First Temple Judaism, “Those with the ‘biblical’ way of thinking saw the creation as the work of God, and felt that people who saw it in any other way were not liberated but deprived.” [5] Furthermore, “the covenant of creation bound everything in one system: the material world, living beings, human society, and the invisible forces they called angels or powers.” [6] I was right: this is Sophiology.

This is also, I claim, the Kingdom Christ proclaimed.

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 Garden.

1. Oliver Davies, trans. with Thomas O’Loughlin, Celtic Spirituality New York: Paulist Press, 1999), 298.

2. Christopher Bamford and William Parker Marsh, Celtic Christianity: Ecology and Holiness (Lindisfarne, 1982), 12.

3. In H. J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 37-38.

4. Gerhard Herm, The Celts: The People Who Came out of the Darkness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), 268.

5. Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 26.

6. Ibid., 111.