Mark, you are one of the best Christian voices of our time. I wonder if this is partly because you did not remain an Anglican priest but went on a journey free from those shackles. Or am I just looking back over 35 years since my own ordination and wondering if I have been of any use. Maybe a bit of f both.
Jesus Is The Infinite Desire, Dying To Self, To Be All? "Jesus has offered himself and the implication is that we will find divine life not through self-transcendence but insofar as we follow him through the dying to self that leads to the wellsprings of life. This is the way our infinite desire can participate in the All." Absolutely Lovely Read, Thank You Mark.
Your essay is brilliant, a reunion, a renewal of marriage vows. Blake has been portrayed as wildly eccentric, romantic, sort of hallucinogenically (the angels in the tree) creative, and Jesus is now strait-jacketed in the domain of the right-wing, fundamentalist, white supremacist, and reactionary, or the newer versions, which are more formless but on the same plane. In Chimayo, New Mexico, a site of pilgrimage, there is an elongated very wounded, very bloody Jesus in a room full of crutches and wheelchairs which people have left there. There is healing dirt, which everyone knows the priests replace, which people take away with them. The chapel is awash with energies, the furnaces of affliction and the telluric forces of a thin place and ? Maybe our primary error is assuming we have the capacity to FULLY comprehend what Jesus is, or means.
" William Blake is one of the greatest poets the West has produced. He has many beautiful insights. Blake has said ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’ Just a few steps more and he would have been an enlightened person. He could have been a RISHI, a seer. Just a few steps, maybe only one step, a little jump… he had come very close to the boundary of realization. .. ‘Religion is art,’ said William Blake. ‘Religion is art, not money.’ This is a very very pregnant statement. And only a man like William Blake could have made it. He is a mystic poet. What is art? ‘Art is a way,’ he says, ‘of doing something’: painting, poetry, dancing, sculpture, music, pottery, weaving. ‘Art is a way of doing something.’ He does not say anything about creating oneself. But that is exactly what religion is. It is not painting, it is not poetry, it is not sculpture, it is not music, but something on the same lines, something beyond - creating oneself. Religion is a way of doing something also - living, loving, seeing, being. All art is ‘making’. It is helping God to create. That’s why I call the man who said to God, ‘Can I help?’ the religious man. If you want to know the creator you will have to become a creator in some measure on your own. Poetry may not be religion proper but it points in the right direction. When a poet is really in a creative state, he knows something of religion - a faraway distant music, because when he is in a creative state, he is no more himself. He participates - although in a very small measure, but he participates in God. Just a drop of divinity enters into him. That’s why great poets have always said, ‘When we write poetry, we are not the creators of it. We become possessed. Some unknown energy enters, sings, dances in us. We don’t know what it is.’ When a painter is lost into his painting, he is utterly lost into his painting, his ego disappears. Maybe only for moments, but in those egoless moments God paints through him. If you participate in God, God participates in you. Art is an unconscious form of religion. Religion is conscious art."
Great topic and project! I know I have a very classical American mindset on this but after 50 years of studying everything near Eastern and western history . Etymology, theology, archeology reading the early founders to me encompasses this idea Blake has as they felt like they where identifying evil in the world that is often necessary with time and place applications for tribes ,nations and yet reducing it in its place while through the" word & individuals free will was not only setting people free but freeing God into the fabric of society and out into the world. Because these where theologically discovered ideas the 1900s cast then aside as many minority religous factions still held past resentment allowing athiestic structuralism trying to capture a by product we call secularism create vote blocks larger than the majority American like minded beliefs on this. And at the sametime of adoption of sir bacons scientific formula theyve told a chaldean minds primordial soup evolutionary story even though its in direct opposition to the classical American mind. This 1900s has reduced God back into the keblas,churches, synagogues and mosque while setting evil free to roam in broad daylight unidentified with endless mask that it can masquerade in without any check or balance.
NO - we are not spiritually lost, mate… - we are spiritually found. Speak for yourself! You seem sometimes to have it backwards! Gnosticism is clearly to be sidelined by the Almighty (if, that is, you truly and earnestly do still believe or wish to believe in Him as the One final singular authority far far above “us” through Christ) in the Holy Bible in its final eternal form. 😊 So, you can all (for whatever your conscious or unwitting purposes) keep saying that “we today in our culture” are now challenged and lacking in our faith, etc - but you mean “you”, Mark, you certainly should not include “we” who still have our faith in His total Perfection, surely? We are not in any quandary ….- we refute such human doubt just as we are taught to and would teach all others this clear, evident and extremely simple Truth. … We are NOT the lost, you see? We reach out for others to enter into the One and only Faith - the perfect path of Christ as laid out for ALL children to grasp - in the Holy Gospel - taught in all God’s Churches of a Sunday in any parish … For this is the single indestructible Light of God’s grace that emanates from Him and elevates ALL who choose to follow - lifting them via the death of all death into the paradise of Eternity. All words that try too hard to insist on an intellectual or precarious or in any way now uncertain path - or insist it is all much “deeper” - and that “today” there needs to be further qualification of the perfectly clear and radiant Gospel- (unwittingly to obfuscate through complication or specialization perhaps) the Words of God (The Living Light) in the Holy Bible are efforts seemingly of a dark spirit. Sorry, but a child - especially a child - knows all that there is to know in this realm of the Father through the teachings of Christ - there IS no rocket science - and thereby the true innocent knows such awe with greater precision than even William Blake as Mark Vernon psychoanalyzes him to be - exactly because the good child knows where he or she is so joyfully and intuitively headed without further dark sermons of dread or fear or negativity emanating perhaps from mere adult doubt. I know McGilchrist lauds the right hemisphere love of doubt - and this is understandably fashionable - but this prescription for mankind is also overreach if taken too far in the other direction - certainly in matters of Perfection and God and Truth. Innocence rediscovered and won anew - this is NOT a pursuit of intellectual reasoning or scientific rationalism - it is almost the very opposite because the genius of the logic is surely purposefully designed and coded as to be infinitely beyond the grubby mitts of human would-be prize winners - clever men - and is only the treasure of the good heart, the Scriptures, and of the selfless desires for eternal beauty and love we were all born with….(?)
