An Epistle of Comfort

The 21st of February this year will mark 528 years since the martyrdom of St. Robert Southwell upon the scaffold at Tyburn upon charges of treason, though his only crime was in ministering and providing spiritual comfort to a small number of Catholics, then persecuted by Royal decree, in underground Elizabethan England.

On the morning of Friday, 21 February 1595 by Julian reckoning, Southwell was drawn by a cart from Newgate to be hanged, drawn, and quartered as his fellow Jesuit Edmund Campion had been a little more than thirteen years earlier. Despite the government’s clumsy ruse of hanging a famous criminal at the same time at a place remote from Tyburn in order to divert the attention of the populace, a great throng had gathered to watch the priest meet his end. Eyewitness accounts, both Catholic and Protestant, are unanimous in describing Southwell as both gracious and prayerful in his final moments. When cut loose from the halter that tied him to the cart, he wiped his brow with a handkerchief and tossed the sudarium into the crowd, the first of what would become his relics. When asked if he would like to speak, Southwell crossed himself and first spoke in Latin, quoting Romans 14:8:“Sive vivimus, Domino vivimus, sive morimur, Domino morimur, ergo vivimus, sive morimur, Domini sumus.” If we live, we live in the Lord. If we die, we die in the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or we die, we are in the Lord. He then addressed himself to the crowd, saying he died a Catholic and a Jesuit, offenses for which he was not sorry to die. He spoke respectfully of the Queen, and asked her forgiveness if she had found any offense in him. Then, after the hangman stripped him down to his shirt and tightened the noose around his neck, Robert Southwell spoke his last words, echoing those of Christ found in the twenty-third chapter of Luke. Three times he prayed, “In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum. Redemisti me, Domine Deus veritatis,” (Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit. You have redeemed me, Lord God of truth) while repeatedly making the sign of the cross. At the third utterance of these words, the cart rolled away and Southwell hung from his neck. Those present forbade the hangman cutting him down to further the cruelties of drawing and quartering commencing before Southwell was dead. Yet, despite their efforts, according to one account, he was still breathing when cut down. When the executioner lifted Southwell’s head up before the crowd, no one cried “Traitor,” as was the custom. Even a pursuivant present admitted he had never seen a man die better. Southwell had been in England on his mission from 1586, when he would have been around twenty-five years old. He was never old.

In 1587, Southwell started writing a series of letters to Philip Howard, the Earl of Arundel, who was then imprisoned in the Tower for plotting against the Queen in defense of his Catholic faith. The letters, later published clandestinely as An Epistle of Comfort, are spiritual counsel for a church and its faithful under extreme duress. The first lines of the book articulate as much:

“It hath been always a laudable custom in God’s Church for such as were afflicted in time of persecution to comfort one another, not only by continual prayer and good works but also by letters and books.”

It certainly has seemed like a period of persecution for the past few years, though even longer if I am honest. We live in a world now characterized by demonic parody at scale, parody of the human being, of the beauty of biblical gendered typology, of Christ, of Sophia. What we have is not a persecution in the sense of outright imprisonment and torture, but of their more subtle deployments of isolation, compulsion, and depression. But make no mistake: this is still persecution.

To be sure, Southwell’s Catholicism is profoundly masochistic to a degree, with his preoccupation with suffering and martyrdom. Or so it may seem to us. I get it. But, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer told us not all that long ago, we have become too accustomed to “cheap grace.” This is also a theme of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In that important novel, Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, tries to explain to John the Savage why the world no longer needs religion, or suffering, or God (very much in the manner of a Noah Yuval Harari) because soma (a kind of combination anti-depressant and psychedelic) is “religion without tears.” But John isn’t buying what Mond is selling. He knows madness when he sees it. “What you need,” the Savage tells him, “is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.”

Nothing costs enough here. I often think of those words when I speak to students, particularly young women who have grown up in a culture where young men (boys, really) have been so pornified and compromised morally that they expect sex for the most minor of services—like a hamburger—and that love has very little to do with it. I tell them that when I was a young man, I still carried the idea that I had to earn a girl’s love before expecting so much as a kiss. They think this idea very quaint—and naive, I suppose. But they also lament that such is no longer the case, or at least that is what they have been conditioned to believe. My youthful assumption was also John the Savage’s—and it is likewise ridiculed and dismissed by the citizens of the brave new world Huxley describes, as well as the brave new world surrounding us. He clearly saw where things were headed.

I have certainly been in need of an epistle of comfort of my own these days. I’m sure I’m not alone. And these things come when and how they are needed. For one, I have found tremendous solace in reading children’s literature, both with my youngest two sons and on my own. My youngest is now twelve, and I had stopped reading to him and his brother in the evenings about a year ago when we were making our way through The Silmarillion. They could read on their own, after all. But one of their big brothers gave them a satchel of classic children’s lit books for Christmas, which prompted my youngest to say to me a couple weeks ago, “Remember when you used to read to us?” As if I could forget! So, at his insistence, we started reading Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (which I had never read, despite having been a Waldorf teacher and father of nine children—and I have been reading to children at night for over thirty years!). On my own time, before bed I have been reading George MacDonald’s Fairy Tales. They’re such a balm for the soul.

For another, as ever in my life, I have turned to music. Now this happened by a very serendipitous path. In a course I teach on persuasive writing, I forbid the students to write “college papers.” Because I CAN’T EVEN. Instead, I expect them to find other methods, other genres for persuading their readers. This week, my topic was “mash-ups,” the combining of different genres to create something new and exciting. For such an enterprise, I chose, quelle horreur!, Taylor Swift. First of all, we look at Jared Smith’s “Taylor Swift: A Socratic Dialogue” from McSweeney’s, certainly one of the cleverest and funniest pieces of writing on the internet, mashing up Plato’s style with Swift’s. I know. I also throw in Swift’s collaboration (while still a teenager) with, of all people, Def Leppard, performing their metal megahit “Photograph.” It’s mind-blowing. I do this to show how combining things one would never put together can come up with surprising results. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the creative-process book.

Finally, I show them Swift’s collaboration with the, alas, now defunct Civil Wars on “Safe and Sound,” the song they wrote together for the first Hunger Games film, based on the book of the same name (talk about timely children’s literature!). It is a superb modern folk song, and the version below, under T-Bone Burnett’s visionary musical production, is sublime.

I always tell my students that I’d love to see Swift do an entire album like this and prove that she has gravitas when she wants to and is not really as superficial as her music may sometimes suggest. Of course, this was a little easier before she started (as all of her profession do) weighing in on politics, religion, and culture. But that’s how it goes. I’m so glad nobody ever asked for my opinions when I was 23.

Anyway, I told you that story to tell you this one. After showing “Safe and Sound” to my students, I decided it was time I learned how to play it on the guitar. It didn’t take but a couple listens, and it is a lovely progression courtesy of the wonderfully talented John Paul White. But that led me to searching for White’s Civil Wars partner Joy William’s version of their “From This Valley,” a folk-gospel barn-burner if ever you heard one. I bet I listened to it 20 times on one day, learned how to play it on the guitar, and played along with the video. The lyrics are poetic, uplifting, and grounded in Jesus. You can’t ask for more.

Oh, the caged bird dreams of a strong wind That will flow beneath her wings Like a voice longs for a melody Oh, Jesus carry me

Won’t you take me from this valley To that mountain high above? I will pray, pray, pray ‘Til I see your smiling face I will pray, pray, pray To the one I love

There is something downright miraculous about seeing a woman, a genuine female and pregnant woman at that, lifting up her voice in song and rejoicing in the glory of the Lord. In our perverse times, it is nothing short of salvific, a fresh draft of cool spring water in the desert of the technocracy.

So this was my epistle of comfort this week, albeit it arrived by a circuitous route. But that’s how grace works, isn’t it? You think you’re doing one thing, following one trace, going about your daily tasks, and it brings you where you need to be. That’s the world I want to live in. I don’t want to live in a world without religion or suffering or God. So I will pray, pray, pray until I see his smiling face.

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_

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_

The Blessings of Lammas and Bread

Corn Doll

Lammas, or Loaf Mass, is a feast I would hope to see grow in popularity as more and more people look for a way to connect the Christian Year (or, we might say for our neopagan brothers and sisters, the Sacred Year) with the agrarian year, a synergy once assumed but now almost entirely neglected. Celebrated on August 1st, Lammas marks the midpoint between St. John’s Day (June 24th) and Michaelmas (September 29th), which, as you can easily see, hover near the Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox respectively. May Day (May 1st), All Saints/All Souls (November 1st/ 2nd) and Candlemas/St. Brigid’s Day (February 1st/ 2nd) complete the cycle of half-turnings. And they all should be observed.

Traditionally, Lammas was celebrated as a harvest festival to mark to first grinding of the new wheat, so it is no wonder that the ancients associated this event with Christ and the Eucharist. (You have to suspect that this was part of the inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lembas bread” in his mythopoesis). It is also the beginning of fair season—a tradition which persists in most rural areas to this day, though shorn of its sacred dimension. According to historian Ronald Hutton, in England the observation of the harvest season starting with Lammas was marked by “the crowning of girls as harvest queens by sets of reapers, the bringing home of the last load of corn covered in garlands, with loud acclamations, and the weaving of images from grain stalks.” [1] This season ended just before All Soul’s Day, after the surplus livestock were slaughtered and the meat salted for winter storage. Again, usually sans salting, this remains the practice in rural communities—I’ll be doing so myself this Fall with the surplus livestock on my farm. But, tragically, this moment in the cycle of life and sustenance is also deprived of its sacred dimension in almost all cases. This is something we should remedy.

You may have noticed something in my description of these mostly-vanished folk customs: they are incredibly sane and health-giving. I’ll take a harvest queen over the celebrated drag queens of our culture any day. Likewise, I’ll take bread and lamb from my farm over the diets of crickets and maggots being pushed by celebrities and the WEF. Because I’m not a fool.

Even the simple practice of making a corn dolly is a way to begin to resacralize our relationship to God, the Cosmos, and our food. Here at Stella Matutina Farm, we observe these practices and host a big and merry harvest festival at Michaelmas. The English folk tradition is rife with the remnants of such observations and practices. The ballad “John Barleycorn Must Die” is one iteration of this mythic and sacramental motif, but so is the tale of the Gingerbread Man. Put simply: something must die, that we might live. A basic lesson of life.

Steve Winwood deserves a round of applause.

According to T.F. Thiselton-Dyer in his magisterial British Popular Customs Present and Past (1876), another folk custom on Lammas was the visitation of sacred wells. I don’t know of any such wells nearby (though I plan on digging a well on my land for a hand pump very soon) but I know if I lived near a sacred well or spring… I’d be there! (Side note: I visited Chalice Well in Glastonbury many years ago and my eldest child was baptized with water I smuggled out of there. So arrest me.)

The Eucharistic connotations of Lammas bread, of course, are the most important: the magical act by which we eat the god who then inheres in us. Sir James Frazer in his classic text The Golden Bough, includes a section subtitled “Eating the God,” which is about the ritual eating of the divinity in contexts other than Christian, and he also associates it with first-fruits customs. “In these examples,” he writes, “the corn-spirit is represented and eaten in human shape [like a gingerbread man]. In other cases, though the new corn is not baked in loaves of human shape, still solemn ceremonies with which it is eaten suffice to indicate that it is partaken of sacramentally, that is, as the body of the corn-spirit.” [2]

Part of Frazer’s project, of course, was to show that Christianity’s god-eating was old news. But he didn’t really get it. What existed as a mythic imagination (though nonetheless very real) prior to Christ became historical and metaphysical reality through Christ’s institution of the Eucharist with the words “This is my body. This is my blood.”

They said therefore unto him, What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee? what dost thou work?

Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat. Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.

For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.

Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread.

And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. (John 6:30-35)

What I am describing as an ideal here may strike some as quaint, or even a complete fantasy. I don’t think so. In fact, I think we are heading for what some have called a “New Middle Ages.” Those of us who survive the current chaos anyway. Rudolf Steiner, though he didn’t use that language, in his reimagination of the Christian year and festival life, certainly spoke to this, as did the Russian sophiologists Nikolai Berdyaev and Pavel Florensky. Florensky, surely one of the great polymaths of the twentieth century, put it this way:

“History has days and nights. Periods of night are dominated by the mystical element, noumenal will, susceptibility, femininity. Daytime periods of history are characterized by a more active, superficial interaction with the world, phenomenal will, masculinity. The Middle Ages were a period of night; the modern age is a daytime period. We are now at a threshold of a new Middle Ages. In its depths the Christian world-understanding is medieval. In the modern period the present world-understanding is useless. The present return to the Christian world-understanding shows us that we are at the threshold of a Middle Ages.” [3]

Actually, I think we are watching the desperation of the daytime period of the masculine in its death throes. The chaos in the Church, the machinations of the WEF & Co., the pathetic attempts by men to usurp the place of women and the feminine: these are symptoms of breakdown, not ascendancy. Their days are numbered.

And, as I often say, the way to realize the sophianic reality of the New Middle Ages is by embodying it. The things we do—the rituals we observe, the realities we celebrate, the communities we love, the foods we eat, the sacramentality of Things—make the Kingdom come to life.

So make the Kingdom come to life.

Alison Milbank on Lammas.

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. Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994), 44.

2. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged edition (New York, 1927), 480.

3. Pavel Florensky, At the Crossroads of Science & Mysticism, trans. Boris Jakim (Semantron Press, 2014), 7.