1 Corinthians 15:51-52

Behold, I shew you a mystery;

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

* Today's Lectio. Pasted here with a reminder and a caveat, that synchronicity is a word that Blogger underlines in red.

Ritual Healing

Rituals both preserve, and change, and indeed healing, in a way, preserves as well as changes, or more accurately maybe, both preserves and transforms. Typically rituals can be represented as healing social relationships (with people, spirits, gods, or from oppression, violence or feud). To connect with the healing that is always available to us in ritual, four typologies are useful:

1) Understand the afflicting forces

Underlying all ritual healing are beliefs regarding what it is to be ill and the causes of that illness - be they natural, supernatural, external, internal, cosmic or personal. Explanations for illness may include:

- unhealthy living;

- succumbing to physical, emotional, humeral or energetic imbalance;

- suppressed emotion;

- anti-social feeling;

- inability to manage stress;

- sin;

- lack of faith;

- ritual impurity

- inattention to ancestors or ghosts.

Illness may be the manifestation of individual punishment or collective failing or a natural outcome of imbalances. Illness can also be attributed to others:

-the sins of the fathers visited upon the children;

- other-inflicted trauma;

- curses or the 'evil eye';

- sorcery or witchcraft.

2) Typology of Ritual Healing

Ritual objects across cultures tend to be similar - crystals, holy water, six pointed stars and crosses tend to feature heavily. Interestingly, the pursuit of healing will often lead a person out of their culturally identified background into exotic social contact - interreligious dialogue in some ways begins right here.

Simpler clusters of healing technique centre on the laws of contagion and similarity in the manipulation of sacred objects. Amulets, scapulars, and milagros all feature here.

Prayer and meditation form a second cluster - formulaic, spontaneous, silent, chanted - a divine response is sought and elicited.

The third cluster involves removing the problematic object or experience - 'casting out spirits' via confession, exorcism, purification public or private, physical or spiritual.

The fourth is the opposite - imbibing for example herbal tea or inserting acupuncture needles or ingesting homeopathic remedy.

The fifth is the laying on of hands - from massage to Reiki.

The sixth is the introduction of trance. Spirit possessions, hypnotic chant, glossolalia and invocation of imagery can induce altered states of consciousness. Typically a ritualised social interaction is part of a healing setting - usually the intent of reconciliation is a key. Embodied spirits may be invoked or symbolic representation of energies may be included.

The final typology is cognitive restructuring. The work of a Christian Science healer, for example is to help the patient realise that their suffering is not real.

3) Procedures, Settings and Roles

Which ritual, conducted by who and under what terms is a distinction point for healing work - domestic settings and grandmothers and mothers are typically the first-line expert healers across cultures, so different from the Western medical centre. The 'cult of affliction' (people suffering similar symptoms banding together) is another evident healing structure. Religious groups may also gather with the expressed intent of helping the congregation to heal.

In some situations, the power role of the healer is maximal, with special clothing, insignia or honorific title to deign the hierarchy.

In the mid range, Reiki practitioners for example channel the healing force, but are not the healing agent.

The minor role range includes the work of hospital chaplains and congregational nurses, for example, who accompany the person through the healing process but are in no way carrying out the healing.

Group healing models include the Twelve Step programs, where community is essential to the healing process. There are also (an old fave) self-help rituals.

Across any of these, theologies enter the picture, articulating the nature of the sacred and it's relationship to the affliction. Healing occurs at one end of the spectrum where the God/s are the healer, and ritual functions to invite that sacred presence, or in the middle of the spectrum where the sacred expresses comfort, courage and guidance, or at the very other end where a biomedical 'ritual' is conducted in a clinical environment.

d) The Process of Ritual Healing

In part the process of ritual healing opens new transformative possibilities, although little research has been conducted into individual's actual experiences during the ritual. A new narrative relationship is available through reframing - a 'rhetorical action' that persuades the supplicant to approach his/her experiences from a new perspective. Two distinct processes need to occur - one is a shift to a felt possibility of transformation, the other is a n enactment of a global psychological mechanism such as regression, catharsis (!) or placebo effect. The symbolic repertoire that is engaged through ritual healing not only communicates cultural meanings, but also has it's meaning reworked during performance by the collective. Healing is therefore re-defined, to a certain extent, for every situation within which it is enacted.

Source: Sered, S.S., & Barnes. L.L. (2007). Ch 13 'Teaching Healing Rituals/ Ritual Healing' in Teaching Ritual, Ed. Catherine Bell, Oxford University Press, 195-208.

Collective social realities. Surely we are custom-built to be able to leverage off their structure in these times of media-distributed (nearly global) cultural norms? Hmmm.

Dirge Without Music by Edna St Vincent Millay

Just a note before I faithfully re-type the poem.

Books and poetry can, I think, be a little like a towel-wrapped keepsake that was buried down the bottom of a moving-house box full of 'non-essentials' - re-discovery upon re-opening can re-create the world, as it was, way back then, not only when it was wrapped, but also when the whatever-it-was was birthed, into your life, as it was, then.

Thus it is for me, with the reading of this poem, this week. I discovered this poem when I was eighteen - it seemed so mature, then. I read it now and it feels, well, a little simple, but that might have a lot to do with familiarity. I memorised it by heart, then. And it's funny, but this week seems to have shown me a whole chunk of Trish that was wrapped up around 'not being resigned'. The refusal to let it go, to diminish it's importance in time. Until time herself took over.

There can barely be a person left around the echo-chamber of my airwaves who hasn't heard my theory about the importance of favourite childhood fairytales in the operation of schemas as we progress throughout our human lives. I've only seen the schema of this very poem, this week, echoed backwards throughout my history. There's a grab in some information, some storylines, some characters, it's sharper than a resonance, closer to an intuition than an instinct. The moment of encounter sets up a chain of outcomes that we as humans barely register as they happen, much less stand any chance of piecing together out of the clash and the whirl that is participation in exalted person-skins.

Though I am a gal of varied and wild magi-mysti inclinations. :)

So here, is 'Dirge Without Music' by Edna St Vincent Millay.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Become Fully Human

'Lord, when someone meets you

in a moment of vision,

is it through the Psyche that they see,

or is it through the Pneuma?'

The Teacher answered:

'It is neither through the Psyche nor through the Pneuma,

but the Nous between the two

Which sees the vision.....'

{and so she says}

'Therefore let us atone,

And become fully human,

So that the Teacher can take root in us'.

{and the Teacher concludes}

'Henceforth I travel toward repose,

where time rests in the eternity of time;

I go now into silence.'

Having said all this, Mary became silent;

for it was in silence that the Teacher spoke to her.

Extracted with my own idiosyncrasies from The Gospel of Mary, translated by Jean-Yves Leloup.

Unspoken, Unheard

I'm on a bit of a TS Eliot trip at the moment, and this is verse 5 from 'Ash Wednesday':


V
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.






Here's the thing. It's wickedly interesting to mess around with separating out the feminine from the matriarchy and the masculine from the patriarchy, and to ponder for a little while what a masculine version of matriarchy and a feminine version of patriarchy might look like. It's satisfying to get all het up about the subordination of feminine power to masculine domination, and it's justified when we construct the social history as evidence of our cultural shadows.




Can I offer, in a very small voice, that this might completely miss the point? Turn around and look for a second at Eliot's verse. It would seem to me that this is what we're missing, culturally, this profound recognition of the unknown. A veneration of the silence that births it. A championing of the way into it. A blessing and a love that speaks directly of and to it. That illimitable thing that sits at the end of the sideways eight signs that you've been writing since you were in the eighth grade. An inquiry, an action that cannot be bound by words, a silence that resounds......




So, that I see at this level, we're well beyond a concept so earth-bound as gender. But, because we're earth bound humans, to relate to the notion, we might need to choose out a culminating character, a kind of archetypal patterning that fits the dossier of the notion.




That 'silence' seems to me to be somewhat captured in the Blessed Virgin Mary, the one about whom most of the post New-Testament story is a cultural artifact. The people have owned her, yet she owns so little in verbiage.




Although, it doesn't feel right to pick just one person as a representative. Which reminds me, I must post a bit about the glorious virtues of the Tridentine Mass, a Mass never said/led by just one person, a Mass where the priest has to confess and be absolved by the people before the people begin their own confession.




Never a oneness.

Kalama Sutta

'Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it

Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many

Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books

Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders

Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations

But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good benefit of one and all, accept it and live up to it.'

Mother of God by Miri Rubin

Courtesy of a wonderful friend, my life has been blessed with a copy of 'Mother of God - A History Of the Virgin Mary' by Miri Rubin, in all of it's astonishingly beautiful Marian blueness. The book depicts the cultural imagination that has taken hold of the story of Mary and retold the life of a character practically invisible in the Bible as the centrepiece of devotions, communities, faith, art and, in Rubin's interpretation, a sizeable chunk of Western history.

I'm just beginning to delve into it, but having had a bit of a flick through and a read about the expansion of her role as bereaved mother, I've been reminded that I've been meaning to post a reminder to myself about the sensations that are associated with grief.

The thing with grief is that, I've read Kubler-Ross, I've started working through my Bereavement and Loss practical for my Counselling Diploma, and I've read bits and pieces of books on death and suicide and so on, and I still haven't come across a decent description of what grief actually feels like. Which strikes me as a bit odd, because, for me, there is actually no comparable subjective experience to really relate it to. I was hoping to be able to relate it to other people's perceptions of what it is like.

Because, at the level of spirit, we're never disconnected from everyone around us, be it of the past, the present or the future of which we speak. Always, everywhere, united. At the level of soul, we can cognise our connection to each other, and so we have experiences where our soul cries out for our other, regardless of the distance of kilometres, time or planes of reality. At the physical level of human incarnation, our connection to each other is grounded in our re-cognition of each other in real-time human-skin contact awareness. In death, a physically presenced sense of each other is irrevocably altered. From our own perspective, the loss of someone else, through death, while we're alive, is a massive, and unalterable change. At the level of physicality, it's like a cold gap, an emptiness, fills the place where a whole warm, live, beautiful person once was.

That's what I'm talking about when I talk about the sensation of grief. Bodily speaking it's a cold swamping emptiness in me, it runs head to toe, and it momentarily de-voids me of my humanly sensation of myself. It's not the cold sinking feeling of knowing that you've done something wrong. Moreso, it's the absolute momentary absence of warm life force, gone, gone, gone far beyond. It stops me, dead, in my tracks, and demands I attend to this emptiness, that I match all the love, all the thought, all the experience and all the knowing of that other person, against this space, this call of spirit. It asks that I be still.

Emptiness. Which brings forth a new awareness maybe, of grief's potential for fraternity with a sense of kenosis.

Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Self Consecration

Act of Self Consecration

Take, O Lord, all my liberty, receive my memory, my understanding, and my whole will. All that I am and all that I have come to me from Thy bounty; I give it all back to thee, and surrender it all to the guidance of Thy holy Will. Give me Thy Love and Thy Grace; with these I am rich enough and ask for nothing more.

St Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556)

I have an incredibly gorgeous doorstop of a book called 'Ignatius of Loyola - The Psychology of a Saint' by W.W. Meissner, S.J., M.D. (1992). It sits on my dresser shelf and teases me with it's dark demeanour and tiny font, and I'm half afraid to read it, because, what if, you know, I found out?

A sleeping satellite.

Sore Hearted Reprise

.....From Verse VI at the very end of 'Ash Wednesday' by TS Eliot:

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks,

Our peace in His will

And even among these rocks

Sister, mother

And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.