Walking the Path: the practice of resurrection

[photo by Rob Wanenchak]

I think we’re all pretty freaked right now. 

~

Something my particular journey down the Druid path involves at this point is a heavy focus on meditation (known in some quarters as the Moon Path). That involves the sort of meditation where one merely Is in a specific place, wherein one experiences it and allows one’s awareness to filter outward into it, wherein one becomes mindfully conscious of one’s context, but also a form that involves a tight focus on particular things for a set period. 

Among other things this is helpful training for me, a person who has difficulty focusing on anything at the best of times. 

I began a few weeks ago with something I found in one of my introductory Druidry books: a simple white circle on a black background. I actually recommend this for anyone who has a hard time with the normal think-about-nothing brand of meditation: get a picture like that, sit comfortably somewhere reasonably undisturbed, and look at it for about ten minutes. Just look, and be aware of yourself looking. Think about the circle if you feel so inclined, but keep your focus on the circle. If you find your mind wandering—and it will—just gently lead it back to the circle, and also try to note at what point it wandered off and what drew it away. 

Once I felt like I was able to do a passable job of that, I moved onto other specific objects. Right now I’m meditating on the various letters of the Ogham—the ancient Celtic tree alphabet, which when carved on wooden staves can be used for divination. But as I’ve continued to practice meditation, I’ve felt the need to expand that daily practice, and at this point I’ve actually worked up a regular “order of worship” suitable for a Christian Druid, complete with a Bible reading and opening and closing prayers. 

Something else I do is read a poem. I do this because I love poetry, but also because the old Celtic (and particularly Welsh) Bardic tradition is hugely important to Druids. One of our central theological concepts, to the degree that Druids have anything that can properly be called theology, is that of Awen, the sacred and endless well of creative inspiration and power available to all people. Bards of all mediums dip into that well for joy, for knowledge, for memory, for beauty and wisdom, and in that way spiritually enrich themselves and their community. 

Creative work is sacred. Poetry is sacred. So as I contemplate the Ogham and read the Bible, I also read poetry, and I meditate for a little while on every poem I read. 

Today’s meditation ritual was especially fraught, given what happened last night. I found myself in a heady mix of meditation and prayer—for guidance, for comfort, for strength and courage, for all of us to find the ability to see what we can truly be capable of together in fellowship and solidarity, if only we dare to try. 

I looked for that in the poem I went to as well, and the poem I ended up at is one I’ve gone to more than once. It’s probably one of my favorite poems, if not my most favorite. 

Wendell Berry — Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

I latch onto different things in this poem every time I read it. But the lines I come back to more than most of the others have to do with the work that we didn’t start and we won’t live to see completed, the tremendous act of faith that is the task of justice. 

Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

In the Christian tradition, faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. It’s unproven and unprovable. The empirical evidence to support it may be shaky at best. It’s irrational. It’s ridiculous. It makes no sense. 

It does not compute.

This notion has gotten its share of mockery, and in some manifestations that mockery isn’t entirely unearned. But what I come to when I meditate on it is how profoundly radical it is, how it’s the necessary core of any fight for justice. The oppressed and marginalized by definition have the odds stacked against us. Resistance to power almost always looks foolish on paper. If you’re going to bother with it, to put your energy and your effort and your body and maybe your life on the line for it, you must be willing to believe that it’s worth it, that another world is possible, and you must be willing to find that belief in the face of overwhelming evidence against. 

Everything has changed, but really nothing has. We did not plant this forest and we will not live to harvest it. We put our trust in the long game. We don’t know if we’ll succeed. We have faith, because in the worst times there is nothing else. We prophesy. And we are joyful, though we have considered all the facts.

Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.

We look at failure, at death, and we listen and hear the future that death cannot and will not stop. Not if we refuse to let it.

So the line I always come back to more than any other—I may get it in tattoo form someday—is the final one. 

Of course a core tenet of Christianity is the Resurrection; whether or not one believes it really happened, it represents the supreme hope, the triumph of love over power. But I think it’s far too easy to think of the Resurrection as a single event. It isn’t; it can’t be. Resurrection must be an ongoing process. Moreover, it must be a practice—it must be something we work at, something we do. 

A Pagan view of the world contains as part of its spiritual core the endless cycle of death and rebirth; we see it in the dawn and the dusk, the festivals of the Wheel of the Year, the ebb and flow of lunar cycles, the passing of the seasons. For those of us who believe in the passage of souls through many lives, death is never an ending but only one more door to step through. 

But I favor an idea of resurrection that isn’t merely a process we happen to participate in simply by virtue of existing. I love the idea of resurrection as a verb as well as a noun, something done actively and purposefully. It’s a choice one makes, and in fact at the core I think it’s at once part of all and entirely apart from any god or religion: Will your daily choices work toward rebirth and renewal? Will they work toward solidarity and healing? Will they work toward justice? Will they make everything whole?

Friends, every day do something that doesn’t compute. 

Fighting against the odds doesn’t compute. It doesn’t make sense. To the powerful, it’s incomprehensible. 

Which is why they won’t see us coming.