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We made the door a cross
Which barred our way on through,
A symbol not of death but
Our eternal fear of it,
Grounding every rite and prayer
Ever six feet short of shores
Susurrant with blue heaven.
Why can’t we come to love
Our blood’s salt mystery
And breach those old walls
With the sweet tides of blue?
In the Secret Book of James
Jesus invited James and Peter
To join him in this heaven,
First by suffering the fear of death
Then, by doing so, remit death’s grip.
“Be zealous for the crashing coast.
Those huge waves are my wildest host.”
Note
From Eileen Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas:
“In The Secret Book of James, Jesus comes back a year and half after he departed, explaining that he had not actually removed himself from his disciples. He then invited James and Peter to travel with him to heaven, perhaps in the kind of ecstatic trance that John of Patmos said he experienced before he wrote the Book of Revelation.
“First Jesus separated them from the others and privately explained that they could join him not only after death but also here and now, by becoming ‘full of the spirit’ {Apocryphon of James 4:19, in NHL 31}. But instead of urging his disciples to simply follow him, here Jesus encourages them to surpass him. He explains that those who suffer and overcome the fear of death may ‘become better than I; make yourselves like the son of the Holy Spirit. Be zealous, and if possible, arrive (in heaven) even before I do.’ (ibid 5:19-20)”
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Oh, Brendan. Now you’re talkin’ sexy.
Seriously, nothing gets me like some Pagels and a secret gospel or two. I might not have fled Christianity if it had been allowed to be a door and not a cross. All the great Eastern stuff that got pulled out. I love Magdalene’s gospel, and Thomas’s. What happened to heaven on earth that Jesus invited us to?
Every line of your poem is splendid. I feel the build, and my heart swell, out of so much that lies inside me, waiting for the rest of life on this earth to feel it, see it, know it.
Ever six feet short of shores
Susurrant with blue heaven.
Why can’t we come to love
Our blood’s salt mystery
And breach those old walls
With the sweet tides of blue?
I do love the blood’s salt mystery (yes, even in your raw sex poems), and I celebrate it with all my being.
Thank you for this gorgeous verse, and for what feels like another part in a continuum in this start of Lent, when many of us are not religious but are expressing our rootedness in spirit.
“Be zealous for the wildest coast” . . . and exceed Jesus perhaps, after all the kingdom of god is within me.
The image is remarkable, maybe you combined them? How beautifully they cup together, Jesus in that peaking wave.
Can you tell I loved this?
I kinda guessed.
I think that the discovery of the gnostic Gospels in a stone box near Nag Hammadi in 1945 and their subsequent translation and infusion into Western thought came at a precise moment when we we culturally free, at last, to go through the door beyond the cross, which here empties onto a shore but is really, in my opinion, the limitless freedom to explore the kingdom of God within. Glad there are other readers who agree. (Barbara at Signed … bkm is another.) I think those gnostic gospels allow poetry to become scripture of the soul in living hearts. A good deal, wouldn’t you say? Thanks for reading … B.
Oh yeah, and “Dante’s Damned” — that rather ripe rant which precedes this poem — is a sort of rising up through the medieval rot I think traditionalist religion still clings to to affirm the great fires we carry in our varied passions, physical and spiritual and poetical. Damned we are to the mayhem of our enthusiaisms — and dammit what a joy that is …
I really get that, Brendan. I sincerely celebrate your expression of what couldn’t be expressed for too long. Maybe in another few lifetimes I will even be able to write and publish such verse myself. For now, I can quietly read yours, and rejoice that we really are getting free at last, and that right and wrong have very little to do with the flesh but with intention to harm, and so very much of the latter, as CSN&Y sang:
Open up the gates of the church and let me out of here!
Too many people have lied in the name of Christ
For anyone to heed the call.
So many people have died in the name of Christ
That I can’t believe it all.
But even so, the temple can be cleared out and cleansed again. Maybe.
I agree. Our language has much Christianity in it, as well as scattered remnants of the pagan. When Christianity was moving into Ireland, there was a time — several centuries long — where the new and old dispensations lived together. Irish monks wrote down much of the old oral tradition — amazing, since most oral cultures are obliterated by the newer literate ones. I think we can accommodate the old new religions in the same manner as the new older one takes root and overtakes the central canon. Let’s hope it takes lifetimes. And that a form of literacy will survive.
Good ole St. Patrick and his relevant equivalencies.
BTW, “Litany of the Shore” is part of a collection of short poems I titled “Blue Gospel” — never attempted to publish — which explores gnostic themes. Kindred poems I’ve put up here so far are “Merlin’s Cave” (Feb.10), “Round Dance” (Jan. 31) and “Apolutrosis” (Jan. 23)
“We made the door a cross
Which barred our way on through,
A symbol not of death but
Our eternal fear of it”
This was kind of the basis of a morning discussion at my house, although less birthed directly into the loins of christianity, but moreso through the legs of mainstream western society. And what I am beginning to believe is that our faltering is based in our fear, and our fear mostly hinges to the ego. If we could let loose our hold on our ego, our fear of death would pass as well.
Perhaps when Jesus urged his disciples to not follow him, but instead to surpass him by becoming full of the spirit, he was asking them to shed the ego. Isn’t that what faith is supposed to be centered around, losing sight of the i and passing through to something greater?
I’m beginning to think that the bible is some of the most wonderful poetry going.
This is another incredibly important notion to me, Our blood’s salt mystery. It seems to point to this volatile state of spirit and body.
Salt. I salivate. So base, this creature that I am. And yet, to surpass the i would be a mighty fine thing too.
xo
erin
I think you’re right — salvation is from ourselves, from the bondage to self.
Michael Ryan’s “God Hunger” is succinct —
When the innumerable accidents of birth —
parentage, hometown, all the rest —
no longer anchor this fiction of the self
and its incessant I me mine,
then words won’t be like nerves in a stump
crackling with messages that end up nowhere,
and I’ll put on the wind like a gown of light linen
and go be a king in a field of weeds.
I hope you take the time to visit “Dante’s Damned.” It was posted with your quest in mind. Rather salty, but then wild animals love a salt lick.
Ok Brendan obviously you are a muse that is telling me to revisit all these writings and I must heed the calling….I love the “salt mystery” and I think that is the one beauty of the Catholicism…in any form…the mystery…..believing that the early church itself, as today can not fully understand it and in its fear of self went out to destroy the mystery instead of fully embrace it. Many of the pagan faiths sort to understand it in nature rituals, poets such as Rumi and Gibran could see it touch it and did their best to put it in word, but it forever alludes us fully to express.
But seek it we must, that place between words is a door to that mystery, it is where the salt alchemy takes place and should we but taste it who would ever turn back from it. (one other thing, have you read Meister Eckhart?) ….again thank you …..bkm
Thanks Barbara … There is so much imagery in Catholicism which lolls and langours on the tongue, like the host … the mystery of communion, cathedral spaces, miracle tales, the music of psalms, plainchant, the scriptorium where texts were copied, etc. A rich, rich lode.
Yeah, I have a volume of Eckhart’s writings selected by Matthew Fox, a somewhat renegade Catholic theolgian who embraces what is called Creation Spirituality — the belief, which goes back to the heretic Pelagius of the 4th century, that original sin did not taint human nature, and that the will is capable of choosing good without divine aid. The creation is good, heaven is on earth. Cardinal Ratzinger, before he became Pope, was a theological enforcer who went after Fox bigtime. I’m flying up to Pennsylvania later today (that is, if the state doesn’t wash out) to visit my ailing father. He’s a friend of Mattew Fox’s — Fox was just up visiting him a week ago while doing a conference on creation spirituality at Kirkridge, an ecumenical retreat center that borders my dad’s Columcille.
The Irish monks of the 6th to 8th centuries — among whom is my patron saint Oran — were Pelagians of a sort, and fought Rome on the issue til about the 9th century when Rome came to dominate Irish Catholicism and, in my opinion, a living faith died there.
My Eckhart i by Bernard McGinn…called the Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart (the man from whom God hid nothing)….I will look for Fox’s writing….what version of the Gnostic writings do you use….I have one called The Other Bible, edited by Willis Barnstone….1984….do you have a new version?….thanks for the commentary on Eckhart…my book does not go into that aspect of his writings – I need to do more research on the celts…you have given me some good seeds to grow on…bkm
The main inspiration behind the Blue Gospels poems is Eileen Pagels’ “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas.” An excellent survey of that book. I also have Pagels’ original book on the gnostic gospels, and the Gnostic Bible, also edited by Willis Barnstone (published in 2009 — an expanded edition of Barnstone’s orginal is my guess.) I think the volume of Eckhart’s sermons (with commentary by Fox) is out a print, but it looks like he still has out has a slimmed-down version of the same. The ESSENTIAL book on Celtic myth and folklore is Celtic Heritage by Alwyn and Brinsely Rees (1963, I think), which shows an amazing parallel of Irish-Welsh-Scots-Celtic cosmology and mythic motifs with Indo-European roots found in India. Clara Strijbosch is an excellent contemporary Celtic scholar. (My fave by her is “Sources and Analogues of the 12th Century ‘Voyage of St. Brendan’” — my namesake …) B.
You go deep. Great comment page too, this.
I liked
…Susurrant with blue heaven….
very much by the way. They way it lies on the tongue…
Exquisite, carefully wrought, pulsing. Visit my garlic poem if you would– would like to hear what you have to say…xxxj
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