December 26-January 3, 2020
NOVENA DAY 1: The Joyful Mysteries
In the interests of full disclosure, I have been working on a new book for some time now, and the next nine days of writing will be my way of exploring one of the questions at the heart of that book: How do we get more men praying the rosary?
Of course, we have a lot of men already praying the rosary here on Way of the Rose. But a quick tour through our members list reveals that ours in a movement with a lot more women than men. As we enter our seventh year on Facebook, we are 83% female.
Is that a problem? No. In fact, our strong feminist culture on Way of the Rose is one of our greatest strengths. At the same time, men desperately need the rosary—especially now, as patriarchy is finally being revealed for the moral and ecological end game it always was.
Even so, the rosary is a hard sell for a lot of men. Boys in Western Eurocentric cultures are taught to pull away from their mothers and sisters. As men, they are encouraged to retain unhealthy levels of detachment or emotional distance from their wives and lovers. For many men, the culture of male bonding consists of objectifying or stereotyping women.
Of the various men’s movements that began in the 1970s, most collapsed under the weight of their own misogyny. Robert Bly’s blunt-fisted Iron John: A Book About Men was replaced on the bestseller list by Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ more psychologically and spiritually nuanced Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, but male readers of the Times Book Review seem never to have gotten the memo.
So where does that leave us now?
For the past eight-and-a-half years I have been the only man at most of our Woodstock Way of the Rose meetings. Don’t get me wrong. Men have come and gone. Some of them I could have kept had I been willing to bond with them purely out of male solidarity. But I had no interest in that.
Last year a man who’d read my books visited from the town next door and I entertained the fantasy that he would return as a regular. I had no interest in discussing my writing with him (I’ve never been any good at having fans) but I’d have loved having a male rosary buddy. Weeks passed. Finally, I heard through a mutual acquaintance why our meetings hadn’t been for him: “It’s just a bunch of women praying about their kids!”
“Well…what are you praying for?” I wanted to ask.
After that episode, you’d think I wouldn’t have been caught flatfooted by the male author who asked me only a few weeks later, “How is it that you, a man, have written what amounts to a feminist manifesto?”
That sounds like a question for a magazine interview. But it wasn’t. It was just the two of us talking shop as spiritual book authors. I told him that the “Girl” I had written about in Waking Up to the Dark would make a feminist out of any man. But later I realized that wasn’t true. I never felt like Our Lady made me a feminist. Our Lady made me a man. If that looks like feminism to some people, that only shows how poorly understood manhood has become in modern times.
That will be the subject for my remaining posts. I want to explore what men have to gain from praying the rosary, why we should want them to pray the rosary, and what will happen if they do.
NOVENA DAY 2: The Sorrowful Mysteries
Speaking of Men and the Rosary…
Before we go any further down the path of talking about how to bring men to the rosary, let’s take a day to acknowledge the men who are already here.
Our numbers include quite a few men who were raised with the rosary and never gave it up. For the most part, these are cradle Catholics raised in strong Marian cultures—families with male or female role models who prayed the rosary. Fathers, grandfathers, or uncles. Mothers, grandmothers, or aunts. Someone in their life showed them that is was alright, or even good, for men to pray the rosary.
Some of our WOTR men were raised in conservative Christian households. If they are on Way of the Rose, there is a good chance they left the church at some point—or found a more progressive version of the religion they were raised with. Some discovered they were gay or transgender (or always knew they were). Most will tell you that the rosary was a lifeline for them at various points in their lives. It offered an alternative to toxic masculinity, hope of recovery from illness or addiction, or simply a way of holding onto what was best (not worst) from their upbringing.
Others, like myself, were not raised with the rosary—either because the rosary wasn’t a part of their family culture or because they weren’t Catholic to begin with. I will leave it to them to tell you how they got here. I’ve heard a lot of these stories, and each one is utterly unique.
And while we’re on the subject, we should probably also acknowledge those men who prayed the rosary in times past—not because some priest told them to do it, but because they were ardent devotees of “the Lady.” We can include the troubadours of the High Middle Ages who sang of chivalry and courtly love, whose enduring motto was “Lady, I am yours for as long as my life endures!” And those men also from Mesoamerica and elsewhere around the world who, after being forced to convert to Christianity, found solace in the rosary, where they could pray privately to their indigenous Earth goddesses like Tonantzin and Pachamama. Their male and female descendants can be found among us today praying the rosary on WOTR.
The rosary may be in decline in the northern hemisphere—among women as well as among men—but it never went out of fashion in Central and South America. Not only do men pray the rosary in these cultures, a LOT of men pray the rosary. Partly this is because Catholic folk religion is still strong in Latin countries, and partly it because of positive cultural attitudes toward mothers and mothering. We have WOTR members from most countries south of the U.S. border—many of them now living in America—and more than a few of these are men.
So, for all you guys out there on Way of the Rose, today is your day to tell the story of how you got here. Let discover what (or, rather, who) we have to build on, and then tomorrow we’ll return to the main theme of these posts by looking at what men have to gain from praying the rosary.
NOVENA DAY 3: The Glorious Mysteries
Finding Our Core Strength
First of all, a special thank you to the men who told us their rosary stories in the comments for yesterday’s post. I hope you will continue to share your stories and offer support to other men who, for whatever reason, might still feel reluctant to do so.
It can be difficult for a man who is NOT a religious conservative to come out as a rosary devotee. In modern times, the rosary has been sullied by legions of emotionally stunted, sexually frustrated men who hid their misogyny behind layers of false piety.
For such men, the rosary functioned as a form of “moral camouflage” that allowed them to harm real women or girls—or to condone such harm—while appearing devoted to “the Lady.” At worst they were predatory wolves in pious sheep’s clothing, at best they were cowards. By now we know that their numbers included, not just the religious rank and file, but bishops, cardinals, and popes.
Who wants to risk being aligned with such men? “Yes, I pray the rosary, BUT…” we find ourselves saying. What follows is nearly always something like “BUT I’m not a fundamentalist”…“I’m not an right-to-lifer”…”I’m not a hater”…“I’m not THAT kind of man.”
I’m here to say, “That is not enough.”
There is nothing to be gained from defining ourselves defensively—in terms of what we are NOT. If we’re not that kind of man, what kind of men are we?
There is no single answer to that question—nor should there be. There are all kinds of men. At the same time, each of us should have an answer. We should have a reason for praying the rosary that can stand up to empty conformity, false piety, misogyny, racism, child sexual abuse, and the toxic belief that the rights of humans supersede the rights of the Earth. We need a reason that stands up to homicidal, matricidal, ecocidal patriarchy.
A few years ago, I went through my own rosary crisis. Not that I ever stopped praying it. Since the apparitions began in 2011, I have never once considered abandoning the rosary or replacing it with some other form of spiritual devotion. No. My crisis wasn’t about the rosary. It was about my core reason for praying the rosary as a man. Did that reason give me the “core strength” to stand up to patriarchy? Was it solid? Was it rooted? Was it real?
To answer that question, I found that I had to answer another. Those men who identified as Catholics in conformity with modern church doctrine—the ones I went to such pains not to be identified with—what was their “core reason” for praying it? I wasn’t sure I could answer that question because the reasons might be complex and, in many cases, quite specific to the individual. So I reframed it. What did they stand to gain?
From the modern Catholic rosary men stand to gain the power of solidarity with a male-dominated church that privileges their gender and recognizes their rights as superseding those of women in many vital and significant ways. That power is conferred from above through theological conformity with a priestly hierarchy in which women have no presence and no direct influence.
Nearly all modern books and writings on the Catholic rosary (the majority of which are written by men) reinforce gender stereotypes and gender roles. The modern Virgin Mary offers a model of modesty and theological conformity that would have confounded the imaginations of our medieval ancestors. For those ancestors, the Virgin Mary was so closely aligned with the Great Mother they had no trouble seeing Her as an all-powerful Divine Female who answered prayers in Her own right and was constantly intervening in the lives of Her devotees.
To understand the difference between the rosary of the Middle Ages and the rosary as it is prayed in most Catholic settings today, we only have to consider how often the latter has been enlisted by religious men in the fight against birth control and abortion. Doesn’t the rosary begin with a woman being offered the choice of whether to conceive or not?
Patriarchy teaches that gender is destiny and sex is power. As conceived in the Middle Ages, the rosary teaches that power is power and sex is sex, and that the latter always prevails over power in the end. This is the lesson of all the old stories of the Great Mother resurrecting her slain Brother/Son/Lover, including the story of Mary and Jesus. The Mother—that very matrix of Earthly biological blessings into which we are born, in which we live, and to which we return at death—always finishes last. That is why the rosary ends with the Coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven and Earth, rather than with the Last Judgment as the Bible does. Like the circle of the seasons, the rosary brings us to life, not death, in the end. The rosary is a prayer for the Earth to win.
I would like to suggest that the use of the rosary to consolidate against women and solidify institutional power at all costs is a dead end where men are concerned. Even in instances where they seem to be winning, men can only lose at that game. If, on the other hand, men join forces with the Lady who, in her earliest incarnations, was always a Goddess of Love and Fertility, there is no limit on the power that can flow to them and flow through them—because that power is the power of Life Itself.
I pray the rosary to unite with that Lady and that Power. If anyone asks me nowadays why I pray the rosary, this is what I say. As a man, I have no interest in any authority that might be conferred upon me from above. I don’t care about it, and I don’t want it. If it comes from above, it isn’t my power. Only that power that rises up from the Earth, like spring water or rising sap, is mine.
NOVENA DAY 4: The Joyful Mysteries
Men Listening to Women
Yesterday I posed the question, “If we Way-of-the-Rose men aren’t praying the rosary to align with male religious authority, then why are we praying it?” I offered my own reason—to align with the Earth and the Lady—but that is by no means definitive. We don’t have to have a big, one-size-fits-all reason for praying the rosary, just one that will stand up to pressure from without.
The culture at large defines the rosary as Catholic and its aims as religious. If we want to use the rosary to build small, resilient, non-hierarchical spiritual communities, it only stands to reason that we will need some way of framing that. Some of those frames will apply to all members of our fellowship, regardless of gender or spiritual background. For example, just about everybody here likes a friendly, relaxed spiritual community that doesn’t exclude people. “Come one, come all…just be nice!” That could be our unofficial credo. Inclusivity, informality, and civility—these define the basic character of Way of the Rose.
At the same time, there are frames that apply specifically to men. To offer one example, we are men who are open to the experiences of women. We are ready to listen to and (if called upon to do so) to validate the experiences of women. Women in traditional religious communities have to spend a lot of time listening to men, much of it in a state of forced silence. Sermons, lectures, homilies, Zen talks. Women are silenced in most of these settings. There is no rule silencing them in most cases. No sign saying they can’t speak up. It’s just how most religious settings work.
Of course, the men are silent, too, in those settings. But, provided they are straight men, they usually don’t experience themselves as “silenced.” Most of the stories or lessons are about straight men. And it’s men writing or speaking in most of the scriptures. I once listened to a female Zen master give a talk on a famous koan. When the talk was over, I remarked to a female friend sitting beside me, “That didn’t exactly pass the Bechdel Test, did it?” referring to the brainchild of American feminist cartoonist Alison Bechdel.
“What do you mean?” my friend asked. “The roshi (Zen master) is a woman, and over half of us in the room are women—so it’s one woman talking to another, rather than two men talking, or a man talking to a woman.”
She was right, technically. But that isn’t how the Bechdel Test works. It applies to media—to movies or works of literature—not to what happens in formal or informal social gatherings. The koan under discussion featured one male Chinese Zen master talking to another male Chinese Zen master. No women appeared as characters in the exchange, nor were women referenced in the roshi’s talk. As social institutions, religions are so patriarchal that, even when women find themselves in positions of authority within them, they may find it difficult to talk about anything but men.
Contrast this with what happens in your average phone or face-to-face rosary meeting. There is no sermon or lecture delivered by an expert. No religious ritual to be performed by a person in authority. No privileged point of view. There is just a group of men and women (OK, at this point mostly women) sitting in a circle, all sharing their stories and reciting the rosary together, and praying for their heart’s desires. There is no cross-talk, and everyone gets to speak. So there is no fear of being silenced—no worry their story or their voice won’t be heard.
I originally intended to write about several other “frames” that apply specifically to men praying the rosary in Way of the Rose, but this is such a defining frame that I don’t think we should mix it with anything else. To pray the rosary as a man in Way of the Rose is to belong to a spiritual community where women have a voice.
Tomorrow I will write about the fact that men can’t find their voices as men until they begin to listen to the voice of the Mother—and that means listening to women’s voices as well.
NOVENA DAY 5: The Sorrowful Mysteries
The Fork in the Road
A few days ago the New York Times published an article by recovered alcoholic Holly Whitaker titled “The Patriarchy of Alcoholics Anonymous.” Its critique is summarized in the following two paragraphs:
A.A. may be the foundation of global recovery, but it wasn’t made with everyone in mind. It’s a framework created in the 1930s by upper-middle-class white Protestant men to help people like them overcome addiction. Its founders believed the root of alcoholism was a mammoth ego resulting from an entitled sense of unquestioned authority.
A.A. was a miracle for those men who, until then, had almost nowhere to turn for help. It was radical in that it was free and it was fueled by an ethos of service. But it grew out of a fundamentalist Christian organization, the Oxford Group, and as a result, it is undergirded by the same belief system that asserts Eve grew from Adam’s rib.
I don’t want to get hung up on whether the 12-Step recovery program first initiated by A.A. works or not—or whether it works for everybody. Addiction is such a terrible, life-destroying illness that, if any program works for anybody, that is reason enough to feel grateful for its founders. But I am skeptical of the notion that patriarchy serves anyone—even men.
The men who believe they are served by patriarchy are the most deluded men of all. Sadly, that counts for a LOT of men in today’s culture. For the delusion of patriarchy is devastatingly simple and almost universal in its application. It isn’t the belief that patriarchy is God-ordained, determined by evolution, or simply right. The central delusion of patriarchy…is that patriarchy works.
I would apologize for the bluntness of today’s post, if it weren’t for the fact that there is more bluntness to come over the next four days. It needs to be said. Men are in trouble in our culture. Men are in trouble worldwide. We have come to a fork in the road that is so irrevocably decisive, once we have ventured down the wrong side of it, we may find it impossible to make our way back to sanity again.
There are any number of symbolic ways of describing that fork and the choice it represents, but I prefer the starkest expression of it. As I see it, the choice is between PLANTS and PORN.
More on that to come…
NOVENA DAY 6: The Glorious Mysteries
PLANTS vs. PORN
Yesterday’s reference to a New York Times article on “The Patriarchy of Alcoholics Anonymous” sparked a lively discussion in which many of our members recounted their experiences—good, bad, and mixed—in various recovery groups. Where there were disagreements, they were mostly civil. Where they weren’t, well…it takes a while to get used to being in a group that is based on spiritual friendship rather than spiritual authority. It takes a while, also, to get used to the idea that our problems are bigger than we think.
In the opening paragraphs of his 1991 book Cultural Addiction: The Greenspirit Guide to Recovery, Albert LaChance wrote:
There is only one problem: everything! We like to talk about the ecological problem, the nuclear problem, the drug problem, the family problem, the violence problem, the alcohol problem, the species extinction problem, and so on, as if each of these were separate and distinct pathologies, each unrelated to the other. There’s really only one problem. It’s the way we live. We suffer from a deep cultural pathology.
Industrial culture has a bad chemical dependency problem. Internally, within our bodies, we call it the drug-and-alcohol epidemic. Externally, outside our bodies, it’s the pollution problem—the two faces of one problem, a toxic human on a toxic planet. Our attempts at detoxifying individuals and returning them to a sick culture can be compared to wringing out a sponge and tossing it back into the sea.
No wonder there is so much recidivism—not just in A.A., but in all recovery programs, in those that follow a 12-Step format and those that do not. The problem of toxic humans on a toxic planet is much bigger than alcohol or drug dependency. For us sponges, it’s ocean as far as the eye can see. So let’s not argue about a problem that no one but Our Lady has a solution to—a problem as vast as our trash-filled oceans, as big as our weather systems, as ubiquitous as our planetary atmosphere.
The idea to write Waking Up to the Dark first came to me at a beach on Fire Island in 2009. I had just finished reading Harry Frankfurt’s book-length philosophical essay On Bullshit, in which he argues that, although bullshit is one of the most salient features of our culture, and although most of us feel confident in our ability to recognize it when we hear it, “we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves.”
I don’t know why exactly, but for some reason, sitting there on a beautiful beach with the waves lapping in, it occurred to me that the same could be said of pornography. So I took out a fresh notebook and began to write. I didn’t get very far with the idea. I had no idea how big or complex the topic was. Like bullshit, the pornographic was everywhere. And it was often impossible to tell where it ended or began. But near the end of the notebook I wrote a note to myself in the margins: “It all goes back to light—everything goes back to light.”
Perdita said something a few weeks ago that stopped me in my tracks. It came during a dinner with a much younger couple in which the conversation had turned to how much trouble young men were in—and how much trouble all of us were in. Perdita was elaborating on a theme we wrote about in The Way of the Rose, which was the difference between linear and circular ways of being.
“There’s only one perfectly straight line I can think of in nature, and that is a beam of sunlight. The rest is all circles and curves. The Mother uses her great cycles of plants and animals to sustain life on Earth and hold it in balance. All She needs to get that going, and keep it going for billions of years, is sunlight. That’s where the Father comes in. Men have forgotten how to be sunlight.”
For me it was one of those watershed moments when a lot of things come together in a single idea (which is why the two of us often write together these days). I’m not at all sure that I understand it yet, but I will share what I have been thinking.
The geological era we are living through now has been called the Anthropocene because it is a period in which human activity is the dominant influence on Earth’s climate and environment. In 2014, a Finnish media theorist named Jussi Parikka used that term to create another: the Anthrobscene, a media-saturated, media-driven consumer era in which vast quantities of substances—from metallic ores to petrochemicals—are dug out of the Earth, used, and discarded in such quantities that, collectively, they become a geological stratum unto themselves.
At the rate we are going as toxic humans on a toxic planet, the Anthrobscene could easily become the last and topmost layer of the Anthropocene—the final testament of a species that took a wrong turn in the road and went over a cliff instead on into the future. And, as Parikka’s term suggests, there is something fundamentally “obscene” about it.
I would like to suggest that what distinguishes the horticultural practices of our Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic ancestors from the organized agriculture of so-called “modern civilization” is mining—a “cutting” of the Earth that is, in essence, a form of rape. It is a way of taking from the Earth more than it wants to give. A way of taking its life force, its creativity and fecundity, its treasury of buried energy, and—yes—its beauty and harnessing them for purposes that are not its own. “Not its own” for the simple reason that such “mined” resources are reserved for the use of a single species, rather than being used for the whole.
Modern studies have shown that, where women have reproductive freedom, they tend to reproduce at levels that are sustainable with their environments and, in many cases, even benefit the plants and animals of that environment. In places where women’s reproductive freedoms are curtailed—places where abortion or birth control are forbidden—their bodies, like the Earth, are being mined.
So how does this present modern human beings, and modern men in particular, with a choice between plants and porn? That is the subject for tomorrow’s essay, but here is the gist of it: The world we live in now is sustained by the mining of vast quantities of the Earth’s “buried sunlight” in the form of coal, petroleum, natural gas, fertilizer, and other energy sources laid down geologically with the passing seasons over millions and millions of years. Its essence is pornographic because (1) it takes from the Earth what Earth does not want to give, and (2) because it turns beauty into trash.
Do we want beauty…or trash? Plants or porn? It’s a stark choice, but a real one. And the time is now.
NOVENA DAY 7: The Joyful Mysteries
On Sex, Darkness, and The Song of Songs
Today I wanted to offer an alternative to the billion-watt, 24-hour tabloid pornfest that so many of us find it impossible to look away from—even if a part of us senses that there is something deeply and dangerously wrong with it. But as I began to write, I realized that I had already written a piece that said everything I’d wanted to say.
Here, then, is a short chapter on darkness and sex, intimacy and privacy, from Waking Up to the Dark, Book One of the Way of the Rose trilogy. It applies to men as well as to women, but I suspect that men will find ideas in it that aren’t often shared in male circles—although they should be.
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Before the invention of gas and incandescent lighting, most people went to bed within an hour or two of dusk. Candles were expensive, oil more so. There was light if you needed it, but it wasn’t enough to turn back the tide of the night. Once the sun went down, the darkness began to roll in from all directions until it completely swallowed the land. There was no resisting it. It was a universal fact of life.
People instinctively headed home as that time approached. You wanted to be settled in before night. By daylight you could travel as needed, journeying here and there to attend to the business of life. By darkness only the most urgent matters led to venturing forth—to fetch the doctor when someone was ill, for instance, or the midwife when a baby was being born. People strolled sometimes by moonlight, and they might wander by starlight into a nearby field, to pray or check on the animals . . . or sometimes both. But the darkness kept them on a short tether. The other end was tied to the bedroom, which at nighttime became the center of their world.
The night life was very different from what it is today. No one was coming home after midnight. No one was in the next room on the computer or watching TV. Everyone was in bed, sometimes for a dozen hours at a time, depending on the season. It was a time for storytelling and listening, musing and imagining, sleeping and dreaming, and—in the middle of it, after waking from the first sleep—a time for making love. Maybe it isn’t true that most babies were born during that time, but it was almost certainly when most of them were being made.
What was it about the darkness that lent itself to love? Privacy was surely a part of it. And then, in an era that included much less leisure, most people were tired at the end of the day. They woke rested after the first sleep, lying right next to one another in the dark . . . quiet and awake.
But it wasn’t only that.
The Hour of God was perfect for lovemaking. For prayer isn’t the only thing sacred in the dark. Absent the troubles of the day, people could more easily relax and let go—of fears and worries, of false hopes and expectations . . . of everything. The darkness also helped them to accept and honor one another. Light invited comparisons and judgments. It exposed what appeared to be flaws but really weren’t—the belly that sagged after the birth of children, the wrinkles from a lifetime of working in the sun. The darkness not only forgave these, it celebrated them. You were as old as you looked by daylight, as young as you felt by night.
Strangely, sex wasn’t something they talked a lot about during the day, even though sex was probably a lot more intimate in those days. What passed between lovers in the dark hours was invisible, indescribable, and unseen. Perhaps that was the reason they didn’t speak much about it. They couldn’t describe it. Or they didn’t want to—not because they were modest, but because they didn’t want to break the spell.
Most people today would probably claim that they are sexually liberated compared with people living only a century or two ago. For one thing, birth control has allowed women a sexual freedom they could never have experienced otherwise. For another, in most educated circles homosexuality is no longer regarded as a sin. But something has been lost when couples, straight or gay, no longer wake to embrace one another in the silence and privacy of the dark.
Outwardly liberated, many of us are so exhausted and sleep deprived we can rarely wake ourselves for sex in the middle of the night. Even more tragically, when we do, the lights in our heads are always on. Our thousand-watt culture has left so few shadows, particularly when it comes to sex, that there is now no place left in the world to experience our lovemaking but in the full light of consciousness. It’s as if the dimmer switch we were born with has been broken—by advertisements, by movie and television images, by sexting and sex tapes and even sex therapy—so that now it has only two settings: On and Off. With the switch off, we’re unconscious. With it on, we’re at the mercy of light. The light stimulates us, that much is certainly true, but in so doing it shifts our experience of the sensual from the body into the mind.
How are we who spend so much time in the light to recover that inner dimness that dissolves the borders between bodies and that is the universal precondition for physical and spiritual rapture of any kind?
In the Song of Songs, the only book of the Bible that celebrates both darkness and erotic love, two lovers rendezvous in closed rooms and shadowy bowers, making their way by taste and touch and smell until they find one another’s bodies in the dark. The Song of Songs was the most widely commented-upon book of scripture during the Middle Ages—more popular even than the gospels—and the reason was simple. It wasn’t read as an erotic love poem that somehow made its way into the Bible. It was a manual for mystical union—a guide for the care of the human soul.
Sex belongs to nature and to darkness. It does not belong to a world supersaturated with images, with information, and with light. The more we look at it, the more forced and unnatural it becomes. It belongs to the world of touch, to skin and lips and fingertips. It does not belong to sight. It’s the reason why most of us instinctively close our eyes to kiss. And the reason why lovers—true lovers—are happiest with no one watching, not even themselves, alone and quiet in the dark.
NOVENA DAY 8: The Sorrowful Mysteries
OPENING THE EARTH-PORTAL
For the final post in this series tomorrow, we’ll talk about the importance for men of “being sunlight” and what that means, both spiritually and practically—for our relationship to the Earth, to women, to one another, and ultimately to ourselves. But first we need to talk about the rosary and the Earth.
Whatever else it has been to people for the past thousand years, the rosary is a PORTAL—the doorway into another realm. That Other Realm has been called by many names. Our Lady’s Rose Garden. The Communion of Saints. The Collective Unconscious. The Imaginal Realm.
I personally dislike the last two terms, which are attempts to bring darker, more feminine ways of knowing into the light where they can be seen and analyzed—usually by some masculine consciousness. (Whether the analyzer is male or female matters not at all.) Both terms are inherently biased against older, darker, deeper ways of knowing. They want “to shine a light on things,” but the illumination they offer is of the artificial variety. It yields no warmth, no generative power, no life.
The UN in unconscious means “not”—“NOT conscious”…“NOT known”…“NOT aware.” Which implies that it is only by forcing things into the light that they can be known. The motto of this approach is “Seeing is believing.” It has nothing to say about feeling, sensing, intuiting, knowing directly, hearing, or—perhaps most importantly—having eyes “to see in the dark.”
Similarly, Imaginal means imaginary—i.e., NOT real. Psychologists and folklorists will tell you that the Imaginal Realm is the place we go to create art or literature, or to engage in creative problem-solving. Which is a subtle way of suggesting that entities or events in that realm have no inherent reality of their own. The Imaginal Realm is useful—a kind of workshop for consciousness. But it isn’t real.
“Rose Garden” and “Communion of Saints” are better ways of describing it. At least they are embodied. But the scale of the first is too small to accommodate the full scope and size of that Other Realm, unless we treat it like a metaphor. And Communion of Saints is too Christian for some folks. Nowadays I prefer to say that the rosary is a portal to MOTHER EARTH—or, as Our Lady has described it, to the Column of Saints.
When we pray the rosary—when we give ourselves fully and with sincerity to its simple syllables, sounds, and sensations—a door swings open like a portal into the Earth. This sounds symbolic, but it is not.
All of us (all human beings, and all plants and animals alike) come FROM the Earth…and return TO the Earth…and our bodies are made OF Earth. This is the Column of Saints. The portal we pass through when we pray the rosary is therefore, in a sense, illusory—even though the Earth Herself is real. There is no coming or going through that Earth-Portal. We are always there.
The rosary simply reminds us of who and what and where we really are. At a certain point in praying it, we feel GROUNDED, because we have felt Our Mother’s presence. Because we feel Her touch in the beads under our fingers (which come from the Earth), in the air (Her blue mantle) circulating within or around our bodies. She is in every smell, touch, taste, sound, sight, and phenomenon that we perceive. She is in our dreams and visions as well—for these, too, come from Her and are no less real than we are. They aren’t imaginary, or even imaginal. They blossom out of the soul like flowers. They well up from the ground of our being like springs of water. Consciousness itself is physical. It is grounded in the stuff of the planet. It is seated, as we are, in Our Mother’s lap.
The portal-like aspect of the rosary comes to bear only because we draw a distinction between the Human Realm and this “Other” Realm we call the Earth—this Other Realm which we do not ordinarily experience ourselves as one with. We seem to walk on TOP of it. Most of us believe (at least in principle) that we can have DOMINION over it—at least to the extent that we can influence it, control it, make stuff from it, or get it to behave as we wish.
The rosary offers us a way back to the Mother whose body is the body of the world. But the way back—the portal—isn’t really there. Our Mother has never left us. Likewise, it is impossible that we should ever succeed in leaving Her. Nevertheless, we experience passing through that portal when we pray the rosary. We experience coming back to Earth.
NOVENA DAY 9: The Glorious Mysteries
ON BEING SUNLIGHT
About twelve years ago, at the height of my efforts to find a spiritual response to the problems of species extinction and climate change, I came up with a simple formula to weed out religious ideas with no ecological value.
The formula went like this:
t/e = 1, where “t” stood for theology and “e” for ecology.
In instances where t > e, a dangerous imbalance would occur, and examples were easy to cite. Religions that prohibited birth control privileged a theological idea over an ecological reality with results that were eventually disastrous. God’s first commandment to human beings in the Bible was: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28). Arguably, this was the worst idea that anyone anywhere ever came up with in the history of the world.
But the opposite was also true. Where t < e, a different problem would unfold. A theological idea might offer too weak a response to ecological realities, in which case human beings, far from seeking to conquer the world, would fall into lethargy and despair and eventually go extinct. The idea of a spiritual destination beyond or apart from this world offers a prime example. Whether we call it heaven or nirvana or interplanetary migration matters not at all. All three offer an “escape clause” from the reality of life in a planetary ecosystem in which living beings are, by design, always dying and being reborn.
I discovered that the same formula could be applied to virtually any religious idea or belief, with results that were nearly always depressing. But sometimes they passed the test.
When Jesus is born, his body is laid in a “manger” (a food trough for animals) and on the night before his crucifixion he says to his disciples, “Take, eat—this is my body.” In a sustainable ecosystem, all life is interdependent. Whatever eats must also be eaten. This is the first rule of ecology. In the Book of Job, the principal character rebels against that rule and suffers endlessly as a result. At the end of the story, God appears out of a whirlwind, offering Job a crash course in planetary ecology, and—thus enlightened—Job’s fortunes are reversed.
The Indian prince Siddhartha is also plagued by the limits of life on a finite planet, which he experiences in terms of sickness, old age, and death. On the night of his enlightenment, as meditates beneath the bodhi tree, the demon Mara assaults him with all manner of temptations. When nothing works, Mara finally says to Siddhartha, “Who bears witnesses your right to sit on the seat of enlightenment?” In response to this challenge, Siddhartha reaches a finger down to touch the ground, saying, “I call the Earth as my witness.”
Don’t think of the finger as a pointer. It’s really an equal sign. The Buddha is saying, “My enlightenment consists of the realization that the Earth and I are one. I don’t need any witness apart from that.”
Which is another way of saying, t/e = 1.
Or, as Our Lady puts it: “The rosary is My body, and My body is the body of the world. Your body is one with that body. What cause could there be for fear?”
But enough of formulas. What we are talking about here is really very simple—and that is sunlight.
With the exception of steam vents, volcanoes, and a few other geothermal sources, the energy allotted to sustain life on our planet derives from one source and one source only. This is the way it was described on June 16, 1972, at the world’s first international conference on the state of our planetary ecology. In their final report for the Stockholm Conference, the Friends of the Earth wrote:
Life holds to one central truth: that all matter and energy needed for life moves in great closed circles from which nothing escapes and to which only the driving fire of the sun is added. Life devours itself: everything that eats is itself eaten; every chemical that is made by life can be broken down by life; all the sunlight that can be used is used. Of all that there is on earth, nothing is taken away by life, and nothing is added by life—but nearly everything is used by life, used and reused in thousands of complex ways, moved through vast chains of plants and animals and back again to the beginning.
Not coincidentally, June 16 is the date of the first apparition of Our Lady of Woodstock. She doesn’t leave such details to chance.
For millions of years our ancestors lived by a rule so elegantly simple it was impossible not to follow it. They were born knowing it in their bones. The amount of energy you could consume in terms of plants, animals, and fuel was limited by the “solar carrying capacity” of the land on which you lived or through which you traveled in nomadic bands.
The term refers to the amount of sunlight that falls on a plot of land over the course of a solar year. That “amount” was all there was to spend, and so you had to live within its limits. To outgrow it was to starve or, in some case, freeze to death. It is questionable whether our ancestors could have understood anything BEYOND those limits. The idea would have seemed impossible to them, if not downright evil.
I have created a thought experiment wherein Upper Paleolithic humans are brought through a time portal to the modern world where it is explained that nearly everything they see is the product of solar energy. Their first response is, “But how can this be?”
It is explained to them that—through mining, drilling, plowing, and excavating—ancient sources of solar power laid down over millions of years as petroleum, coal, combustible gases, and natural fertilizers have been brought to the surface by humans to transform their world.
In some versions of the experiment, our ancestors expire of heartbreak on the spot. In others they demand to return at once to the Paleolithic world. In still others, one of them becomes a Job, a Jesus, or a Buddha, establishing a religion that tries, and fails, to bring us back to our senses.
So this is a rather long-winded way of explaining what happened in the depths of my mind when Perdita said to me over dinner with a young couple a few weeks ago, “Men just have to remember how to be sunlight.”
Why should men pray the rosary? What do they have to gain from it? What do they have to learn? The rosary is that rare outlier among the religious teachings of the world that carries within it the memories and teachings of our remotest ancestors on how to live on a planet that is always dying and re-greening itself on its yearly cycle around the sun. What the world needs from men is an understanding of those ancestral teachings and a willingness to uphold and honor them—especially as they relate to women and to the Earth.
Thank you for allowing me to be of service. This concludes my nine days of posts for this novena.