The Same Invitation

St Patrick's Chapel

We have arrived home to blizzards, a tiny house, an outdoor privy, and cozy times… as we process the pilgrimage that brought us to motherlands and spiritual roots. Trying to take it slow, and easy, in tight quarters.

Luckily, I still have my portable studio that was once a truck cube from the 1960’s, where I now write to you, with our dog Lucy at my feet.

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I was sitting in Saint Patrick’s Chapel on the Abbey grounds in Glastonbury, Somerset.

Unbeknownst to me, I had arrived five minutes before the scheduled weekly Eucharist, and was invited in by a woman who was preparing the meal.

Wonderful, I said, and settled right in. 

To ritualize my visitation to this chapel would be a welcome experience.

I sat in the little pew and became conscious of the ancient, worn, slabs of stone under my feet. 

Marked by the soles of rough-shod monks, throughout ages of fidelity.

We waited. 

Waited for the strange meal. For the remembrance and the magical expression of receiving the reality of incarnate matter, in the mouth. The genetic coding of saliva produced by spiritual mastication. To taste the bread, and feel it move across the tongue. Eyes closed. Receiving the inspirited mundane… until that moment when we realize we must swallow before shuffling to the goblet.

Then to gulp… Life Force… Christ-born… paradox-holding, daring, scandalous, red.

Taste buds at the tip and all the way back, flooded by the fabric of all that ever was. Bitter. Sweet. Beautiful.

At least it was for this, that I waited. 

But it never came.

The lay woman who had welcomed me was not qualified to administer. The priest, was delayed.

And we were in limbo. 

The bread and the wine sat tantalizingly at the altar, beckoning us to re-member. To enjoy. 

The two men also sitting there, shifted in their respective pews. 

I looked around at the storied paintings - depictions that give hints about the way a story was angled, for the trajectory of our current age.

Mary Magdalene and her demons.

Joseph of Arimathea’s arrival. A threshold between dispensations.

St Patrick, the serpent crusher.

King Henry’s massacres of the monks.

Then I noticed something else.

We were sitting in an uncontrived silence.

And so we held that wonderful morning silence for at least 40 minutes.

There would be no celebrant. No meal.

Eventually everyone but I, and the lay woman, was gone, and she got up to put the Meal back, un-enjoyed. 

There, in Avalon, land of apples, I looked at the uneaten bread and undrunk wine , and couldn’t help but smell apples fallen to the ground, never grasped, never bitten, never pressed.

I made a note to go and find a local sourdough and some of the best cider from apples grown between the Tor and Chalice Hill.

“They contrived her for their own purposes, you know…. made her out to be some demonic prostitute.” 

The lay woman was speaking to me.

“That painting makes me so sad and angry. It makes me feel cheaply manipulated, how they told us to remember her.”

I nodded with a twinkle in my eye. 

So we’re sisters my eyes told her…

Nice.

Walking toward the altar, I contemplated the serpent under St Patrick’s feet.

Once, when St Patrick was fasting for 40 days on an Irish hillside, a knot of snakes began attacking him. He drove them toward the sea, and it is said that he cast them forever out of the land of Ireland.

In the Western Mystery tradition, the serpent is known as the symbol of rebirth, and actually as a symbol of female power. It was not seen as a conniving, evil, creature but would have been seen very differently through the eyes of pagan folk in Ireland, and on the British Isles. The coiled serpent with its tail in its mouth is about infinity, about regeneration. Not about doing harm.

In the case of St Patrick, this picture of him crushing the serpent under his heal, is really a picture of him supplanting the old religion with a new one. (Not too pretty to our eyes, but one wonders if we’re not using the same driving out energy to bring about the new today.)

But let’s back up a little.

The Barbarian invasions had splintered the spine of the Roman Empire. 

Split down the middle, now, between East and West, it balked at the weight of its spread-thin greed, and began to tremor and erode. 

After almost 400 years of assimilation and infrastructure, the British Isles found themselves abandoned by their colonial oppressors. 

Footholds and identities were discombobulated. 

Everything was upside down. 

Raiders became commonplace. 

There was no order, after a time of extreme order, and no time to self-organize, self-regulate, into some semblance of trust amongst groups, broken and rebuilt, by the might of Rome. 

The Saxons had come.

At the age of 16, young Patrick, born of Roman-British parents, was captured and taken as a slave to Ireland where he spent over 6 years. 

A traumatic and formative time…

A time that could have shaped him to yearn for words and ideas that might set him free.

Maybe he saw the faces of those enslaved by his own Roman British world, and wept. Maybe he had heard words once, that had then meant nothing, but now companioned him in a very alive way.

Set the captives free. 

I came so that you might have life, and have it in abundance.

Patrick dreamed of a boat, and escaped. 

And his owners had done nothing to endear him to their ways. 

Like the crucifix on the wall of an oppressive, abusive place, the serpent, to him, represented the antithesis to his freedom. It felt far more like a snake bite, as he carried the weight of his shackled body.

He returned to a Saxon-invaded Britannia of warring princes, that was in utter shambles.

Some things I learned as my old motherlands spoke to me:

Chivalry was born out of a time of rampant rape and pillage.

Propriety, out of anything goes. 

These ideas were once progressive, grasping for some semblance of decency.

But… in our oversimplified retrospect, this is hard to see.

And, as with all threshold ages (like the one we are currently in), Patrick threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Let’s not put it all on him. The way he was remembered is no doubt responsible for much of the harm done.

I stood there in that chapel where the Glastonbury Tradition says Patrick is buried, and pondered all this. Just as I had sat in St Ninian’s Cave and held the paradox of Scotland’s Cradle of Christianity.

There was a lot of “rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”, (ie, not much), and a whole lot of seeking, longing, wondering. 

Our age is a hyperextended monoculture, resulting from a mimicry and extension of the very empire Patrick was born into.

Even our antidotes are floundering in uniformity. Even our rebellions don’t know how to transform out of the energies that are suffering entropy. 

With good reason… with the trauma of chaos, and plague, and enslavement, and the trauma of participating in perpetration, that we carry in our genetic memory, we seek aseptic safety, only to realize doing so is an overcorrection that makes us die of separation instead.

We’ve all but lost our sense to dance with all that is already dancing all around us.

We’ve tried to put a Bible-length (whether we call it that or not) between ourselves and the writhing-hipped reality, that part of what it means to be alive is to be together in the belly of the whale. 

Later that day, I ate and drank unconsecrated bread and cider and it was sacred. All the old ones that might have told me my longing to partake was not valid, chuckled at their own incessant pomp, and they reached across the veil for my cider, like children reaching for ice cream.

Maybe I was even drinking with Patrick… and with the ones they say he drove out.

Avalon shone out of all the cracks and complexities, singing a silvered song. Pristine in her earthworm roots, in her blood wellspring, in her mysteries.

The same invitation arrived again:

to hold the world’s story in the pain and stretch of reconciling love.

For the coming birth pains are imminent,

they might as well birth a collective beauty.

In this photo, I, (the weary pilgrim), am sitting with the ruins of the vandalized Holy Thorn Tree on Wearyall Hill, across from the Tor.