celebrating the slender strands of synchronicity - part two

The American poet, William Stafford of blessed memory, put it like this:

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among

things that change. But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.

I am not certain when I began to pay attention to that thread; it has long been a point of reference, but I suppose I consciously started to hold on to it while studying Celtic spirituality. Not only did the ancient Celtic monks practice a unique pilgrimage - they would venture out into the world without a fixed destination, rather than head for an established holy destination - but they would wander until they found a place of personal resurrection. That's a unique distinction that squares well with Maritain's commitment to personalism, yes? A traditional pilgrimage is linear: each sojourner chooses their destination in advance, experiences personal insights into the care of their soul along the way, and then celebrates completing the peregrination at the end of the road. Think of the Camino de Santiago to the church dedicated to the brother of Jesus in Spain. Or the various sacred journeys believers make to Lourdes, Chimayo, or Fatima. I've been on one of those treks and value it profoundly.

Christine Valters Paintner writes, however, that a Celtic pilgrimage was quite different. Sometimes seekers would wander without a clear destination, waiting and trusting that the spirit would reveal herself when the pilgrim was ready. Think of St. Columba who left Ireland in a coracle (a small, simple boat) and eventually founded a monastery on the Isle of Iona. Those seekers waited prayerfully for the wind (or the Spirit) to literally carry them to their resurrection center without much control. (Talk about a counter-cultural spirituality!) Other times, given their deep appreciation of spirals, suppliants would walk three times around a tura - a circular space dedicated to contemplation - resembling a labyrinth. Dr. Valters-Paintner writes:

These Celts had a deep understanding that walking embodies prayer, and walking in a circle has a way of moving our brains out of their desired linear course. When we are discerning our direction in life, we often want the next best step to appear, if not the entire path clearly ahead. But discernment in this tradition is more like a spiraling inward and a deep attentiveness to what is happening in the moment.

She adds that walking these turas was a multifaceted spiritual practice:

Walking helps to slow us down. The poet Wallace Stevens once said “the truth depends upon a walk around the lake.” We allow ourselves to arrive fully in a sacred place, both body and soul, and ask permission to be there and receive the gifts offered. Walking in a circular manner helps to move us out of linear ways of thinking. It allows us to rest into the spiral nature of time and see things from a new perspective. Pilgrimage is never a straight, step-by-step journey, but one of continual unfolding and listening to wisdom arising from dreams and nature. Walking helps us to bless the earth with our feet, so that our whole being becomes a prayer. Instead of walking to “get somewhere” as we might when journeying to a particular place, walking the rounds invites us to continue journeying in place. https://godspacelight.com/pilgrimage-and-walking-the-rounds-by-christine-valters-paintner/

The mystical and serendipitous nature of the Celtic pilgrimage appeals to me and offers a corrective to my illusions of and inclinations toward control. How did St. Paul put it? "Let it be, let it be, let it be, yeah, let it be: whisper words of wisdom, let it be." During our current wanderings this week, yet another slender strand of synchronicity was revealed in the words of Barbara Brown Taylor. Her most recent Substack column describes how once the words of traditional theology opened insights into the meaning of life for her. Esoterica like theophany and eschatology carried her into college, seminary, advanced studies, and in time, the Episcopal priesthood. Incrementally, though, these same sacred words of illumination soon became unsatisfying. They were disembodied - abstract - and she was yearning for incarnation through a life of connection and belonging.

In books and concepts, I not only found names for holy mysteries I had never been able to name before; I also experienced the kind of ecstasy others talked about finding in worship and prayer. The medium of this encounter was the written word. The experience was being known by writers I had never met. The ecstasy came in the process of yielding to minds greater than mine that had no desire to dominate me. They didn’t point me at anything; they pointed me beyond. From them I learned that the yearning to know God might be as close as I ever got, and it was plenty These writers had such an effect on me that I decided to make my living with words as well—some spoken, some written, all in the service of beyond—which was how I learned the difference between words that have bodies and words that do not. Take a look (at what I have just written above) and you may notice there is not a single word in it that has a color, temperature, taste, or smell. This was not on purpose; it just happens when I am thinking theologically. You may have added some bodily details to “ecstasy” or “dominate” based on your own experience, but I didn’t put them there. You did. When I started noticing this, I decided to put more trust in words made flesh.

https://barbarabrowntaylor.substack.com/p/words-made-flesh?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3382211&post_id=163430122&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo3MTcxMDc5LCJwb3N0X2lkIjoxNjM0MzAxMjIsImlhdCI6MTc0NzE0MTI4NSwiZXhwIjoxNzQ5NzMzMjg1LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMzM4MjIxMSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.EASwNNFZfmqiZ8G2ocpBXbRcvLnkm0whs6FHDblTm2k&r=49p8n&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Like Taylor, Brooks, Martian, the Pope (old and new), those writing from a spiritual but not religious perspective, feminist authors, hundreds of musicians, and their countless popular songs, I, too, began to see that while human angst, confusion, and inner fury are a part of the human condition, they aren't the whole story. It's clear that some of us have been blinded by our culture's obsession with unbridled individualism. Others have endured the starvation of their souls in societies built upon a one-size-fits-all bureaucratic collectivism. Some have been wounded by religion, others have been kept ignorant of or afraid of its blessings, and still others who found their hearts, minds, and flesh set free by the promises of faith. Small wonder that brother Brooks believes that perhaps NOW is the time for a Maritain revival

The first responsibility of personalism is to see each other person in his or
her full depth. This is astonishingly hard to do. As we go through our busy days, it’s normal to want to establish I-It relationships — with the security guard in your building or the office worker down the hall. Life is busy, and sometimes we just need to reduce people to their superficial function." But personalism asks, as much as possible, for I-Thou encounters: that you just don’t regard people as a data point, but as emerging out of the full narrative, and that you try, when you can, to get to know their stories, or at least to realize that everybody is in a struggle you know nothing about.

Jazz critic extraordinaire and public intellectual, Ted Goia, also brings something to the table of synchronicity in his recent explication of the "new romanticism" that is rumbling just below the surface of popular culture. As one often labeled "a total downer," Goia replies that he's more of a truth teller in a culture of denial. He is savvy, sassy, and seriously attuned to the wisdom beyond the obvious in popular culture. (check out his Substack column @ The Honest Broker.) Take a careful look at this reflection on the emerging rebellion against life ruled by algorithms In the 1800s, cultural elites assumed that technology, science, the pursuit of profits, and linear reason would unlock an earthly paradise. 

As that century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives—an 180 degree shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse. Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments — embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation. The new paradigm shocked Europe when it started to spread. Cultural elites had just assumed that science and reason would control everything in the future. But that wasn’t how it played out. Resemblances with the current moment are not hard to see.

“Imagine a growing sense that algorithmic and mechanistic thinking has become too oppressive. Imagine if people started resisting technology. Imagine a revolt against STEM’s dominance. Imagine people deciding that the good life starts with NOT learning how to code.”

This rings true to me personally, professionally, and politically. It seems to be true on the edges of culture, too. Goia observes that stepping back from the overly optimistic promises of rationalism includes relinquishing our " aesthetics of light" for an "aesthetics of dark." More mysticism than map-making. More trusting the slender strands of synchronicity than the propaganda of Meta and X. He writes:
"When rationalistic and algorithmic tyranny grows too extreme, art returns to the darkness of the unconscious life—and perhaps of the womb." His closing insights speak to my heart as this personal pilgrimage ripens:

Beethoven turned against Napoleon—and this is emblematic of the aesthetic reversal sweeping through Europe (during the first age of romanticism). Not long ago, Beethoven and other artists looked to French rationalism as a harbinger of a new age of freedom and individual flourishing. But this entire progress-obsessed ideology is unraveling. It’s somehow fitting that music takes the lead role in deconstructing a tyrannical rationalism, and proposing a more human alternative.

Could that happen again? Imagine a growing sense that algorithmic and mechanistic thinking has become too oppressive. Imagine if people started resisting technology as a malicious form of control, and not a pathway to liberation, empowerment, and human flourishing—soul-nurturing riches that must come from someplace deeper. Imagine a revolt against STEM’s dominance and dictatorship over all other fields? Imagine people deciding that the good life starts with NOT learning how to code. If that happened now, wouldn’t music stand out as the pathway? What could possibly be more opposed to brutal rationalism running out of control than a song?

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/notes-toward-a-new-romanticism

All of which leads me back to "The Power of Love." I am not suggesting this is the ONLY song that covertly challenges the status quo, but it is one we need to hear again. So, too, the gentle masculine harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The lyrical wisdom of Joni Mitchell. The way our band, Wednesday's Child, deconstructs old songs like "Runnin' on Empty" or "Paint It Black" to reveal the deeper lament that is aching for expression. This music is tender. Uncluttered. It makes room for improvisation alongside well-rehearsed and complicated vocal harmonies. It is genre-bending rather than squeezed into the confines of "auto-tune." And it celebrates the beautiful particularities of life that tremble with holy wisdom for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Josh Ritter captures this new romanticism affectionately. Michelle Ndegeocello, too. Brooks closes his essay on personalism with prescient words of caution and promise that speak to me of the music I'm committed to sharing: music that is participatory, music that honors our feelings, music that is saturated in darkness but unafraid of the light, music that celebrates beauty over ideology, and creativity as a key to blessing.

Personalism is all about availability: to be open for this kind of giving and friendship. This is a tough one, too; life is busy, and being available for people takes time and intentionality. Margarita Mooney of Princeton Theological Seminary has written that personalism is a middle way between authoritarian collectivism and radical individualism. The former subsumes the individual within the collective. The latter uses the group to serve the interests of the self. Personalism demands that we change the way we structure our institutions. A company that treats people as units to simply maximize shareholder return is showing contempt for its own workers. Schools that treat students as brains on a stick are not preparing them to lead whole lives. The big point is that today’s social fragmentation didn’t spring from shallow roots. It sprang from worldviews that amputated people from their own depths and divided them into simplistic, flattened identities. That has to change. As Charles Péguy said, “The revolution is moral or not at all.