Samain Long Nights Moon
When Hanukkah ends tonight, it will only be two days to the Winter Solstice. I long ago kicked transcendence out of my religious toolkit, believing it encourages authoritarianism, the patriarchy, and body negativity. How, you might ask? If we find our source of authority outside of ourselves, either up in heaven or with a divine father figure or anywhere outside of our body, we give away our own deepest connection to divinity, the sacred that lies within us. BTW: locating revelation in written texts does the same.
You could argue that cavalierly jettisoning a millennia old religious idea, celebrated and loved by millions, is anathema. Yes, may well be. OK with me. You could say if transcendence is real, then denying it is misguided or just plain wrong. Yes, you could say that. But if the downside of accepting transcendence includes self-oppressing, self-negating ideas, then it’s functionally bad, whether it’s true or not. So out with it.
If not up and out, then what is the direction for spiritual enlightenment? In and down. In your body/mind, and down into the depths of your soul. You say soul links us to the transcendent. Yes, you might say that. I’m more in the metaphysical world of Jungian thought though, where the soul connects us to collective unconscious, a deep stream of reality to which we belong and which belongs to us. Or, another way to think about it, the soul is our direct link to the nature of reality. It is the part of us that is eternal, that is divine and to know eternity, to know the divine, we only need know ourselves, as the Delphic Oracle said long ago.
All this to say that the Winter Solstice is my high holiday (or, low holiday) because it encourages us to go inside, to sit in the darkness, to be part of the Gaian womb from which life emerged. As we head toward it, I’m considering my eternal soul, that divine spark within which makes me holy. And you, too.
The holy scripture I choose to read starts at my fingertips, but extends into the reality around me. When I look at the lodgepole pine and its elegant means of sloughing off snow, or at Maxwell Creek as it slowly carries Shadow Mountain toward the sea, or the lenticular clouds over Black Mountain, my sense of wonder and awe increases. These close by things and I share the same building blocks, the stuff, the things that burst out so long ago in the great expansion. Just after the tzimtzum, the great contraction. There is no transcendence here, only interpenetration, the universe and its evolutionary marvels.
Down we go, into the longest night. A darkness profound enough to reshape our lives, to help us see.
After writing the post below, about slowing down, I realized I need a vacation. Time off. A break. A pause. I need to vacate the life I love for just a bit, to clear out the schmuz in my pistons. Confess I don’t know how to do that right now. Money. Visitors. Holidays. I’m considering how to do it.
Afterward, kabbalah. Three presentations. One on the idea of the holy of holies. The temple looms large in Jewish thought, in many, many ways. One on the link between the ten sefirot and a Japanese inspired version of Chinese medicine, acupressure. One on the surprisingly pervasive influence of the kabbalists in the shabbat service. All were, in their own way, interesting. Having to come up with a presentation did cement the learning for each of us, that was clear. And, they led to interesting speculations.
CC’s work with Maslow sparked a conversation about the difference between human agency in moving up the pyramid as opposed to the necessity of God’s agency. Within my worldview this is a false dichotomy, but the conversation was fruitful. It’s a false dichotomy to me for two reasons. 1. How else would God move someone up the pyramid save through human agency? 2. Since I see energy moving up and down the tree of life, from the invisible to the visible and back through the visible to the invisible, this energy flow is the key agency involved, imh. I might call it chi, or prana, or l’chaim. Could also call it divine or vitality or consciousness. I don’t see that adding God to the conversation accomplishes much.
In the end I felt heard and honored for my understanding of the relationship between the cyclical turn of the seasons and the meaning of the tree of the life to kabbalists.
Since I have long believed that the world’s religions are philosophy and poetry accessible to all, I remain eager to learn from them. Since I know their claims cannot all be true, I choose to remain outside them, yet to walk with them as part of my journey. During college, when fellow students were turning to Asian faiths: the hare krishnas, zen, tibetan mysticism, I believed that the religious traditions of the West were most culturally attuned to the American mind. I still believe that and find Judaism and its traditions and thoughts, like Christianity, trigger a depth of understanding I don’t get from the Asian faiths.
Think I’ve figured out my kabbalah presentation. Still a bit rough around the edges but that’s going to be part of it. It’ll be a how to think with the tree of the life as a touchstone example, using the Great Wheel as an instance.
This a crucial difference between a secular, scientific world view and a mystical one. Entropy posits, as I mentioned in a post not long ago, that all things die, including death, I suppose. The Great Wheel and the tree of life challenge that grim metaphysics with an alternative.
God became fractionated during the tzimtzum, the contraction of divine energy that made the finite possible. This idea is still difficult for me, but I’m just accepting it for the purposes of this presentation. During the tzimtzum the infinite light, ohr, tried to manifest in the finite, filling the space created by the contraction, but the vessel, things, (ein sof = no-things, infinity) could not hold it and shattered. That shattering created all the elements that now make up our universe. (and other universes, too) Trapped inside all of these elements is the ohr. The ascent and descent of divine energy, from the keter to malchut and backup through the sephirot to the keter from malchut, is the way the ohr will once again join with the infinite. How? No clue.
This is a malchutian manifestation, I think, of the ascent and descent and ascent again of divine energy represented by the tree of life. Why? Well, until the divine energy passes through yesod and becomes real in malchut, it is hidden, invisible, just like the vivifying function of the soil and the air and the sun is hidden during the fallow time. Both represent the cyclical nature of things coming into existence from apparent no-thing, then returning themselves to the invisible, the hidden.
The slinkys I will hand out, tiny one-inch ones, illustrate what I mean. The Great Wheel turns through one year, one orbit around the sun, then repeats and is, in that, cyclical and not chronological. But, if you link this orbit to that one we get a spiral as our rapidly moving planet follows our solar system around the galaxy at unimaginable rates of speed. The Great Wheel then extends in space, in a spiral, this year’s revolution becoming another while the whole planet and its sun captive neighbors push further and further around the Milky Way. And, just to add complexity, as the whole galaxy moves, too.
The day after the day after. See, there’s the sneaky part of our language. This is the day after the day after Thanksgiving. Yet, really, this is another day, neither after nor before, just a day on its own. Yes, it’s a little further along the third planet’s track around the sun, but it’s a spot on the orbit, so different than yesterday and tomorrow, but no different as a day than either of them save for the slightly less light occasioned by the planet’s tilt, now away from the sun for those of us in the northern hemisphere.
Anyhow leftover capon, pancetta and fig stuffing, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potato pie and caramelized sweet potatoes, pecan pie and deviled eggs rest in the fridge, awaiting their moment. The slow and the stuffed have gotten up off the couches, the beds, the chairs and started to move around again within their lives.
Jon, Ruth and Gabe and I went to Katsu Ramen for lunch. It’s close to their house, sort of, and I’ve wanted to eat there for a while. Ramen places are a very typical Japanese restaurant, more common there, I imagine, than sushi ones, because ramen is food for the masses, a sort of fast food. “Tampopo”, a Japanese movie from the mid-1980’s, features two truck drivers who learn how to cook great noodles.
Marvel has expanded its media presence to both movies and television. Spider Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, Guardians of the Galaxy, the Fantastic Four, Thor, Doctor Strange, Captain America, Iron Man all have at least one movie, some many more than that. Now on television Marvel has pulled off a rather stunning feat, populating streaming services like Netflix and Hulu with original made for television serials featuring many other Marvel characters. Right now you can watch (and I do) Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, the Punisher, the Gifted, the Runaways, the Inhumans, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Defenders and Peggy Carter.
In one sense then the Great Wheel, focused as it is on this earth, can only be of malkuth, that is, of the sphere of the actual, the bottom circle below the hand of the kabbalist in the illustration. In another sense, since all sephiroth contain all others, what is of malkuth must also be of the others, the spiritual dna of the whole universe. So, if we take the Great Wheel as a metaphor for the creating, harvesting and ending of life, a cycle without end, then the Great Wheel is, too, a Tree of Life. That is, the inanimate becomes animate, the animate lives, then dies, returning its inanimate particulars to the universe which, through the power of ongoing creation, rearranges them in living form so the cycle can go on.
I really like cooking, used to do a lot more. It requires mindfulness and produces a meal for others to enjoy. Just popping up from my days of anthropology: 
We’re not like dogs in that fundamental sense. As Emerson observed, “The days are gods.” Another binary opposition is the sacred and the profane, like the holy and the secular, ordinary time and sacred time. We imbue, out of our speculative capacity, the passing of time with certain significance. The day we were born. The yahrzeit notion in Judaism, celebrating the anniversary of a death. A day to celebrate the birth of a god, or to remember a long ago war against colonial masters. We identify certain days, a vast and vastly different number of them, as new year’s day, the beginning of another cycle marked by the return of our planet to a remembered spot on its journey.
When we merge our speculative fantasies with the chemistry of changing raw food into a beautiful cooked meal, we can have extraordinary times. The natural poetics of wonder join the very earthy act of feeding ourselves to create special memories. Very often on those days we gather with our family, a unit that itself memorializes the most basic human purpose of all, procreation of the species. We don’t tend to think of these most elemental components, but they are there and are sine qua non’s of holidays.
The tree of life, the tree of immortality guarded by the angel with the flaming sword; the tree itself still growing in paradise, concealed by language, by our senses, by the everydayness of our lives; the path back to the garden often forgotten, the exile from paradise a separation so profound that we no longer know the location of the trail head and even harder, we no longer have a desire to search for it.
But here’s the trap. Metaphor, of course! I studied philosophy, religion, anthropology in college. Then, after a few years stuck in unenlightened instinctual behavior-the storied sex, drugs and rock and roll of the sixties and seventies-I moved to seminary. The trap tightened. I learned about the church, scripture old and new, ethics, church history. It was exhilarating, all this knowledge. I soaked it up. I remained though stuck in the intellectual triad, pushing back and forth between the polarity of intuitive wisdom, hochmah, and analytical thought, binah, often not going on to daat, or understanding. I learned, but did not integrate into my soul.
My heart knew I had gotten lost, in exile once again. In Dante’s words in Canto 1 of the Divine Comedy:
At the time of its crumbling another path had begun to open for me. Fiction writing emerged when, ironically, I began writing my Doctor of Ministry thesis. Instead of working on it I ended up with 30,000 plus words of what would become my first novel, Even The Gods Must Die. Irony in the title, too, I suppose.
Even so, I sat behind the barrier, the flaming sword, the metaphor trap. Beth Evergreen and Rabbi Jamie Arnold have started me on a journey back to where I began, immersed in the dark. Seeking for the light, yes, but happy now in the darkness, too. The Winter Solstice long ago became my favorite holiday of the year.
But. At Beth Evergreen I have begun to feel my way back into the fourth triad, the mystery I first encountered on the hard wooden pews in Alexandria, the one pulsing behind the metaphors of tenebrae, of crucifixion, of resurrection, and now of Torah, of language, of a “religious” life. I knew it once, in the depth of my naive young boy’s soul. Now, I may find it again, rooted in the old man he’s become.
Three nights in a row at Beth Evergreen. Challenging for this early to bed, early to rise guy. Though. Kabbalah fascinated me. I’m beginning to feel my way into the occult, again. The hidden wonders. This time around I may be able to actually hold at arm’s length the cultural vehicles and not resist the message because of the messengers. That is, kabbalah, in particular, has a poetic, evocative, confounding approach that speaks to my sense of absurdity. And, my in but not of relationship to Judaism also allows me a critical distance that I find very helpful.
This story works for me. The imagery is something I can relate to because I’m human. Honor is so important and so often gotten wrong. Think, for example, about the instance of DJT honoring America First; just as Kim Jong Un honors himself and North Korea first. Or the gang member who feels dissed, disrespected, dishonored. A sense of kavod would have prevented the shooting in Las Vegas, the holocaust. It would prevent child abuse and domestic violence. Harming another whose dignity and respect is as worthy as your own is just not possible.
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