[T]he Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans (Romans 8:26)
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin that each with one consent pursues newborn gods though they be made and moulded on things past (Troilus and Cressida, Act III, scene III)
The Church is a body in crisis. It fails to remember how to make use of its corpora to intercede on its behalf. We must relearn to harness order and dissonance, ballet and butoh, harmonies and drones: a fluid state, a multiplicity of being in both Truth and Spirit.
We are bodies of order, but not in the way the rationalist thinks of order. We must come to understand the seemingly spontaneous manifestations of the Holy Spirit within the Body: Weeping, laughing; quaking, dancing; prophecy, tongues. The rationalist seeks to make a fixed face of the Body but cannot and so determines it is in crisis. Rather, it is a divinely orchestrated murmuration of each member moving in a metasomatic spirit disko across time and space.
We have before us two totems. The public church, once a symbol of trust and virtue, is now a memorial of failure. The other, the church at the margins, is what appears to be a body in ontogenesis, groping in the dark, with wordless groans. Both humbling, are conditions for growth and death.
And standing just ahead, on the horizon, are the heroes of old, the men of renown. While we are still learning to speak we must speak out against them and break the world of signs and symbols. But to do so gives them permission to remove their veils and come forward from behind the shadow of the Zeitgeist. Friends and family will pick sides. But if there is any RETVRN to return to, it’s the transcendent ecstasy of the numinous, embracing radical Otherness. Without daily kenotion we have not the strength to stand for fear of the expectation of what is coming on the world. We must, therefore, become poured out and, like incense, beaten small, burned, and breathed into the very same nostrils that made dirt into life.
The text above was originally featured in the first issue of Pyr