“And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” ~ Joel 2:28
Part of my vocation as a poet no doubt has something to do not only with my fascination with wordplay and music as a child, but equally with an almost atavistic interest in the possibility of visions. This certainly has something to do with my Catholic upbringing—but we were working class Detroit Catholics, not exactly pious, though certainly church-going. Rather, it was grounded in stories of the saints—especially Joan of Arc’s encounter with St. Michael the Archangel and the encounters with the Lady related by St. Bernadette and the children at Fatima. I remember as a young boy being mesmerized by the performance of the luminous Jennifer Jones at the titular character in the 1943 film The Song of Bernadette, especially the scenes in which Bernadette sees the beautiful lady.
I was also transported, though not quite to ecstasy, when serving as an altar boy at my parish (it’s always been easy for me to “get into the vibe of the moment”). My mother once overheard a woman at church saying of me, “Who was that little boy up there? He looked so holy.”—which caused my poor mom to nearly choke on her stale doughnut during the coffee hour. I just looked like I had disappeared. The same thing happens even today when I improvise on the guitar or prune an apple tree. I disappear.
In elementary school, I used my library privileges to read as many saint stories as I could find, particularly those which involved visions of Jesus, the Virgin, or angels. Of these, I was particularly taken with the Horizons Caravel book Joan of Arc, which was filled with an abundance of color illustrations and much historical information. One image (that above) haunted me for decades after checking the book out from the library at the age of eleven. At least twenty-five years later, while combing through the stacks of a used bookstore (one of my native environments), I found a copy of the book. The strange thing is that over the intervening years this image had grown in me—and when I found it in the book, for all its beauty, it seemed smaller and less real than it was in my imagination, in my soul. What is that?
But Catholic school in 1970s Detroit was not unlike going to the joint, and after putting up with the violence of some holy sisters upon my flesh with the business end of a pointer (though there were good nuns too) and a brush with a pedophile priest, I was done with the Catholic Church by the age of eighteen. (I would return twelve years later, as idiosyncratic and heterodox as the return has been at times.) But I was not done with my fascination with visions and religious experience.
As many of us do, in my twenties I explored the various religious movements around me. I became somewhat familiar with Tibetan Buddhism (quite a few of my friends were adherents) and various New Age groups. But the people outside of my own Catholic sensibility (which never left me—it’s like DNA) with whom I most resonated were the neopagans and the Hare Krishnas. They were, on the whole, nicer people than the Buddhists (who tended to get a bit preachy and doctrinaire—kind of a turn-off). Even when I returned to Catholicism, I had a client in my gardening and landscaping business who, along with her husband, was a practicing pagan. She would come out to garden and talk to me while I worked, and I’d tell her about various natural remedies and tricks to use in gardening. Once during one of these impromptu tutorials, she interrupted me and said, “Michael, you’re the most pagan person I know.” A lot of people say the same thing nowadays, but she meant it as a compliment.
I had much more exposure to the Hare Krishnas. Detroit at that time was home to a sizable community of Krishnas, most famously Elisabeth Reuther (daughter of the famed UAW leader) and Alfred Brush Ford (great-grandson of Henry). In fact, I taught Reuther’s children when I was a fledgling Waldorf teacher; at that time there were a number of Krishna kids at the school, and I had a few in my classes. They and their parents were without question some of my favorite people in that community. They were always cheerful, always kind, and extraordinarily generous. I have nothing but good to say about them.
But, as I’ve written before, five years before becoming a Waldorf teacher, when I was still a working musician, I was already friends with a number of Krishnas and was a habitual visitor to the free vegetarian Sunday feasts that were held at Detroit’s Fisher Mansion (purchased by Reuther and Ford in 1975). That food was SO GOOD! It was around this time that I had a vision or intuition of Krishna’s (or Vishnu’s, if you want to get technical) avatar as Kalki, the rider on a white horse who comes at the end of time. I posted a poem I wrote about the experience here last summer (it appears in my forthcoming book of poetry, Mythologies of the Wild of God.)
Now I am not saying this was a “real” vision, but it was significant—and in ways that, like faerie gold, vanish when subject to rationalization or dissection. I’m also not saying it was “really” the Kalki avatar. In fact, I suspect it was Jesus in disguise. But it was as real as anything I’ve experienced. As I mention in an upcoming Regeneration Podcast interview with John Vervaeke (it drops next weekend), I think these kinds of spiritual presences appear to us in an imaginal vocabulary fitting to the time and place—much like the scene in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth when the fairies conform to Ofelia’s expectation of what they should look like (you can see it here in the trailer).
Vervaeke, as many of you might know, in his recent conversation with psychologist Jordan Peterson has received a little (“A little,” he says!) pushback (mostly from Orthobros and Traddies) about his own “vision” of Hermes—which is the central theme of the conversation Mike and I held with him.
Now, as a poet, a philosopher, and a scholar of literature, all I can say is that visionary experience is central to both poesis and religious experience. William Blake. Yeats. Tolkien. Marguerite Porete. Hildegard of Bingen. I can’t tell where the poetry ends and the mysticism begins, where the mysticism ends and the poetry begins. Can you? Such an aporia is unavoidable. But that doesn’t mean spiritual experiences are all good or beneficial, either. As I mention in a delightful conversation Mike and I just had with my dear friend and co-conspirator Lindsay Rose, “The are just as many jerks in the Otherworld as there are in this one.” In the film version of The Last Temptation of Christ, for instance, John the Baptist tells Jesus, who is about to go into the desert following his baptism, “Be careful. God isn’t alone out there.”
The gauzy border between religious experience and poetic imagination, in fact, is a theme in Evelyn Underhill’s monumental Mysticism (1911), which bears the subtitle: “A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness.” The opening sentences of her book are worth repeating in full:
“The most highly developed branches of the human family have in common one peculiar characteristic. They tend to produce—sporadically, it is true, and usually in the teeth of adverse external circumstances—a curious and definite type of personality; a type which refuses to be satisfied with that which other men call experience, and is inclined, in the words of its enemies, to ‘deny the world in order that it may find reality.’”
As consciousness studies are more and more revealing, there is more to reality than meets the eye. But the mystics and poets have been telling us this for millennia. Science might catch up in another century. You never know. Miracles are known to happen.
My own scholarly work has been in primarily focused on religious experience, primarily in literary works (in particular the Metaphysical Poets) and in phenomenological inquiry. And this professional interest—which is also profoundly personal—led me to Sophiology as a kind of “safer” or more practical mysticism. But even that investigation began with a vision, that of Vladimir Solovyov, when I read of his three visions of the Divine Sophia (whom he called “My Eternal Friend”). Then I found that same thing happened with Jacob Boehme, Jane Lead, John Pordage, Thomas Merton, Teilhard de Chardin, William Everson, and countless others.
One of my concerns is that, because of the hyper-materialistic cultural milieu in which we in the West have been mired for the past few centuries, we have lost the capacities for contemplation and attentiveness that characterized earlier ages. As a result, we have lost what William Desmond calls “the porosity of being” that is our birthright. I also worry that the collapse of the humanities and exposure to poetry, literature, music, and the arts in education has impoverished the souls of untold millions of people, so that not only their imaginations but their spiritual sensitivities have atrophied. I think this results in a culture lacking in the spiritual organs of perception requisite for discerning spiritual presences, both holy and demonic. And, trust me, those on Team Demon are fine with this. It makes their job all the easier.
In closing, allow me to share these stanzas of the Irish poet and visionary A.E. (George William Russell) from his poem, “The Twilight of Earth”:
We dwindle down beneath the skies, And from ourselves we pass away: The paradise of memories Grows ever fainter day by day. The shepherd stars have shrunk within, The world’s great night will soon begin. Will no one, ere it is too late, Ere fades the last memorial gleam, Recall for us our earlier state? For nothing but so vast a dream That it would scale the steps of air Could rose us from so vast despair. The power is ours to make or mar Our fate as on the earliest morn, The darkness and the Radiance are Creatures within the spirit born. Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might Forget how we imagined light.
Let’s not forget how to imagine light in this Age of Darkness.
I know you thought I would have a different Van Morrison song, but this one, in my opinion, is even more a work of mysticism. Here in a take by The Waterboys.
You may enjoy this. Something I wrote years ago.
Michelangelo and William Blake were right about God.
From a Biblical perspective the nature of God is seen as reflected in aspects of the created order. Yes, God to a certain degree does have the nature of space, wind, emptiness, mist, air, sky, force, energy, light, darkness so congenial to Buddhist/Hindu/New Age types. However humans as being made in the image of God, are the best representation of what God is like – especially a human at their highest development, a mature, wise, good, vital 50+ man or woman. I knew a dynamic, spiritual woman in her late sixties, another one in her eighties. They both reminded me of a female God the Father carrying personal authority and full of love and kindness and approachable.
To me saying God is NOT like a man – Our Father in Heaven - is dumbing God down, making God less than what he is, flattening the divine out, a less than human gas. In a true sense since humans are made in the divine image, humaness is intrinsic to God, God is even MORE human than we are, as our humanity is but an image of that which is being imaged. though divine humanity is an infinite multidimensional cube compared to our simple flat squares. God is even more perfectly human than us who are echoes, a flatter image of him.
There is much wisdom and truth in Michelangelo’s and William Blake’s depictions of God as a dynamic, active, wise older man. Far from being simplifications of God they point to his personal depth, his danger, his joy and love and perfect humanness and the familiarity and commonality we encounter when we meet him for he is like us for we are patterned after him.
In all this talk of a wild Christianity I see no talk of the wild spiritual life of Jesus had with God the Father. A wild life we can also have as being fellow sons of God filled with the Holy Spirit – John 1:12, Galatians 3:26, 4:6. A wild Christianity with the Father because it is empowered by the Holy Spirit doesn’t need nature immersion to happen, though having the privilege of nature immersion I suppose may be a useful adjunct for many. After all when Jesus gave prayer instructions in Matthew 6 he said to close the door to your room!, not to go forest bathing.
When you look at the actual spirituality espoused by Jesus and practiced by him in the Gospels it is utterly unfashionable by those who look to non-dual awareness, and “Christ Consciousness” "ground of being” as the ticket. No, nothing as ethereal as that! A Father in heaven, “pray to your Father who is there unseen”. Jesus was by no means ashamed of the old man and talked about and to him a whole lot. God speaking in an audible voice, expectation of specific even miraculous answers to prayer, lifting eyes in prayer, a robust intensely personal God the Father that isn’t you, but you can know, and directly know his love for you as an individual.
Jesus on the cross cried out “My God, my God why have you forsaken me” far from being a cry of abandonment it was act of teaching and prophetic proclamation – which was a part of his job at the time, it was a quote from the first line of Psalm 22 which contains prophecy of what was happening at the moment, and was a statement of deep faith and knowing.
I could go on and on with more examples from all over the Bible of this wonderful dualistic experience of the Living God. The Father made us as individual humans and intends to keep us that way. This is all very childlike as Jesus says we are to be. I know vigorous attempts have been made to squeeze this knowing of the Father and the Biblical record into a new orthodoxy of a “wiser” quasi-Buddhism.
However The final state presented as the ultimate is us embodied as individual humans even as Jesus is now, in the presence of God, in a new physical creation of multiplicity, filled with the Holy Spirit, not generic vanilla pudding non-duality. Sounds like fun to me, which all children delight in.
By William Blake - we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice. . . . . . And round the tent of God like lambs we joy . . .
To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee
Visionary appearances of Jesus to ordinary people I know have occurred over the years. It is much more common than people realize. One story - A elderly Jewish woman from an orthodox background I have known for 30 years (now 98) had one 40 years ago. Her son had become a Christian. He had been giving her a standard evangelical message - Jesus died for your sins, he is the son of God, believe in him for eternal life and so on. One day Jesus appeared to her, she exclaimed, “Lord, you’re younger than I expected!” She then felt his love settle on her and she cried out, “ You love me like I love my grand children” She has walked with the Lord since. When she saw her son next she chastised him for not clearly telling her about the love of Jesus.
Do a bit of online research and you will see that visionary and dream appearances of Jesus have been happening to Muslims in the Middle East resulting in conversions.