Michael Martin's Blog, page 15

JESUS THE IMAGINATION: Call for Submissions, “The Garden”

Jesus the Imagination: A Journal of Spiritual Revolution is now inviting submissions for our fourth volume, “The Garden.” We invite poetry, essays, artwork, and photography exploring this theme, so rich in its implications. JTI’s recent issues have contemplated “Christ-Orpheus” and “The Being of Marriage” and have featured interviews with Owen Barfield, The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, and Therese Schroeder-Sheker, as well as work by Emi Shigeno, Aaron Rich, and Elias Crim among ma...

In the Season of This Our Exile

Notes on chronos and kairos: I. I am not under the impression that Christians realize the import of the words “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Christians are too devoted to politics for that to be possible, or so it seems from the timbre of much of what currently passes for Christian discourse. Not the Kingdom we were looking for. The Parousia is not to come, but is. Perhaps this is too much to bear. Perhaps we prefer deferral. II. Considering Margaret Barker’s argument that the canon o...

Announcing: The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz

This day, this day, this, this The Royal Wedding is. Art thou thereto by Birth inclin’d, And unto joy of God design’d, Then may’st thou to the Mountain tend, Whereon three stately Temples stand, And there see all from end to end. Keep watch, and ward, Thy self-regard; Unless with diligence thou bathe, The Wedding can’t thee harmless save: He’ll dammage have that here delays; Let him beware, too light that weighs. Sponsus Sponsa Thus reads the invitation Christian Rosenkreutz receives that beg...

The Rose and the Cross, or How to Be a Rosicrucian

I don’t remember where I first heard the term “Rosicrucian.” In fact, it almost seems as if I’ve always been aware of Rosicrucianism: which is not possible. However, I do recall the first time I actively sought some concrete information about the mysterious brotherhood. It was probably 1984 or so, and I went to the Mayflower Bookshop in Berkley, Michigan and asked for a book on the subject. The proprietor directed me to Rudolf Steiner’s Rosicrucian Esotericism, transcripts from a series of le...

Mystical Marriage, Sex, and the Eucharist: A User’s Guide

In his Stromateis, Clement of Alexandria bestows some advice for husbands and wives (technically, only for husbands—he wasn’t interested in addressing wives) concerning their participation in “the conjugal act”: “A man must marry exclusively for the sake of begetting children, Therefore, he must practice continence, so that he does not feel desire, not even for his wife.”1 Okay, so that’s kind of a mood-killer. Clement’s advice here continues to permeate the Christian psyche in rather a perni...

Jacob Boehme on the Virgin Mary as the Incarnation of Sophia

In observation of the Feast of the Assumption, I thought I'd share an excerpt from my book The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics on Jacob Boehme's thoughts on the Virgin Mary and Sophia. Central to Boehme’s Christology—and the locus of its intersection with his Sophiology—is the role of the Virgin Mary. First of all, Mary is for Boehme the vessel of the Incarnation, “a bright Morning-Star, above other Stars.”1 Boehme esteems her above all other creatures, much...

“Like the first morning”: For Love of Eleanor Farjeon

I didn’t know it until very late, but two of my all-time favorite songs boast lyrics by the British poet, essayist, and maker of (ostensibly) children’s stories, Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1964). The first song I’ve known since childhood, courtesy of Cat Stevens’ (aka Yusuf Islam) glorious recording “Morning Has Broken,” the lyrics of which had previously been adapted for the Anglican hymnal, though Farjeon’s original title was “A Morning Song (for the First Day of Spring).” The words, so simple a...

The Irreducible Gap: The Paradox of Valentin Tomberg

Recently, I found myself getting pretty excited about the impending publication of Angelico Press’s edition of Valentin Tomberg’s magnum opus, known in English as Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Mysticism. My excitement started when I was allowed a sneak peak and opportunity to copyedit some of the paratexts for the edition. The paratexts—by Ernst von Hippel, Robert Spaemann, and Hans Urs von Balthasar—are practically worth the price of the book. Tomberg’s book, which has i...

THE METAXU BETWEEN CHRIST AND ORPHEUS, LIFE AND DEATH: AN INTERVIEW WITH THERESE SCHROEDER-SHEKER

This is an excerpt from my recent interview with Therese Schroeder-Sheker for JESUS THE IMAGINATION, VOL 3: CHRIST-ORPHEUS. You can read the entire interview and an essay by Therese in the print version. When Therese Schroeder-Sheker was an undergraduate music student working as an orderly in a geriatric nursing home, she saw at firsthand how death in contemporary culture is outsourced, how the elderly and declining among us are warehoused in containment environments until finally sent to the...

Christian Neopaganism for Dummies

for Tyler Happy Solstice. It was on this day in the Year of Our Lord One-Thousand and Ninety-Two that my very pregnant wife (she was four months along, but looked ten) and I attended a “Summer Greeting Rite” at the invitation of a friend, a millionaire composer and esotericist (I almost wrote “esoterrorist”) and his wife, a professor of psychology. The Rite, I was told, was brought to Canada by British expatriates who still practiced “the Old Religion” (meaning some sort of pre-Christian folk...