“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” - Ephesians 6:4
Receding into the unpathed wood, I forget for a moment how I arrived here. Here before me is glowing green moss growing on stones, fibrous tendrils of life carving away at granite. Pioneers of life scratching the surface of the dormant remains of the ancient past. It seems as if an invisible hand continuously claws at this would-be dead space pebble. Its fingernails splintering, blood spilling, the moistened fingertips of the spirit insist that life grow from stones. And it happens: beneath the lichen and fungus emerges new soil out of rock. And from this broken body emerges our daily bread.
Image: chapel at Nervous Nellie’s, Deer Isle, Maine.
If I reach back far enough, I recall what it was to be a child. I remember confessing to my mother as a child that my clearest memories seemed to all be negative — which provoked yet another one. As a child, I had no exposure to Nietzsche (yet), who says, “If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases hurting stays in the memory.”1 In the corpses of the burning past, I see a mirror. Is it karma? Is this how I treated my own children in another life? At least then it would all be my own fault. Is it fate? Then there would be no need to ask for meaning from the absurdity of the world. But, in such a case, how do I learn amor fati? How can I love something senseless without becoming senseless myself? Or, worst of all, is all this grace? In which case, how am I being taught to love? Regardless of which it is, my only path forward is enlivening the dead habits I’ve inherited.
A mother is a mirror. Whatever a mother transmutes can barely be perceived because it is the transmitted wounds we feel most. A bad mother took the brunt of bad fathers, and while she perhaps left what feels like irreparable damage, she took a sword to her own heart.
To be told by your mother, “We got along until you learned how to speak” gives a perfect image of the imperfections of motherhood. My life has been like staring at the color orange long enough that there’s an afterimage of blue. Is this Marian cyanide a blessing or a delusion? Do I taste almonds in the bath of Binah? She is every mother you never had: correcting, but patient; kind, but not doting; forgiving, but only of sincere repentance. I know exactly who Mary is because I know so little of who she is. Her vocation is the bitterness of the starry sea because she feels the pain of each of her children, though she is never a source of pain for them. The philosopher Shankara says in a prayer to the Divine Mother for the forgiveness of sins: “Though bad sons are many, never has there been a bad mother.”2 While this is patently false on the surface, I take this to mean that any bad mothers we encounter are the result of much worse fathers (and husbands). Where was Adam when Eve took the fruit? An inattentive Adam is to blame for Eve wandering, not the serpent. A mother is a mirror. Whatever a mother transmutes can barely be perceived because it is the transmitted wounds we feel most. A bad mother took the brunt of bad fathers, and while she perhaps left what feels like irreparable damage, she took a sword to her own heart.
By blood and bone, there is nothing but to claw my way and turn into new soil the heartless stone of the Puritan ideologues. Bone and blood mixed with stone. There is hardly any regeneration of the dead except through their burial. They have to be eroded until their dust becomes the subtle nourishment of future life. The wild and bold sins of my blood family seem like the stench of the primordial soup from which, on some prehistoric Friday, flopped onto land that doomed ambivalent reptile.
We were taught with unrivaled Calvinist fervor that we were born sinners. No, not just sinners. We were born into depravity. No, not just depraved, totally depraved. Not just depravity — as complete and total depravity as can be imagined with no basic goodness whatsoever. We were taught that not only did every single person merit eternal conscious torment in hell, but the consequence of this cultivated fear was that any questioning of even a single proposition of the creeds — even to ask what something meant — was a suspension of belief, which meant disbelief, which meant hellfire and brimstone. Questioning as such was implicitly painted as the portal to hell. To be boxed into a space where questioning is prohibited on principle is one of the single most violent acts that can be perpetrated on a human being. There is a Yiddish saying that goes something like: “A blow is forgotten, but an unkind word remains.” Physical pain can seriously limit someone, but if the person has an inner life and an imagination, they can soar. Harming someone’s health is even more debilitating, as they cannot live as freely as before. Moreover, the traumas we inflict on one another’s souls are even more severe. But even those traumas pale in comparison to what happens when someone restricts the spirit’s freedom of thought. Crippling the spirit limits the individual’s expression more than physical pain, harm to health, or even emotional trauma. If you render thought unthinkable to someone’s spirit, you have effectively enslaved them and crippled their soul-life. As Christ says, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”3 Someone who cannot question cannot understand, and someone who cannot understand will always make the stupid choice. And anyone who kills questioning with fear is already one with the legions of hell.
As my father frequently told guests and strangers in front of his children, “If you don’t believe in total depravity, you haven’t met my children!” This was always followed by one person (and never more) laughing. A man laughing at his own jokes is rarely good company for anyone, not even himself. Paul Schrader, director of First Reformed, feels the closest to just about anyone in the world of cinema to how my upbringing was tinged. In a July 2023 interview: “After a strict Calvinist upbringing, Schrader fell hard for the profane world…” Each in their own way, of course, but if you believe seriously that God chooses some for dishonor and some for honor and that it is purely his own capricious and arbitrary will that separates the goats from the sheep, then your will to sin is God-given. If you can’t be good, then that’s on God too. I took a hard turn away from the idiocy of my childhood, and found my own original idiocy. I estranged myself as much as possible from my childhood dogmatism and from unquestioning loyalty to elitist salvation (wherein only the top 0.1% of the world reach heaven). From the Buddhist backwaters of my native mind to the the dark alleys of occultism (and they are dark) through the watercolor aurora of Anthroposophy, into the classics of starving saints, I’ve taken many turns. Maybe only to prove my own freedom, or perhaps to win it from the cold embrace of the corpse of the past.
In his anonymous and posthumous work Meditations on the Tarot, Valentin Tomberg speaks accurately to my own experience of being raised as a heretic. As he writes, “serious heresy is a truth over-accentuated at the expense of the whole truth, i.e. at the expense of the living organism of truth.”4 The denial of the fullness of the human being under a dictator-God robs humanity of its dignity, but also of our moral agency. If I am unfree to do moral good, then I am also unfree when I do moral bad. There is no point trying at all if everything is totally determined. Moreover, theological determinism denies freedom to God: for, if we are made in his image and we are slaves of our circumstances, then God too is necessarily unfree.
No, the world is not necessary, and therefore it is free, and so is God and so are we. The only question is whether we claim our freedom and how we use it.
Nietzche, Genealogy of Morals, pg. 66
As quoted in Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, Chapter 10
Matthew 18:5-6 RSV
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, pg. 420.