Ash Woden’s Day
And so Lent begins today. This is the first year since my awkward and stumbling embrace of Catholicism began that I will not be observing the day or the season. It is a fitting coincidence that today also marks the anniversary of my receiving my honorable discharge from the United States Marine Corps and became a civilian again. Leaving the Corps was an interesting experience, bringing with it a feeling of being unmoored and yet settled on a somewhat shrouded path. That’s a good description of how I feel today. I look outside and see the tiniest patches of green in the woods and little emerald dots along the length of the supple branches. Life has been slumbering and hiding, but its power and force are returning, will return, will sing out in its loud, matchless voice. The frost will steal in some morning and kill the blossoms and send the tiny things into retreat, but this retreat will be temporary. The rolling year will bring its signs and wonders, and the life that hums across the hide of the earth will rise and be about it business in its countless forms. This knowledge is the closest thing to faith that I possess right now, but I hold it in a tight grip, and it is good.
In the months that my views have been evolving and my questions multiplying, my interactions with others have grown curiously silent. With the exception of a small group of friends who still engage me with questions and observations, most of those who were once so enthusiastic about my spiritual meanderings have gone quiet. This is to be expected, I suppose, because most people are more than happy to agree with someone who agrees with them, but questions can come to be a fearful thing. People fear the questions being contagious, that some virus may infect their own spirit and cause them to ask, to question, to pause. I understand, and I say “Bless ’em.” And I see the soundless time in which I have been spending my days as a blessing indeed, because it has given me time to sit still and think my nonthoughts, and to chew on the things that I often tend to set aside as gristle or bone.
No ashes will mark my forehead today. There are no foods from which I will be abstaining for the next forty days. I have no commitments to attend any services or masses or gatherings. I am a spiritual civilian again, my discharge papers being freshly signed by my own soul, and now yet another uniform has been folded into a footlocker, and I will rub my hand across my nonregulation haircut and smile to myself as I continue trying to find my way into the land of whatever is coming next.
It’s a fine day outside here. I hope it is for you, too, dear readers.
~ S. K. Orr
6 Comments
James
A bit late with the reply S.K., but I have been thinking about news casts in general, and what prompted me to turn my back on them.
It was a state of the union address (I can’t recall which administration) but a broadcaster came on and the first thing he said was this.
“Now let me tell you what the President said.”
What! I was sitting right here, I heard what he said!
It soon became clear that this umm, journalist (yah, I’ll go with that) was telling me what the President actually meant.
Since then, the only news person I listen to is the paper boy when comes around to collect.
admin
Yes, I’ve heard the media talking heads say that sort of thing many times, James. One thing I’m constantly mindful of is the Gell-Mann Amnesia syndrome. I have caught myself many, many times falling prey to this mental lapse, and it’s helpful and enlightening to remind myself of the sort of trickery my own brain can pull on me.
Good to hear from you, brother.
NLR
Rules and regulations can be readily captured in writing and so it is easier to talk about Tradition. You can also speak and write more precisely, while trying to capture what the Traditional world was really like is significantly harder. That is probably one reason why so much Traditionalist discourse is in those terms.
I mentioned the Anglo-Saxon poet Caedmon in a comment in this blog a while ago. Back then, if you were a cowherd who suddenly gained he gift of poetry in a dream, you could find someone wise to advise you. You might even find miracle-workers somewhere nearby.
The Traditional world encompassed all of life and that’s something that can’t easily be captured on paper. It takes time to take in what it was like and even then you can’t fully recapture it.
I don’t have insight into deep theological conundrums. I can read what other people write and think about it, but that’s about it. Unfortunately, in this era there seems to be a lot of normal people and not many saints nearby.
One thing I try to do is start with things I understand well and then build out from there.
Currently, one thing I have been thinking about is prayers for the dead. I do believe that we can help them with our prayers. The twentieth and twenty-first ccenturies have had a lot of problems and who knows what those who lived through them are doing after death. But hopefully, we can assist them.
admin
I appreciate the comment, NLR. So true that there are precious few saints, or even people with spiritual depth.
The topic of prayers for the dead has been one to which I’ve devoted considerable thought. Even outside the Roman Catholic fence, it seems that our ancestors (the Norse, Celtic, Aryan, etc.) did offer prayers for the dead, and this ancestral/cultural connection is compelling and appealing to me. I talk to some of my deceased relatives (most notably my mother) on an ongoing basis. Perhaps this is for me, perhaps it is for the departed.
Thank you again for stopping by and for commenting, NLR.
James
“And I see the soundless time in which I have been spending my days as a blessing indeed, because it has given me time to sit still and think my nonthoughts, and to chew on the things that I often tend to set aside as gristle or bone.”
Well Sir, once again you have stated something I needed to hear.
Old man winter finally got serious, and while we can get out and go I simply have not wanted to. I have spent the time with a mix of hauling in bags of pellets, reading and re-reading old books, and listening to music on YouTube.
A side note here is that I tend to avoid “news” programs.
I see them as someone else’s slant on an issue and not necessarily honest or a factual account.
admin
So good to hear from you, James.
Since winter has you in its grip, I feel almost guilty looking outside and seeing the greening up of the countryside. But I don’t feel guilty because I know that Old Man Winter, that devious trickster, is just waiting for me to let down my guard. He’s not done with us yet.
And yeah, “news” is bullshit propaganda. There is not one single news outlet in any form, be it print, online, radio, or television, that I trust to any degree. They’re all liars and pimps for the narrative. There’s no such thing as a “journalist,” if ever there really was such a thing. I am enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe that the pharmaceutical poobahs underwrite the news media because they know it will create a market demand for their antihypertensive “medications.”