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Saint John of the Apple

It is apple season in the northern hemisphere, and the varieties of apples busshel-ing their way into markets are beautiful and bewildering; with names and reputations plucked straight from a fairy tale.  I find the russet-and-yellow displays alluring.  Their scents intoxicate me with the anticipation of a crisp, tart bite.  I remember startling a door-to-door surveyor with the extensive types of apple I could list off: Royal Gala, Fuji, Braeburn, McIntosh, Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, Jonagold, Pink Lady, Jazz, and even the misleadingly called Red Delicious, to name a few.  That is not to mention the less known but eccentrically named Hoople's Antique Gold, Scotch Dumpling, Queen Cox, and Flamenco (these I did not name).

It is during the height of apple harvest when Americans celebrate the birthday of one, Johnny Appleseed, on September 26th -- three days shy of Michaelmas.

Johnny Appleseed is an historical figure who has taken up a role in Americana much as a folk hero would.  The descriptions of his character, his dress and life events, sound very much to me like a saint's hagiography.  It's interesting therefore that even in the thoroughly Protestant former-British colony, the human collective mind raises figures of semi-mythological significance; a figure around whom to hinge their rhythms and traditions.  This man, born Jonathan Chapman, was a missionary for The New Church (of the Swedenborgian persuasion), making the similarities of Johnny and the wandering, preaching hermit even more striking.  In one oral tradition, Johnny was supposed to have healed a lame wolf, who afterwards became his constant companion -- a story sounding straight out of the life of Saint Francis of Assisi.  

What Johnny Appleseed is most known for, however, is the tradition every American schoolchild can tell: that of the barefooted, scraggly-bearded, pan-hatted man, who walked the Midwest countryside planting apple seeds.  He seems to me a kind of Green Man, or a Tom Bombadil, mysterious and benevolent.  He is an emissary of nature, partway bridging the gap between the garden of Eden and fallen men.  A spirit whose communion rekindles in us something of that early sanctifying grace.  It is a fearful symmetry that the fruit responsible for our recollection is an apple.

I am no agriculturist, but edible apples, I am told by those who know better, are all clones.  You get a good apple, you graft from the tree in order to get more good apples.  Growing from the seed might get you something hard, deformed, or sour.  Johnny had religious objections to grafting, so the seeds he planted were all genetically different -- wild and unique -- but not necessarily good for eating.  What were good for?  Cider.  One imagines Johnny being heartily welcomed by pioneers thirsty for fortifying liquor.  In this way, Johnny Applessed is an American saint who comes bearing drink, much as Saint Brigid of Ireland came bearing beer.*

By planting nurseries and leaving them in the care of others to raise into orchards, there is a bit of the Robin Hood flavour to Johnny as well, sharing wealth with the common folk, asking for naught in return but a floor to sleep on.

I am of the hearty belief that human beings sometimes transcend their individuality to step into an archetype of the universal story.  Saints took these roles, bearing their lamps across many dark centuries, like beacons in a dark world.  Saint Christopher is a type of Christ, carrying the weight of the world's sin over treacherous waters.  Saint Brendan voyages to strange lands, scattering the seeds of the Gospel as the Master commanded.  

Salvation history doesn't stand alone and far away, but draws near, intimate.  It invites us mortals into the eternal story.  Like a cosmic mystery play, we enter into these roles, for better or worse.

+JMJ+

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

* One of the more delightful tales of Brigid's hagioraphy is when she worked the miracle of turning bathwater into beer.

A Poem for Michaelmas

Let slip past the friendly ghosts

of summer last and lost friends,

o sainted angel, o heavy halo-headed, lift

your binding sword and watch

at autumn’s gates. Old Scratch chafes

against his cyclical disgrace – pricked

by over-ripe field-fruit brambles, like

some vulgar bear by fury’s bees. Honey-

noted afternoons chase the frothed skirts

of misted mornings, and elder bedlam elderberry,

strained for syrup, soaks heavy and sweet,

casts off youthful sobriety. Indoors the copper kettle

scratches a sound like cold-in-the-throat, and without

a northerly wind skims the beech-branches, teasing

he will soon tickle them from leaf-frocks –

but not yet! Blackberries settle thorny-down

in hedgerow barracks, tucking themselves

into contemplation. Michaelmas is for settling

accounts.

+JMJ+

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

Hallowe'en

One of the (many) things I love about Hallowe'en, is that it is one of the few times in modern life that you can approach a neighbour's and expect joyful and spontaneous hospitality.

 
It also invites the community to come together and consider the littlest ones: do the mobility challenged need help climbing the porch step?  Come down to them, heck, set up a water bottle stand in the col-de-sac.  Non-verbal autistic child?  The blue pumpkin pail signals people not to expect a "trick-or-treat" or a "thank you" but that someone has considered a child's needs and included them.  Food intolerances?  Plastic spider rings and homemade toys like felted acorns are wonderful surprises!

Even the dead are included.  In Mexico and eastern Europe, the deceased are invited to a meal with their loved ones, and we pray for one another, the dead for the living, the living for the dead.  We acknowledge that the threshold between life and death is only temporary, and that Christ steps easily over it.  Nobody is forgotten.

I wish modern western society still participated in holy days and festivals.  We've lost our sense of belonging to one another.  On this one night a year, we remember.

+JMJ+

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Writing and Rest

I've been meditating recently on the writing process.  I struggle with habit, in both the spiritual and creative life, but I'm starting to be reconciled to the notion that, perhaps, this is just how I write.  I've no shortage of ideas, but my pattern is this: I will work tirelessly on a project for six weeks to two months and then run out of steam.  I may then lay fallow for several months before the sadness of not writing catches up to me.  Then I am swept up again by inspiration which will not leave me alone.  

Part of letting my charism of writing work in partnership with me rather than struggling with it, is allowing it to be what it is.  I am comforted recollecting that Tolkien took decades to write his magnum opus, often going for years without progress, putting aside the work close to his heart to tend to his family and community.

A friend pointed out to me that productivity is deceptive.  Just because nothing visible is being produced does not mean that the resting is wasted.  The opposite is true.  The field lies fallow, but down deep, the earth is working and preparing unseen for the growing time.

I don't want writing to be an adversary to my contentedness.  I don't want to feel unproductive and failing during the times I am not actively writing.  My writing life goes through seasons, and wintering is a part of that.  I remind myself that everything that is, was loved into being.

+JMJ+

Photo by Greg Keelen on Unsplash

The Artist's Vocation and the Greatest Commandment in The Banshees of Inisherin

Pursuing the artistic impulse while also obeying the Christian injunction to leave all one's possessions, take up one's cross, and follow Him feels conflicted at its core.  The call to create the true, the good, the beautiful is no small order, and can feel like a mighty vocation.  It takes time, space, emotional commitment.  As a writer and poet, I find my attempts at touching the divine through art often frustrated by the earthly demands of children and family, community and parish.  But like the poet and priest, R.S. Thomas, who wrote of his parishioner's untimely interruption, I must often put down my pen to attend to my immediate duties before me.  Alas, I do not always turn to them gracefully!

It was this particular conflict which struck me in The Banshees of Inisherin, the 2022 film by Martin McDonagh, starring some of my favourite actors: Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell (not to mention Colin Farrell's eyebrows, which deserve an Oscar in their own right).  The tragicomedy is one of a triad in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor's violent grace (the others being In Bruges and Calvary, also a favourite of mine); and, like O'Connor's Christ-haunted South, deals with the cultural wasteland in the souls of a people who can neither abandon nor fully enter into the beatific vision.

The end of a friendship

The plot is deceptively simple.  On a remote island off the mainland during the Irish Civil War, Colm Sonny Larry breaks with his long-time friend Pádraig, telling him he wants no more contact because, in his own words, he just doesn't like him anymore.  The reality is more complex.  Pádraig is simple, a bore even.  What Colm calls a "limited man."  And Colm has a calling, a vocation, to music.  With his banjo and fiddle, he wishes to leave something substantial behind, a shining offering remembered in the years to come, transcending death and mortality.  It is a noble enough aspiration.  But each day spent humouring his dull friend chips away at the time he has left.  He longs for "silence," for "peace in [his] heart."

What follows is a humorously outrageous attempt by Colm to get Pádraig to leave him alone.  I sympathise.  We've all communed with people from time to time who don't "get the message."  We may even be tempted to resort to something desperate. Setting boundaries is a reasonable enough ask.  In Colm's case, he chooses to cut off a finger every time Pádraig speaks to him.  It is shocking.  Until you look closer and realize that the exchange is wildly appropriate -- for each precious moment he spends with Pádraig means one less devoted to his art.  Might as well cut off a finger.  That's how tedious he finds him.

The careful attention paid to the environment is masterful.  There's a sense of a place suspended on Inisherin, stalled and stunted.  It's the twenties, but the villagers see by the flames of  lanterns, and the women cover their heads with shawls to attend Sunday service.  The island is a world on its own, and not for the better.  Once again, it is reasonable to sympathise with Colm's frustration.  Their dwellings underline the juxtaposition between the two aging men.  Pádraig depends on his spinster sister, not noticing her loneliness.  He surrounds himself with his animals, dumb beasts whom he loves like children -- even letting them into the house! -- and his routine never bores him.  In contrast, Colm's sparse cottage houses, not common farm animals, but kabuki masks, marionettes, and other foreign treasures.  One can see he has scope.  He has knowledge.  He is not "limited."

A scene in the confessional reveals Colm's previous struggle with despair.  Since putting aside his affiliation with Pádraig and devoting himself to his music, despair's grip is weakened.  So when he finishes his composition, one can be excused for thinking perhaps things can return to normal.  Pádraig certainly thinks so, and Colm even agrees to their ritual drink.  But then Pádraig lets slip in passing that he interfered with one of Colm's students.  Colm realizes his first instinct was right -- "I just don't have a place for dullness in me life anymore."  He cuts off the remainder of his four fingers and leaves them (hurls them--??) at Pádraig's front door.  

Tragedy follows.  Pádraig's last friend, Dominic, shuns him for his selfish albeit humorous prank on Colm's music student.  ("I used to think you were the nicest of them.")  Pádraig's sister Siobhán leaves for a job on the mainland, not intending to return.  Pádraig's beloved donkey, Jenny, chokes on one of Colm's bloody digits, and Padráig vows revenge.  He tells Colm he will burn down his house at 2 o'clock on Sunday, whether or not he is in it; but to leave Colm's dog outside.  He would never hurt a dog.  "You're the only nice thing about him."

To me, the film is a requiem, a merry wake for a wholeness striven for and misplaced.  In his quest for meaningful things, good things, Colm ruthlessly shuns Pádraig, setting off a chain of events that rob Pádraig of his (naïve, even foolish) innocence.  "You used to be nice," Pádraig accuses his ex-friend in a drunken confrontation.  And then, with heart-breaking realisation, "Maybe you never used to be."

And there it is -- because Colm merely tolerated the irksome Pádraig until he gave in to the temptation that his time was worth something better.  Colm is not a bad man; neither is he a good one.  He comes nearest to redemption when he confesses the accidental death of Pádraig's miniature donkey.  God doesn't care about miniature donkeys, the priest harangues him.  "I fear he doesn't," is Colm's reply, "and I fear that's where it's all gone wrong."

But the truth is that God does care; it is Colm who does not.  For in some mystery, fate ordained him the friend of a simple creature, in Pádraig; but Colm decided to no longer suffer fools gladly.  Despair returns.  Colm could not put aside what he saw as a worthier calling to minister to one of these "little ones."  His neglect of the greatest commandment -- to love his neighbour as himself -- robs him his peace and happiness.  "If I have the gift [...] but have not love, I am nothing" (1 Corinthians 13:2).

The bigger "picture"

Jenny the donkey is not the only casualty of Colm's pursuit.  The kerfuffle shakes out some unpleasant truths about the village dullard Dominic, whose father beats and molests him.  After a kindly rejection of his advances from Siobhán, Dominic drowns in a lake -- whether by his own hand or no is unclear.  But the dour elderly woman, Mrs. McCormick, has predicted two deaths, and two deaths indeed follow.  Colm names his composition, "The Banshees of Inisherin," mostly because he likes the sibilance.  But the only banshee on Inisherin is Mrs. McCormick, who "just sit[s] back, amused and observe[s]."

Colm escapes his burning house but hopes that the arson means an end to the feud.  Pádraig declines.  Colm has, inadvertently, made Pádraig mean.  He has corrupted the innocent.  He has followed a calling at the expense of his friend.

I do not mean to put art and virtue at odds with one another.  To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the one who surrenders his life to Christ keeps not only his life, but everything else thrown in with it.

These themes are dealt with with delicacy and deftness by J.R.R. Tolkien, in his late-in-life work Leaf by Niggle.  In the shore tale -- the closest Tolkien came to ever writing an allegory -- the little man named Niggle works at painting a leaf but is constantly interrupted by the demands of a neighbour.  He does not want to put away his paints and canvass to attend to the helpless Mr. Parish; but he knows it is his duty.  He does so, with the result that his painting suffers.  At his death (which is referred to throughout the story as a journey for which he is not prepared) Niggle is sent to "convalesce" in a place like a dreary sanitorium.  He is let out in the end because of the kindness, however begrudging, he showed to his neighbours.  The next place he is sent is much nicer, familiar in fact; for it is the background of his leaf painting only hinted at, come to fruition.  He sees "the bigger picture."  Niggle continues his purgatorial healing work, where he is eventually joined by Parish, and it dawns on him that his world wouldn't be what it is without Parish.  When it is time for him to set out on another journey to the mountains, Niggle leaves Parish awaiting his own wife, the next person who will come to find solace there.

Tolkien's legendarium was his life's work, and he wondered if he dawdled his time on a silly hobby.  In the end he trusted to faith, that he gave his God-given talents justice, and that whatever he left unfinished in this life he'd find complete in the next.  Like Niggle, Tolkien put aside the craft dear to his heart to minister to those around him: his family, his pupils, his friends.  In a letter to his son, Tolkien wrote

There is a place called "heaven" where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories left unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued.  We may laugh together yet...

Alas, that Colm did not learn Niggle's lesson.  Or learned it too late.  Perhaps he will leave a great work of music behind him, something to move souls and strengthen the world in darkness.  But what does it matter, in the end, if God does not care for little asses?

Surrender

In writing this article, I have been interrupted at least six times: by children asking for water and to use the potty; by a husband who wants to know what we will do for dinner.  It is easy to feel that my art is frustrated, that the calling sown into my soul by the hands of God Himself is thwarted by the mundane daily tasks life demands of me.  But I must remember that the good work He asks of me has its place.  To put it prosaically, it is not either/or.  It is both/and.

The saints nursed this simple truth.  Teresa of Ávila, a Doctor of the Church, reminds us that "our Lord moves amidst the pots and pans."  Redemption is in the ordinary.  Christ plays in ten thousand places -- in the sticky hands and the night feedings, not just the incense-swathed golden Tabernacle and the lofty calling.  And St. Frances of Rome advises this housewife, his words bridging the centuries, that "sometimes she must leave God at the altar to find him in her housekeeping."

+JMJ+

September

September is a getting ready month.  But its preparations are funerary, even when they are merry.  Like the wakes of old Ireland.  The best of the year is over, and we are setting down to the last sweet swill before the dregs of death-soaked November.  It feels different than the preparation of Lent, of Advent.  The whole great liturgical year is an undulation, between triumph and sorrow.  We can't have one without the other. 

The council mows the common laws for the last (or second-to-last) time, and the smell of cut grass in autumn is distinct, yellower somehow.  The window-washers in the town centre swipe the glass gleaming in the mild sunshine.  Heat has a different quality.  Each year, I forget how much kinship I feel with September.  I like all seasons, each in their turn, but when September comes around I think, I wish to live in September forever.  In the countryside, farmers prepare to harvest corn, and the creeks run cold after the brusk, impatient showers.  It is a bustling month, when apples ripen, flowers bloom to encourage the hardworking bees, and conkers fall from the horse chestnut trees -- always the first species to tell autumn oncoming.

My son asked me yesterday morning, "Does it hurt to die of old age?"  I tried to console him without drifting into falsehood.  I told him there are good doctors to help make people comfortable as they pass.

"Everybody dies," he said later, resignedly, and I wondered what brought on this somber mood.

"Even God," I agreed, "but then He came back to life again."

A conversation followed about Thomas, who, naturally, didn't believe.  He said he must touch the dead-turned-living Man for himself if he were to confess such strange news.  I don't much blame Thomas.  He had to touch Jesus's wounds to know Him.  There's something to that -- that touching someone's hurts and being touched by them, is the only way to be fully known.  Thus we enter into the mystery of the Cross in order to be called His.  All things in their proper order, in their kairos.

The Exaltation of the Holy Cross and Our Lady of Sorrows follow in succession, and we look toward ember days.  Getting ready. That's all penance is, really.  Readying ourselves for the work in the world to come.

+JMJ+

Photo by Georg Eiermann on Unsplash

West

I am re-reading C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces after nearly two decades.  I am pleased to say that my recollection of it as masterpiece is verified a hundred fold.  I urge anyone and everyone to read it once in their lifetime.  It is not a hard read: it is at the same time a fairy tale, a philosophical treatise, a myth, the story of a soul (very literally, of Psyche -- and we are all Psyche), and a damn good story.

January, in Ordinary Time, strips things down to the essentials.  No superfluous light or growth or heat.  I think it helps me see clearer.  I took E. to the bare beach, almost brutal in its beauty with the hail and the flickering sunlight, in her bright plumed wool suit and saw the roots of eternity.  Candlelight, warm coffee, bacon shrinking in the pan, snow on the mountain ... it all means more in the stark season where we carry our kindling inward.

I listened to Father Mike Schmidtz's Sunday homily about home; in short, that "we don't belong here, but we have to live here."  Like Daniel in Babylon, who oriented himself to God three times a day.  I think about a friend's reflection about the Woman Clothed in the Sun, about the Platonic ideal and the "real Narnia."

I'm reading about Psyche in Till We Have Faces, the night before her ritual sacrifice, talk to her sister about "going home" -- home to her real country.  And when Psyche says that in her greatest moments of joy she longed for death, I feel that.  I feel that hard.

I was born looking west -- perhaps I should say, "true West."  For when I was in the US, I felt myself pulled toward Hibernia and Albion, both of them fixed in the inconstant sea.  The stories and culture that formed me, that first introduced me to Faerie, came from there.  And now that I am here, I am looking west still.  West to Snowdonia, to the sea, to Anglesey.  To Ireland, Iceland, to the very gates of Avalon, like a lemming driven to the sea.  More west than west.  It's a beautiful pain to know that I will never get "there" in this lifetime.  And yet I can't stop moving toward it.  I hear the call, the siren song, feel the exile in stillness like water just before boiling.

When I'm on the wild, raw beach with E. in her her curry-color wool suit, with the rain and sun passing over us; cozy indoors with friends with whom you sync so completely you say nothing and everything, and it's all just a delightful discovery of those whom your soul already knows; when you end a conversation with a mentor on peak of utter peace, frustrated all the more for having missed it -- because for a moment you stepped into the person of God.  When I worship God the Bread and God the Wine.  And I think about Saint Augustine and his mother, how before she died, they experienced communion with the Divine Being, and I think about love -- how it is a joyful out-looking at someone Not Oneself.  And I realize how much I still have to learn, and how chasing after God, as he dances and sings ahead of me in the person of the Christ Child, always one step ahead, but darting back to catch me as I stumble, before taking off again, urging me onward, this is joy.  

Tolkien said the euchatastrophe is when tears come because it is a joy so like unto sorrow.  I look around the world and I see sorrow everywhere, deep-down pain in its joints and marrow, and it doesn't touch me -- or rather it does, but when it does, it is transformed.  Because the joy and sorrow are two sides of the same coin.  And when one is acquainted with Aslan, one doesn't fear the tears anymore.

+JMJ+

On Stories

Having read Arthur Machen* for the first time in The Great God Pan, I am more assured than ever of the reality of evil -- of powers actively working behind the scenes, deceiving the world into believing they are not there.  I tend to lavish a lot of my attention on the romantic side of the supernatural.  It's nicer to think of.  But it's important, too, to remember what the medievals knew all too well, which is that one does not transgress into the country of Faerie lightly, nor go without the proper talismans for protection; cross, holy water, Host.

Perhaps surprisingly, this growing recognition of the oppressive powers of evil does not drive me to despair.  Rather, it serves to highlight the opposing side: the great umbrella of unseen watchers that move in the world, protecting, sowing, loving things into being.  This is why horror is a particularly Catholic genre.  If one can recognize a transcendental wrongness, then it is only natural that there should be its opposite.  For by the lack of something do we discover its solid.

It has occurred to me, in this way, that the saints are greater than the gods.  As much as I like to ponder the existence of fairies, I do have access to something far more magical: that is, the great crowd of witnesses, the mortal men and women who have gone before me, who now live in that Burning that is the presence of Uncreated One on the Throne, and who move to interact with me daily, at only my slightest inclination.

I was walking to the bus stop the other day when I beheld myself in an almost mystical vision (it wasn't, I have not yet had a mystical vision, and I think I am not the type of person such things visit, though I have met God (remind me to tell you about the Eucharist)): of myself, as a moving, breathing, living Story.  God thinks of me the way I think of my characters.  He has mediated on me and watches my life unfold like the plots that I pour over, tugging ever thread out of order, finally putting the unfinished tapestry aside because I cannot make it to my satisfaction.  Not everyone can be a Tolkien, after all.  But every person is a Tolkien's masterpiece.

Loving things into being.  That's what storytelling is, isn't it?  Stories are everything.  Jung knew this.  The ancients knew this.  When they initiated people into their mysteries and reenacted the dying and rising with the corn.  The King must die.  The return of the King.  Do, so that you might become.  Enter the story.  Step into the Story as God stepped into His creation, became Incarnate of a Woman.  The Woman.  The Man.  The New Eve and the New Adam.

Story is not only what God does.  It is what He is.  It is what I am, too.

+JMJ+

Photo by Ben Vaughn on Unsplash

* Arthur Machen was a Welshman with a particular affinity for the Celtic Church, and that strikes a chord with me.  I too am an (adopted) Cymraes with a penchant for unearthing the oldest and most localized rites of Christianity.  He was convinced, against historical record and known fact, that the Celtic Church wasn't Catholic, but I'll allow some grace for the prejudices of his time and circumstance.  As C.S. Lewis has shown me, it's hard to be a British person and not have some unconscious bias against the Church.

What are witches?

It's really hard to have a conversation about witches, much less discuss their role in folklore, mythology, and literature, if no one can agree on what a witch is.  

My first experience with the idea of a witch was the Halloween archetype of a green woman with warts and a crooked nose, in a black pointy hat, stirring a bubbling cauldron.  She sometimes flew on a broom over a full moon and was often in the company of a black cat.  She is probably a descendant of Shakespeare's weird sisters in Macbeth.  She is the forerunner of J.K. Rowling's wizards in Harry Potter, at least in their aesthetic (though there is a significant amount of synthesis with medieval sciences like alchemy and astrology that only laterally fall under the witchy category).

There are a few other identifications that overlap in places and repel in others.  The one that evangelicals favor is the late medieval to enlightenment figure of the Satan worshiper.  These women (and sometimes men) were said to have signed a contract selling their souls to the devil.  They worshiped in diabolical sacraments and ate and sacrificed children.  I've yet to read a good history on the subject of the witch trials, but my precursory reading suggests that the panic around this type of witch arose due to a mixture of political and religious issues.  Probably the most famous historical example is the Salem witch trials, especially after the playwright Arthur Miller likened those events to the Communist panic of 1950's America in "The Crucible."  It is likely that the Puritan notion of witches blended with folklore to make the Halloween witch, sanitized to remove Satan from the picture.

The last and most complicated type of witch is the term used by the Neo-Pagans to designate a practitioner of a new age spirituality, the strains of which are as diverse as the people who claim the title.  It tends to be closely aligned with nature, the seasons, and folklore.  At its most formal, this modern witchcraft attempts to reconstruct European pre-Christian religion.  At its loosest, it becomes a kind of Instagram aesthetic, emphasizing herbs, crystals, and spiritual ties to nature.

So it seems to me there are three types: the Halloween witch, a creation of American consumerism borrowed from the folklore of the famous melting pot; literal Satanists, as they were conceived of and mythologized heightening in the Enlightenment; and the Neo-Pagan religion/spirituality.  

While there is definite cross-pollination between all three, I feel it is not appropriate to use them interchangeably.  A good deal of the blame for their confusion can be attributed to the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who mistakenly conflated folk beliefs as a remnant of pre-Christian paganism that culminated in the witch trials.  This has since been thoroughly debunked, and no serious historian gives it any credence.  Still, it has lingered in the western consciousness and one will find on social media a spectrum running from harmless "witchcraft" involving observance of the seasons and respect for nature, with near-diabolical imagery of naked women dancing  in a bacchanal around bonfires with horned goats.  One may make a distinction here between white magic and black magic, but it is not a clearly defined one.

Things get tricky when you are a fantasist drawing from the Middle Ages.  Because of the entanglement of the types of witches in the twentieth century, modern people tend to think that wise women and cunning men were one and the same with current Neo-Pagans, just misunderstood and maligned as the child-eating type.  In reality, they were typical people, thoroughly immersed in the dominant Christian culture, who continued to use folkloric wisdom in fields where science was yet to tread.  Hence, we have St. Hildegard with plenty of herbal folk remedies and recommendations about the healing properties of gems.  Advances in technology have since dispersed the mysticism around such items, and we know they don't work in the way that medieval people believed.  But that does not in any way cast them at odds with the Church of their day.

Similarly, in the medieval agricultural society, the turn of the seasons was an integral part of everyday life; and the universal significance of the calendar year naturally makes for a matching significance in the liturgical one.  Far from being antithetical to Christianity, the coincidence in shared festivals and rituals only served to highlight God's careful hand in creation.  Ostara, the spring equinox, falls around Easter and also Lady Day (the Feast of the Annunciation).  The feasts of Saint Brigid, Candlemas, and Saint Blaise are the Christian triune fulfillment of Imbolc.  And so on and so on.

It is this misunderstanding of the Incarnation that leads American Christianity to repel medieval Catholic practice, which is a shame.  And the common ground of the Catholic stewardship of the earth along with reverence for the seasons could be a bridge between Neo-Paganism and Christianity.  I have often said that if I weren't Catholic I would be a Pagan reconstructionist, and this is precisely why.  The people before the time of Christ saw God folded into the world and reached for Him, for better or worse.  They made a distinction between good and evil.  And when the missionaries came, as Saint Patrick did in Irleand, they embraced the Good News and carried everything good that they knew of beforehand into the faith.  

For "Christ plays in ten thousand places."  Everything true, and good, and beautiful, we have in Him and by Him.  If the sage medieval Catholics and rural Catholic populations of modern times share commonalities with modern witches, it is because they belonged to Him first.

+JMJ+

Photo by Jessica Furtney on Unsplash

On Adaptations

I put on Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle the other day to watch with my seven-year-old.  It's been a while, and I come to it with the self-awareness I wouldn't otherwise if I were watching it alone: will he "get" it?  Will it enchant him the way it did me?  I want so much to share what is true and good with him.  I can't live life for him, or shield him from pain forever, but I can give him that: a bouquet of beauty, the memory of whose fragrance can see him through dark times.  Light and high beauty forever beyond the Shadow's reach.

As the film played, I found myself getting irked here and there.  The more I watch him, the more I wonder if Miyazaki is the prodigious story-teller we make him out to be.  As I'm writing, I think I mean that in the sense of story without image.  Pure narrative, perhaps.  He relies very much on the visual, on motion and music and light and color.  He is gifted at what he does, and I don't make light of it.  There is a behind-the-scenes clip in Spirited Away that shows how they brought in a dog for the animators to observe what it looks like giving it a pill, to translate that into animating a girl force-feeding a dragon a remedy.  It's gorgeous,  breathtaking even.  The love and detail put into rendering a realistic and enchanting pageant of imagery is laudable.  Likewise, Howl's Moving Castle is beautiful to watch, performative and ballet-like, every movement and shot choreographed with care.

But I think I like Diana Wynn Jones' version of Howl's Moving Castle better, as a narrative.  She is less didactic in her storytelling; I prefer an actual enemy, real evil at work, rather than the New Age-y phantoms of war and human conflict.  Miyazaki's Howl is much more forgivable for his idiosyncrasies, more charming and less conceited.  Sophie's relatives aren't even allowed to be benignly awful.  I get the impression that I've come away from a kindergarten lesson about how everyone is different, we all just need to "get along," and "love conquers all."  As he is a survivor of World War II, I get the compulsion toward optimism.  But I can't help but feel it stale and forced in the face of personal and public tragedy; saccharine and too-simple in a way that George MacDonald's universal salvation isn't.

In fairness, there is always difficulty in adapting a written work into the medium of film.  So perhaps I do away with the problem altogether by saying, Miyazaki is a gifted film-maker, rather than storyteller.

The subject of adaptation is one which I tread carefully.  As a storyteller, I've a heightened awareness of what it means to put the work of one's imagination forth into the world, only to have it twisted, misunderstood, weaponized, or forced into a "message."  In a very real way, it has held me back from making stories.  I see what the Tumblr generation has done to Tolkien, and it grieves me.

It is with this kind of teeth-set-on-edge countenance that I watch the development of the situation surrounding Amazon's Rings of Power.  Certain things signal that this is not a good-faith handling of the source material and Tolkien's desires.  The more time goes on, the more I fear that they don't intend to honor Tolkien's vision, which is something the first Peter Jackson trilogy was remarkable at preserving.  Tolkien would have loathed the changes made to his story for the sake of adapting it to film; but I can see that what was done was done out of necessity, and love.  And that's enough for me.

Rarely do adaptations honor in this way; even less so do they surpass the originals.  A recent case of this, I feel, is in Leigh Bardugo's YA trilogy Shadow and Bone.  The Netflix adaptation breathed life into it, upped the stakes, and added dimension to the characters and conflict.  I feel guilty even writing that.  I feel I ought to be allied with Bardugo against the changes that highlighted the flaws in her work.  Because of course, without her, there would be no material to work with to begin with.

It's a creative's conundrum: do I share the fruit of my imaginative inner world with the outside?  Do I trust them with my life's work and passion?  What is the cost-benefit analysis?  These are things I'm contemplating these days.  I'm not entirely sure yet of the answers.

+JMJ+

Photo by Giammarco on Unsplash