Dervala Hanley rides the most dangerous road in the world and lives to tell the tale.
We switched to the left-hand side for the official start of the crazy Coroico road. Downhill traffic drove closest to the drop, and had to yield to vehicles going uphill to La Paz. This was terrifying. The edge of the road often crumbled to nothing, and often there was only room for one car, requiring slow backward creeps around blind corners. The locals weren’t bothered, blithely overtaking on these corners with Pachamama’s drunken blessing. The honks of the oncoming trucks, above and below, made me feel like jungle prey. The girl who had somersaulted right at the start joined us back on the bikes, despite her bandages. We congratulated her on her bravery.‘You don’t understand,’ she said, ‘It’s much, much scarier on the bus.’
For perhpas my last little entry on Pentecost, have a look at AKMA�s Pentecost Sermon:
Now, you may have noticed that that kind of humble, forgiving love doesn�t just spring up in fountains all over the place. That love, that humility, that forgiveness come down to us as a gift, and our best efforts can�t make that gift come. But we can learn to be ready, we can practice the craft of forgiveness, the attitude of humility, so that the Spirit finds in us a limberness for the labor of love. Indeed, when divine love meets spiritual limberness, why, there�s no end of the amazing things that can happen. You might even see a miracle once in a while, if you look hard enough.Nice stuff there. The whole sermon strikes me as a call to giving attention to Spirit, inviting it to feel ourselves and tune us to the possibility of the miraculous.
Courtesy of whiskey river comes this quote from Ludwig van Beethoven, which beautifully captures the notion that “spirit must rise from the earth” even if it seems to reside in the sky:
Here, surrounded by the products of nature, often I sit for hours, while my senses feast upon the spectacle of nature. Here the majestic sun is not concealed by any dirty roof made by human hands, here the blue sky is my sublime roof.When in the evening I contemplate the sky in wonder and the host of luminous bodies continually revolving within their orbits, suns or earths by name, then my spirit rises beyond these constellations so many millions of miles away to the primeval source from which all creation flows and from which new creations shall flow eternally.
When, now and again, I endeavor to formulate my seething emotions in music – oh, then I find that I am terribly deceived; I throw my scrawled paper upon the ground and feel firmly convinced that never shall anyone born on this earth be able to express in sounds, words, colors or stone those heavenly images that hover before his excited imagination in his happiest hours … yes, it must come from above, that which strikes the heart; otherwise it’s nothing but notes, body without spirit, isn’t that so?
What is body without spirit? Earth or muck, isn’t it? The spirit must rise from the earth, in which for a time the divine spark is confined, and much like the field to which the ploughman entrusts precious seed, it must flower and bear many fruits, and, thus multiplied, rise again towards the source from which it has flown. For only by persistent toil of the faculties granted to them do created things revere the creator of infinite nature.
So what is troubling me about the Pentecost is the way it seemed to birth hierarchy, right out of thin air (pun intended).
To do this of course, requires that you believe that Spirit is also authority and that Spirit comes from above. Both of those assumptions, it seems to me were to have devastating consequences over the next 2000 years.
First of all, if Spirit is also authority, then the apostles became the first anointed Christian priests, ordained by Spirit itself to spread the message that Jesus Christ had been teaching before he was executed. The Church began, and very soon afterwards, the apostles started ordaining priests and so it goes until the present day presumably, when every ordained priest or minister should be able to trace his lineage to one of the twelve, at least in theory. The authority that flowed from those assumptions was doled out from one to another in perhaps the first pyramid scheme since the Egyptians. Eventually, the experience had to have become a little diluted. Certainly most ordinations today are not generally accompanied by the wind and fire of the Pentecost. It’s more of a graduation ceremony in most churches, where you receive the blessing of the hierarchy to transmit the message officially. Gone is the mystical experience, the direct connection with Spirit that gave the first apostles and the hundreds of people standing among them, the legs to preach the Gospel. So ordination, tracing its lineage back to the Pentecost, but avoiding the messiness of mystical enlightenment, becomes a process for inviting priests into the hierarchy of power that is the Church.
Simplified for sure, but perplexing to me nonetheless.
The second point though is really devastating. Along with the creation of this vast hierarchy came the notion that only those near the top had direct access to Spirit. That in fact access to Spirit was a privilege you might have the higher up you were. The implication of this was of course that people in high office were most holy, while those closest to the land were most heathen. For Indigenous folks, this was a definite disadvantage when they were confronted with European society. A hierarchical structure whose power was maintained through the notion that Sprit is a top down matter descended upon a people for whom the exact opposite was true. Spirit is in the earth and is accessible to all who practice the indigenous methods of connecting with the land. Methods, incidentally, given to humans by the Creator to allow people to be more fully in “place:” on the land and in touch with Spirit.
In all seriousness, I am beginning to see the power in the Pentecost like I have never seen it before.
As an interesting aside, I have a friend who studies in New Mexico with Rabbi Gershon Winkler, a teacher who practices what he calls Jewish flexidoxy. As I understand it Flexidoxy is a religious practice that begins with the assumption that Judaism is actually an indigenous religion and therefore needs strong connections to the land to be fully in tune with it’s entire spiritual experience. And if you can’t live in Israel where the religion has it’s home, then you need to understand the indigenous practices of the places where you do live and draw on them to express yourself as an Orthodox flexidox Jew. Rabbi Winkler writes:
The tradition in Judaism that the human was formed out of the earth is more than a simplistic metaphor or colorful homily. The theme runs continuously and consistently throughout the scriptural, legalistic, midrashic, and kabbalistic avenues of Jewish spiritual teachings…
The sanctity of the earth is described in the Jewish tradition beyond its relationship to the human, but also its relationship to the divine, whose presence, we are reminded, is no less in the earth as in the heavens: “And you will then know that I am Infinite One who dwells deep within the earth” (Exodus 8:18). The ancient rabbis further dramatized the sacredness of the earth by over her” (Genesis 2:15).
Winkler’s practice involves become a rabbinical shaman:
“All of our inspired prophets and teachers in ancient times received their inspiration and their supernatural capabilities…in the wilderness,” he said during a phone interview from his home in Cuba, N.M.
Citing such sages as Moses, Hillel and Akiva, he said Judaism’s great teachers drew from a font of wisdom that “went four levels beneath the literal interpretation of the Scriptures,” delving into personal experience of the Divine.
“It’s very similar to the Native American concept of the vision quest,” he said, adding that the parallels “came to me backwards, living in the wilderness surrounded by four Indian nations: Navajo, Apache, Jemez and Zia.
“In my spending time with them, observing their rituals by invitation, bells began ringing in my head — the shamanic rituals and ceremonies in our own tradition that we had lost over the centuries because we weren’t allowed to be a people of the land.
“So I went back to the scriptural teachings and many of the kabbalistic [mystical] postscriptural teachings that had been buried over the centuries, and the whole thing just became alive.”
Winkler is currently working on a book tentatively titled “The Way of the Jewish Shaman.” The shamanic path, he said, “involves the ability to shift reality.”
The idea that mystical experience and knowledge of Spirit comes from being “people of the land” is deeply compelling. For me, it completely turns the result of the Pentecost experience on its head.
Pentecost, from the Ingebord Psalter c.1210
Synergy reminds me that yesterday was Pentecost in the Christian calender. This day commerates the day the Apostles were visited by a “Comforter,” Spirit itself.
This must have been a transcendant mystical experience. Gnostics for example look to the Pentecost as the pinnacle of the Gnostic mystical journey, looking to me a lot like a collective Buddhist awakening experience:
To know the event of Pentecost as an immanent and interior reality is the goal towards which the Gnostic’s striving is always directed. If we are to know this other Comforter, we must somehow come to the place in spirit where we can reach out and touch this timelessness and transcendence; we must pass over to a non-ordinary state of consciousness and perception.
Of course others talk about the Pentecost as the intial ordination of the first preists of Christiantiy, ordained by Spirit and setting in motion the design of the hierarchy of the Church:
On the Day of Pentecost the Spirit descends not only on the Apostles, but also on those who were present with them; not only on the Twelve but on the entire multitude (compare Chrysostom’s Discourses and his interpretation of Acts). This means that the Spirit descended on the whole of the Primitive Church then present in Jerusalem. But though the Spirit is one, the gifts and ministrations in the Church are very varied, so that while in the sacrament of Pentecost the Spirit descends on all, it is on the Twelve alone that He bestows the power and the rank of priesthood promised to them by Our Lord in the days of His flesh. The distinctive features of priesthood do not become blurred in the all-embracing fullness of Pentecost. But the simultaneity of this Catholic outpouring of the Spirit on the entire Church witnesses to the fact that priesthood was founded within the sobornost of the Church.
I am struck by this institutionalization of what is probably the most mystical experience a Christian might have. In the book of Acts, the experience is described in the second chapter as the onset of a rushing wind accompanied by tongues of fire which sat on the Apostles. Being filled with Spirit, they began speaking in dozens of different languages. The whole scene was so weird that Peter had to stand in front of horrified bystanders and tell them that, no in fact, all of these people are not drunk at ten o’ clock in the morning, but filled with Spirit of a different kind. What an experience.
And yet, what happened with that experience is that it became the basis for which spiritual authority was to be passed down the hierarchy of what then became called “the Church.” A spiritual lineage that became an entrenched organization.