Liminal Grace
St. Joan and St. Thérèse and the sanctification of creation
Across the Sky-Veil,1 you will find poetic essays describing how God showed me that He loves me and how He gave me the grace to fall in love with Him. His love expressed itself as a call to His Kingdom through the combined hearts of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. He chose me as a broken vagabond, an exiled missionary, who sought the Kingdom through the liminal landscape that revealed the Being of God’s creation—the Sky-Veil. My work of salvation by grace—attaining the Kingdom on the far side of the Veil—required the sanctification of the part of creation the Holy Spirit allotted to me alone.2
“Let the sea be moved and the fullness thereof: the world and they that dwell therein. The rivers shall clap their hands, the mountains shall rejoice together at the presence of the Lord…” Psalm 97:7–9. Douay-Rheims.
Joan and Thérèse inspired me to fulfill my mission through a mythopoetic unveiling of the heralds of creation shimmering throughout the Veil, making it near to my Being.3 In the Sky-Veil through which I had to pass, creation as the moving seas, clapping rivers, and rejoicing mountains came alive as enchantment through the poetic remembrance4 of Aphrodite as the gleam of divine beauty and love, Athena as the sparkle of wisdom and courage, and Hera as the shimmer of silent majesty.5 The Being of the Kingdom through the Sky-Veil presented the three as hypostatic heralds6 —alethic emergences of what was hidden—not in the distorted shadows of goddesses of the Greek temples but in the light of a colorful, dynamic world redeemed in Christ, bursting with depth, height, and resonance. To the ancients, they had been corrupted harbingers of the incarnation but then, on my journey, enchanting lamp posts in the dark night of faith marking the pathway through the Veil.
True enchantment on my way was this: to have transformed the best of the pagan world in Christ by revealing the redeemed hypostatic meanings found in Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera—divine beauty, wisdom, and majesty.
"For the expectation of the creature waiteth for the revelation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him that made it subject, in hope: Because the creature also itself shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain, even till now." Romans 8:19–22. Douay-Rheims.
Once subject to the futility of a fallen cosmos, the heralds too groaned beneath the veil of symbol and shadow. But through the incarnation, across the Sky-Veil, they were re-contextualized as harbingers of the divine into the liberty of the children of God. They appeared anew in the clearing of Beauty, Wisdom, and Majesty emerging like rosy dawn over dew dropped meadows. They no longer spoke as transcendent deities beyond the Veil but through it—as shimmering heralds. They were no longer idols but signs, no longer sovereigns but the radiant echoes of a Word now made flesh.
This is the part of sanctified creation the Sky-Veil unfolded—the hearts of St. Joan and St. Thérèse enshrining my own in the mystery of faith while bringing near the shimmers, flickers, and glints of the Being of the kingdom heralded by Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera.
True enchantment was the gleam and sparkle of the heralds’ divine beauty, wisdom, and majesty received in its orientation toward the Christo-centric ordination of the cosmos—allowing Christ to sanctify His creation. This could only have happened in a heart enshrined in the combined hearts of Joan and Thérèse.
Enjoy “The Pilgrim’s Dance” from my album The House of New Bethany. Visit my music site for more.
Shuffling down a narrow Lonely, dirt path Into a wide Open field I am a pilgrim A journeyman One who rests Only for a time In mystical Quaint villages I am refreshed And stronger now Because of each Enchanting land Now, slowly Onto a plain Where I have come Upon a crossroad Not knowing Where to go Yet, appearing at my Side, ever faithfully Is my sister traveler St. Thérèse of Lisieux We both shield our eyes As sunlight breaks And each look in All directions “Where now, do We dance, sister?” Her eyes glitter Her soul is fire She points and Pulls me along Dancing together, again To where I do not know Then I see that To which she points Distant ahead rides Joan of Arc, hair flowing Dancing we follow her Over the horizon of trust
Sky-Veil - The threshold of Being in this mythopoetic cosmology, representing the veil between time and eternity, symbol and reality, longing and fulfillment. It is across the Sky-Veil that hypostatic heralds of Being—embodied symbolically by the goddesses—shimmer, and through which the soul journeys in mythic contemplation toward divine encounter. The saints dwell beyond the veil; the goddesses, as “hypostatic emergences” foreshadowing divine virtues, herald from its edge. St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse guide the pilgrim across the Sky-Veil of transformation in Christ to Magdalene’s contemplative grotto on the far side in the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 307 - “To human beings God even gives the power of freely sharing in his providence by entrusting them with the responsibility of ‘subduing’ the earth and having dominion over it. God thus enables men to be intelligent and free causes in order to complete the work of creation, to perfect its harmony for their own good and that of their neighbors.”
Shimmering/Being - implies resonance and the perception of truth as unveiling—Aletheia, as opposed to a scaffolding of propositions and deductive reasoning. Thus the shimmering, gleaming landscape of the Sky-Veil is a mythopoetic horizon in our spirit, the grounds of metaphysics but not metaphysical itself.
✦ Remembering/Remembrance - “To remember is not to recall, but to stand again in the nearness of what is.”
In the Sky-Veil, Remembering is not the retrieval of memories from a personal or collective unconscious, as in Jungian psychology. Rather, it is the unconcealing of what has always been—the letting-be of Being—in the manner of Heidegger’s Ereignis, or the event of disclosure. To remember is to dwell where Being has touched us and where the truth of one’s path begins to shine through the fog of exile.
The wanderers of the Grey-Beneath do not lack information; they lack remembrance. And when a herald (such as Caelia, Aphrodite, or Athena) calls, it is not a call to new knowledge, but to ancient presence. One does not learn the truth of the Sky-Veil; one remembers it. That is to say, one stands again in the unveiling light of what was always there, waiting.
To remember, in the Sky-Veil, is to step beyond the calculative metaphysical and into the poetic, where the world is no longer a stockpile of objects to be explained but a revealed place of meaning. It is to be gathered once more into the harmony of Flame, Chalice, and Banner.
Remembrance of Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera - in this context is in a similar vein as “do for the commemoration of me” (I Cor 11:24. Douay-Rheims). Another translation of commemoration is “remembrance.” Just as Jesus implied a real, hypostatic substance in this remembrance—his real presence in the Eucharist—the Sky-Veil implies a hypostatic “poetic” presence of the heralds Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera. The goddesses are enchanting poetic expressions of real meaning in the world—not goddesses of the Greek temples. They are neither subjective imagination—for the meaning is in the world and not created in our subjective consciousness— nor divine beings. Thus, their “remembrance” as “heralds” of divine attributes is not a sacred one of matter, as in the Eucharist, but of mythopoesis in God’s creation—means of raising the spirit from the flat, puritanical, two-dimension world of metaphysical and doctrinal definitions to the world of engagement with the divine. This enchanting relationship does not contradict the metaphysics but goes to its grounds.
Hypostatic Heralds - Figures who bear the presence of a hypostatic form. The goddesses are hypostatic heralds: they do not possess Being, but they announce it. As heralds, they invite the soul to a deeper contemplation of divine attributes. They are real in their effect and presence, though not personal subjects or metaphysical beings.