Alchemy Is The Sister Of Prophecy

A Fulfilment In Bologna

St Onuphrius: The Man You Meet After Seventeen Days Alone In The Desert

A Word-Wrestle

When I travel I like to have a word or idea to be thinking about as I go, it’s my crossword puzzle. And this week it’s an old Sufi saying:

Alchemy is the sister of prophecy.

Alchemy. A common word these days, but with all sorts of implications. I’m not thinking of the external technologies of the medieval gold-maker, more alchemy as images of the soul working-on-itself, that precarious road that bubbles and hisses and submerges and then finally transforms lead to gold. These stages, both alarming and sublime, that as a Christian gradually lead one into experience of God. A theosis that walks – with grace – from the raw to the cooked. Alchemy is a very lively metaphor in the way I’m thinking about it. And for me, metaphor is not a waspish belittlement but a place for imagination to live. They are alive with association, that’s the point of them.

Alchemy can be described in a couple of sentences or puzzled at for a lifetime. I’m cautious about what I’m doing here, as when we think we understand something we tend to dismiss it. I teach it occasionally on post-graduate courses, and even the little I know has taken many years to absorb. Please note: I’m not advocating a turn to Gnosticism or slowly poisoning ourselves on fumes in a hut in an Italian forest. But I don’t think contemplating this saying will do us any harm whatsoever.

Real prophecy – a discerning of the spirits of the age – will likely require the fluidity of alchemy, the holy-spiritness of movement to accommodate its diagnosis. When you have only prophetic proclamation and no response you have all rock and no roll. So prophecy gets at the deeper truth of circumstance that-in-turn provokes changes in our inner condition (this could be seen as alchemical movement) as a response. Prophecy is a doing word. We have to be still enough to discern the prophetic, and open enough to the change it can provoke. No openness and I just tend to create my next set of panicky rules and regulations.

So I’m thinking about prophecy as an unearthing of this is what’s going on. The big reveal. Also we have prophecy in the plural; the pile up of layered realities that take a form solid enough to finally be spoken in to. And prophecy also as warning rather than a slam-dunk immutable future. Prophecy as prompt for possibility. Sometimes. Sometimes it is a ship crashing into an iceberg, two minutes before. I don’t know if prophecy is always as dramatic as the association of a message from God, more something a little less grandiose, a sober joining of the dots. Maybe an angel assisted the thought process.

And just for the record, a frequency that’s entirely prophetic is exhausting and finally hard to build on. You need the pastoral too.

I’ll come back to this later.

Bologna: The Red City

Come on, that’s pretty

I’ve been travelling this month, and am now in Bologna. Not Canada, or Ireland, or Devon or Cornwall, or Bath or London, but Italy. A city known as being red (the colour of the houses), fat (the consequence of the delicious food), and bright (having an ancient University). So I become a chubby, sun-burnt guy with an overactive mind. What else is new? I hear you mutter.

Alchemy is the sister of prophecy: maybe it’s also a thought that the more alchemically aware of our own inner-nature we are, the more accurate our read when we lick our finger and to see which way the wind blows. Outer reflecting inner.

Bolonga is a great place to be thinking about such things. Everywhere is murals, mosaics, shadowed churches, flickering candles, sandy coloured backstreets leading to unexpected, leafy gardens.