The Recovered Thing
Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part 29)
The Recovered Thing is not quite the same as the Thing-never-lost. It is often more precious. As Grace, recovered by repentance, is not the same as primitive Innocence, but is not necessarily a poorer or worse state.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Jacob's Ladder, by Wenceslas Hollar
A Quick Note
So before we jump into the beginning of this two-post essay I will respond to messages that I’ve been getting privately all week. Yes, I’ve resigned from my position at Dartington Arts School.
The post-graduate programme I co-founded, Poetics of Imagination, will continue with a wonderful group of teachers. I just don’t get on with the policies of the Dartington Trust itself anymore. Part of the privilege of being an adult is that you get to take a stand on occasion, and this is such a moment. I’d reached my limit. There’s no great intrigues, just a wayward struggle between finances and art, and simply the way that you treat people. My colleagues and students have not been handled well of late.
It’s not a good example to stay in a relationship of acute dysfunction. It wasn’t healthy, and from my own point of view wasn’t Christian. Of course it wasn’t. Naive to say it really. But my baptism wasn’t just a splash about in the River Dart. That kind of thing has consequence trailing after it. I had agency, and my agency told me to leave.
I’ll miss those students, and hope to find other ways to teach and be with them. But something else is afoot now, clearing space.
The time now freed will help me grope towards what Tolkien called, ‘The Recovered Thing’. You will know as friends and readers just how vital this journeying into Orthodoxy has been for me. Life’s short and we have stuff to do. There’s nothing like a salary evaporating to put a little spring in your stride. I feel lucky.
So on to today’s writing.
I’ve written a lot about dreaming in the last eighteen months. What I’m going to do now is bring in the distinction between a dream and a vision, some of which I’ll illustrate through the story of Joseph’s descent into Egypt – y’know, he of the outrageous coat. The essential theme is how you go from having the dream to being the vision, and the strange and sometimes unwieldy steps that can require.
THE RECOVERED THING
When folks totter back to the fire after spending four days and nights fasting in the woods they’ve got dreamed. Somewhere in the third and forth night they have a tendency to get dreamt. A wee bit of Holy Spirit has a poke about in ’em.
They get a chance to tell their stories––what happened out there––and there’s times when it feels like they’re dreaming with their eyes open. I listen to it, distill it, don’t interpret it too much, and then effectively tell it back to them as if it was a fairy tale.
Sometimes dreams are way ahead of us.
Sometimes we can glimpse a reality we are far from manifesting, but we get a peek, years before time. I saw little moments of my life now when I was younger, and slavishly worked towards it. I faked it till I maked it, or something like that. One day I woke up and around me––and most importantly in me––were the qualities of things that had imprinted on me years before. But though I recognised the scent, caught the taste in my mouth, I wasn’t yet ready to inhabit them. But the glimpse was the thing.
Jim having a thought
Years ago I taught alongside the groundbreaking psychologist James Hillman. We sat together having lunch, Jim an old man now. He was sick, at the end of his life, but was still a lively companion. He told me about something called the Acorn Theory. That we know, deep down in the subconscious, the oak that we are meant to grow into. He told me of Manolete the great bullfighter being scared to leave his mother’s skirts. He felt that Manolete sensed the weight of destiny years before––as little kid––he was able to submit to it. Hillman said that someone receptive to their intuitions would steer their life according to the circumstances most needed for the acorn to grow.
This wouldn’t be entirely conscious, but on reflection you would see an invisible hand guiding you at times towards things you really needed to learn about. As a Christian I experience that as God’s providence as much, or more so, than myself. And it’s stayed with me, that lunch with the Wise Elder. He wasn’t soft and mushy, Hillman. He looked at me rather like a hawk about to swoop on a rabbit, but then would laugh and all this light swept out of him.
Back to the fireside.
The fasters’ stories have been told, fragile as they often are. They have been honoured, sometimes wept over, the ground of deep feeling has been reached.
Then I give them the bad news.
The vigil in the woods was only the second part of a three-part programme. Now they have to return. And most importantly: now they have to turn their dream into a vision. It’s one thing to have an epiphany in the forest, but how do you transmute that to a village wisdom? That’s going to take real, solid work. Not very poetic.
Almost a hundred percent of the time the fasters locate something of great worth they lost many years before. It’s not a clue as to how to get ahead in their career, it’s not some wacky insight into increasing their pension pot, it’s to do with re-connecting to divine ground. There will be a hundred ways to say it, but that’s the thing. In the return, of severance, threshold, return, this is the wonder-ground they return to. Almost always with tears, mystification, relief, and yes, sometimes repentance.
The Recovered Thing is what Parzival fought for when he missed his first opportunity at the Grail castle. The Recovered Thing is for all of us that ever made a mistake, took the wrong road, followed the wrong god home. It is the pearl of great price, and when you’re lucky enough to glimpse it again, you hold on.
And how does all this help a dream flare up into a vision?
Here's a very famous story from a very famous book. And I can’t help feeling it has some of these ideas in it. Through dream symbols it shows us something very grandiose about our future, but then we are going to have to go through a whole heap of trouble to achieve it.
Joseph In The Underworld
Joseph being unbearable