Do not deny the darkness in you or the darkness of the times. Denial is not a healthy response. “God is the denial of denial.” (Eckhart)
It is no secret that we are living in a time of apocalypse and antichrist. Hildegard of Bingen painted such times as an unraveling of order. But also how Christ arrives to challenge Evil and bring peace.
Thus, breakthroughs and revelations occur amidst the darkness. “Apocalypse” also means “Revelation.”
How turn Apocalypse into Revelation? How stay grounded during such fierce times? I offer here some practices for surviving spiritually during times like these.
1. Do not deny the darkness in you or the darkness of the times. Denial is not a healthy response. “God is the denial of denial.” (Eckhart)
2. Ground yourself in the Via Positiva, i.e. the goodness and beauty of life, nature and cosmos that birthed us and the Earth that feeds us and cares for us like the Mother she is.
3. Call on Father Sky for the vastness of soul and imagination and heart and courage (“big heart”) and the truly healthy masculine virility (i.e. virtue) that the times require.
4. Listen to your conscience, connect to it and act from it.
5. Demand that your political representatives search and find their conscience, connect to it and make decisions based on it.
6. Call on the spiritual warrior in you–we all have one in us. The biblical word for spiritual warrior is “prophet”—one who speaks out and interferes.
7. Find other spiritual warriors both living and dead to link up with as allies.
8. Reach out to Jesus as spiritual warrior and discover why the church chose Scriptures to read at the Christmas liturgy on the holiest night of the year that call him “the most powerful Word” and “stern warrior” who “leapt” to earth (Wis 18. 15).
9. Find or birth community, whether online or in person or both.
10. Read and study with an open heart the mystic-warriors of the past and present.
11. As I wrote in the conclusion to my antichrist book: Become a camel and return often to the oasis and watering hole of the Via Positiva. Fill up there on your love of life–the fountain of biophilia–as you cross the desert of the Via Negativa. Drink in the simple miracle of existence, the wonder of the 13.8 billion years that have brought you and the Earth and all her wondrous creatures into existence.
12. Be grateful—full of thanks. Carl Jung writes: “If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude.”
13. Practice silence, contemplation, emptying, letting go. (The Via Negativa)
14. Find a grief practice. Beating a drum daily for 15 minutes allowing sounds from the third chakra to emerge unedited is one such practice.
15. Practice art as meditation: Draw, paint, garden, dance, sing, do clay, chant, journal—let the depths of your soul out.
16. Practice protest or boycotting or contact politicians and attend town halls with them, call their offices, let your search for the common good be felt.
17. Take care of yourself. Laugh, listen to music, be with friends, get rest, read and pray the news but not overly much. Get into nature, let nature into you, make friends with the more-than-human. “Look to the skies, look to the mountains,” the psalmist says.
18. Create and do rituals with self or others that connect your soul to the cosmos.
19. Resist and protest wisely and passionately but non-violently
Pas De Merde 