From Paternal Shelter to Erotic Union

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Love is the first and final utterance of God. It does not descend as doctrine but unveils itself through presence, longing, and touch. In the Christian mystical tradition, the soul does not encounter God through intellect alone—it passes through thresholds of love. These forms—paternal, fraternal, sacrificial, and erotic—are not stages of sentiment but deepening dimensions of communion.

The paternal dimension of divine love offers scaffolding. It is the hand that protects, commands, chastens, and names. This is God as Father, the one who delivers law from Sinai and sustains covenant through wilderness. It is necessary love, but also love from above—a relationship grounded in obedience and awe, not yet intimacy.

Fraternal and communal love draws the divine nearer. Christ breaks bread, walks dusty roads, touches lepers. God here is friend and companion, present in mutuality and shared burden. It is a human-shaped holiness, one the soul sees reflected in brotherhood. Still, it is not yet consummating—it gestures, it prepares, but it does not engulf.

Sacrificial love, agape, burns without consuming. It is the cross and the martyr’s sigh, the tenderness that forgives enemies, weeps with widows, and sanctifies loss. This love gives everything while asking nothing. It transforms suffering into sanctuary. St. Teresa of Ávila and St. Symeon the New Theologian saw agape not as the end, but as the door. For both, true union awaited beyond the altar of sacrifice.

Eros, in its sanctified form, does not belong to the profane. It is the highest expression of divine love—a longing so fierce that it consumes the soul not with desire for pleasure, but for obliteration into the divine. St. Teresa’s vision of the angel’s flaming arrow piercing her heart was no literary flourish; it was a mystical unveiling of what union truly entails: surrender so total it becomes ecstasy. St. Symeon the New Theologian spoke of divine love as drunkenness, as rapture, as fullness so overwhelming that it collapses the self into communion.

This love—bridegroom and bride, flame entering the wick—is the deepest sacrament of divine intimacy. It is eros stripped of grasping and elevated into revelation.

Women often enter this love with fewer complications. Christ, in his embodied masculinity, becomes a natural object of longing—a beloved not only divine but personal. The mystic bride gazes upon the wounded male God and opens her soul in response. Her body, her yearning, and her spiritual imagination find harmony in bridal mysticism.

But for men, this path requires a bridge—not to deny eros, but to purify it. Masculine souls must encounter a face that can hold their longing without distortion or shame. Here arises Sophia—Holy Wisdom—as the feminine countenance of divine presence. Sophia does not threaten or seduce; she receives, illumines, embraces. Through her, longing is reoriented, desire transfigured. She becomes the mirror through which eros is sanctified and agape deepened.

In mystical history, this mediation was often embodied through devotion to the Virgin Mary. The Servites and writers like Henry Suso revered Mary not only as mother, but as divine beloved. In her purity, humility, and radiant wisdom, Mary became Sophia enfleshed—the vessel through which longing could be expressed without fear, and desire could become prayer.

Suso’s visions of Mary were steeped in erotic tenderness—not sexual, but mystical. She embraced not as woman alone, but as gateway to divine union. Her body carried the sweetness of heaven; her gaze dissolved shame; her presence transfigured longing into holiness. She received eros and returned it as wisdom.

In this way, Sophia becomes indispensable. She is not a detour; she is the path. Through her, men experience divine eros without violating order. She completes the arc of longing, cradling the masculine soul until it becomes fit for union.

So love, in its full spiral, moves from distance to nearness, from structure to surrender, from awe to rapture. It begins with fear and ends in fire. The soul is not called to admire God—it is called to be ravished. Paternal love instructs. Fraternal love reflects. Agape purifies. But it is eros, when held by Sophia, that consummates.

In that union, there is no fear—only flame.

Seeking What We Lost

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(A Reflection on Re-Enchantment)

I have been called many things. Druid. Pagan. Hermeticist. Blasphemer. Heretic.
But I am none of these—not in rebellion and not in rejection.
I am a witness.
A witness to a world that still pulses with sacredness, even when we forget how to see it.

I do not seek escape from the Christian story. I seek to remember it rightly.
To peel back the layers of reduction and theological coldness.
To unbury the burning bush, the whispering wind, the God who walks in gardens and speaks through dreams.

We have traded mystery for machinery, wonder for certainty.
We flattened the world, dissected it, explained it to death.
And in doing so, we lost the enchantment that once made faith burn like fire.
But the sacred is not gone.
It is waiting to be remembered.

We live in a disenchanted age. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls it “the buffered self”—a soul that cannot hear the cosmos sing.
We have grown deaf to creation's music.

J.R.R. Tolkien saw this clearly.
“Our myths may be misguided,” he wrote, “but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”
Tolkien understood that fantasy is not escapism.
It is resistance.
A protest against the machine.
A way to remember that the world is more than what it seems.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. echoed this.
“There is a creative force in this universe,” he preached, “working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows.”

This is not mechanistic theology.
This is enchanted hope.

The Bible is not a manual—it is a mythic map.
It speaks in signs and wonders, not steps and rules.
Burning bushes. Talking donkeys. Angels in disguise. Seas that split like scrolls.
And at the center of it all: a God who multiplies bread, walks on waves, turns water into wine, and breaks death like a loaf of bread.

Jesus was not tame.
He was enchanted.

To reclaim enchantment is not to abandon Scripture.
It is to see it with open eyes.
To pray like poets, not programmers.
To meditate as communion, not calculation.
To regard nature not as resource, but as cathedral.
To welcome mystery not as threat, but as friend.

The veil was torn—not to expose God, but to invite us in.

So yes, call me a druid.
Call me a pagan.
Call me a heretic if you must.
But know this: I am not trying to escape God.
I am trying to find Him in the places we forgot to look.
To see how the ancients saw.
To find the sacred in soil, the divine in dance, the Spirit in silence.
To remember that the world is not neutral.
It is holy.

Re-enchantment is not nostalgia.
It is resurrection.
It is the Spirit hovering over the waters again.
It is breath returning to dry bones.
It is the Church remembering she is not a building.
She is a burning bush.

Tolkien said it best:
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If we value the freedom of mind and soul—if we're partisans of liberty—then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”

This is not escape from reality.
It is escape into reality.
Into the deeper truth that the world is charged with the grandeur of God.

We must rediscover what the ancients never forgot.
Movements like neopaganism and modern druidry are not mistakes.
They are symptoms—responses to a church that misplaced its wonder.
Faith, as it’s often taught now, demands death before mystery.
But this is not the way of Christ.
He said the kingdom of God is in our midst.

Sacred Offspring

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In much of modern theology—particularly in overly rationalized or disenchanted interpretations of the soul-body relationship—there is a tragic bifurcation between biology and spirit. Children are often reduced to mere biological outcomes, with God presented as a kind of bureaucratic soul-inserter, dropping spiritual payloads into otherwise mechanical processes. This view strips the mystery from human intimacy and ignores what many spiritual traditions have long intuited: that sexuality is not a sterile act of tissue and timing—it is a sacred rite, and children are its spiritual fruit.

To say that a child is merely the product of biology, with God tacking on a soul like a name tag, is to imply that spirit hovers outside of flesh—externally imposed rather than internally awakened. This view mirrors dualistic philosophies that devalue the body and treat matter as morally neutral or even corrupt. But if we affirm, as the Incarnation insists, that spirit and matter belong together—then we must also affirm that the act of union between two lovers can itself be a spiritually potent event, one that invites God not from above, but from within.

To separate soul from seed is to split what was never meant to be divorced. Sexuality, rightly understood, is not merely appetite or reproduction. It is mystical participation in divine creativity. In the intimate joining of bodies, there is also—if treated with reverence and covenant—a joining of essences. Love, trust, longing, vulnerability, even the metaphysical ache to be known and to know—these flow through the act like sacramental waters. This is not just mating. It is invocation. The lovers become co-priests in a temple made of flesh and delight, offering their oneness as a liturgy in which new life may be conceived.

The child, then, is not inserted by God as a postscript to biology. The child emerges from the spiritual current already moving between the lovers. We speak of the “fruit of the womb” for a reason. Fruit implies not just yield, but cultivation. Something tended, cherished, and emerging from the life of the whole tree—roots and branches, sunlight and sap. So too, a child is not merely the result of gametes and growth. A child is the fruit of love’s vineyard, formed as much by spirit as by cell.

This is not sentimentalism—it’s a theology of enchantment. It recovers the idea that human beings, made in the image of a God who creates through Word and Breath, are themselves creators of sacred mysteries. The family becomes not a logistical unit, but a garden of spiritual generation.

To teach that children are merely biological artifacts to which God adds “the soul component” is to flatten what should evoke awe. It’s like describing a symphony as vibrating strings or a cathedral as stacked rocks. True sexuality invites reverence. It insists that something more is happening—something that reverberates in eternity.

We must return to a vision of sexuality not as base instinct to be policed, nor as a clinical process to be managed—but as sacred dance, as covenantal fire, as the fertile moment in which the spiritual and the biological co-mingle like water and wine. Only then can we raise children not as chance combinations of genes but as spiritual inheritances, born from the holy communion of two souls.

Intro to Exile of Sophia

 I will be speaking on the introductory chapter, and more in the future, of Exile of Sophia by Dr. Michael Martin. (You can watch here in the 2^nd hour of my live stream link). This is more of a reflection and doesn’t necessarily promote his thought. In my public work, however, his thinking is clearly sensed, as he has been a great influence on the way I think. His book, Sophia in Exile, represents the final chapter of a trilogy on Sophiology, which, in terms of what that is, is more like a philosophy on how to experience what he would call “the Real.” Dr. Martin wrote this book around the time of the fires at Notre Dame and the emergence of COVID-19. To him, they were symptoms of a much greater problem within the Church that was manifesting. Sometimes things come to the surface or are exposed by God, as it says in Corinthians, “all things are tried by fire.” COVID-19 was the biggest for him. It showed the real cowardice and fakeness of the Church. He makes a valid point on how thousands died without access to the sacraments because of cowardly clergy and makes the point that Jesus would not have waited for the lepers to be COVID-free before he healed them. We are a religion of beating death. There is no doubt in my mind that Saint Damien of Molokai would not have been canonized in a pontificate of the pope calling for safety. He was the one who went fearlessly to lepers to give them Christ. That is what we have signed up for if you are clergy. Unfortunately, Dr. Martin, as well as thousands of others, fled the church of cowards. I personally pleaded with him to stay, not for the sake of his salvation but for the salvation of others. I don’t think I would have ever been introduced to him had not a subdeacon in my tradition done an interview with him. Going back to the problem of why he left, the Church in its cowardice is really a manifestation of great evil that is within. It’s not based in truth, more of an illusion, not really by design, but by a takeover from the archons of this world that have their hands in everything. The Church as an institution lacks the connection to the Real. That is what is going to be obviously the thought of Dr. Martin’s book, and the Real for him has a face; it’s living, and she is called Sophia.

When we hear the word Sophia, it is often conflated with the Gnostic Sophia, which really is of a different nature but in one way is saying the same thing. In the Gnostic myths, Sophia lives in exile or imprisonment. There is a great deal of Gnosticism, and they all have their story of her troubles. Like her, we too seem to live in exile or imprisonment. For us, it’s not just from God but from Creation. Like the Gnostic, we are seeking to return from our fall. This is ever so present in modern Christianity. Like Gnosticism, the world has no value and must be escaped. The escape comes from the knowledge of what Christ has done on the cross. Sometimes there is even the insistence that all you have to do is verbally acknowledge it, and one day you will escape to be with God in the new world of heaven.

Like modern Christianity, Gnosticism provided a formula through gnosis. The secret knowledge or remembering where we come from, as depicted in the Hymn of the Pearl, is the pathway back. In modern Christianity and in Gnosticism, the world we live in is bad or even an illusion. For the Gnostic, it’s the creation of Yaldabaoth, a false god who thinks it is God who has entrapped us. For modern Christians, it’s the domain of the god of this world, the devil. In both cases, it’s a world that is in opposition to what we are, and as such, we either seek to escape it or participate in the captivity.

In the absence of being where we should be, we try to fill the void. Religion works well for this. I often mockingly share the song that some modern Christians sing, “When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be.” This song is filling the void of what should be now. It’s a replacement of the now, the Real, as Dr. Martin would say, and I know in saying that people will be scratching their heads. Are we not supposed to be going to heaven is probably what you are thinking. To that, I would say no, the gospel doesn’t teach you about going anywhere; it teaches about having what you need now. It rescues you from the captivity of a fallen world and gives you the power to take it back and to enter into the Real.

The Gnostics were not the enemies that many Church fathers made them out to be. In fact, if anything, they had an upper hand in understanding reality, but like the modern Christian, they were escapists. The instance of Jesus’ bodily resurrection contradicted their understanding of the material world, the idea that it is all bad. Likewise, the bodily resurrection contradicts the modern Christian’s understanding of escaping this world and going to be with God. The world is not the problem; it’s rather our perception of it that needs to be resolved.

As Dr. Martin points out, our estrangement with the “Real” is twofold. It’s with God and Creation. To understand this better, we have to revisit the mythology of the Garden of Eden. The garden was not just a floral arrangement; it was the very way God was present to Adam and Eve. When they were exiled, they were exiled from this experience of God that came through the garden. As a result, salvation would be a return not to God but back to this Garden so that God could once again be experienced. An example of this could be found in the Temple worship of the Hebrew people. The temple was a reproduction of Eden, and when it was filled with the Shekinah, Sons of God were born into the world (Psalm 2:7).

The Shekinah was God’s presence manifest through creation. It’s what makes Eden, Eden. Without it, the temple is just a building, and Eden is just a floral arrangement. It might come as a shock that in the Hebrew tradition, this experience is referred to in feminine terms. I say it’s a shock because to speak of God in terms of femininity has become heretical. God cannot be a woman, we are taught. God has no gender, the theologians teach us. On the other hand, just about everything we know of God comes from gendered terminology. The very fact the Bible says that we are created both male and female in the image of God is something that is continually theologically erased.

Like the Gnostic myth, Sophia is exiled. The woman is forced to flee. This is very much present in the scripture. You have in Proverbs 8, Sophia (wisdom) being a central figure at the foundation of creation. In the book of Enoch, she is recorded as being exiled from the temple and being the reason for the temple’s destruction. Dr. Margaret Barker, another important scholar, has done a great deal of research on what was considered the original religion of the Hebrews and how it was forced to various parts of the world, including Egypt, a place that remains a central hub for much of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament.

You could even say the Woman in Revelation 12 is the figure of Sophia, who, with her children, is forced into the wilderness. What is all this forcefulness, and why is it happening, or why are we doing it? It is because we have something else in her place. A false Sophia, one that does not want us to consume the red pill. One who wants us to keep up our religious fantasy of another world. One which makes us an enemy to what is right before us.

In the Garden of Eden, our ancestors were given a special vocation. They were called to leave the garden and perfect the Earth by increasing the boundaries of the garden. The garden was their Sophia; it is what gave them God. It even in the narrative made them children of God; it was maternal. They were, in a way, called to find this Sophia in the Earth. Obviously, they failed to do this and found themselves estranged from what could be considered their Mother and God. They were estranged from the Real.

Do you think that it’s a coincidence that in every ancient culture, they sought to spiritualize the world they lived in? This is what we do by nature, but at the same time, we are doing this in a fallen way. We can never do it perfectly. We see this in many of the myths of the Old Testament. The Tower of Babel comes to mind. It was not wrong to build the tower. It was how they built it that was wrong. They did not build with Wisdom, in Sophia. The tower was an abomination because the unity of the people was false. This was the reason why they were divided and their tongues confused. Not as punishment, but so that they could see that their unity was false, that it was not Real.

It would not be until the coming of the Spirit that the curse of Babel was healed and languages were unconfused. This new unity that was given was one in Sophia. One that was returned to us by Christ. In this unity, God is experienced once again in creation in the form of fire. An element that is not given to destroy but to purify. This, to me, is Sophiology—a way to purify how we understand the world, not for purity’s sake but as a way to return God into this world by how we find the Sophia of God in what is created. 

Overcoming Sleep Paralysis

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Sleep paralysis can be a terrifying experience. I know this because I have suffered from it most of my life. In fact, I experienced it last night, but in my case, there was no terror. It wasn’t always this way, but through the years, I have learned to overcome it. I want to share with you the things that can help you overcome it too.

For many people, sleep paralysis is just a neurological condition. For such people, I want to teach you how to deal with it from that perspective. For others, it is a bad spiritual experience. I have had to explore both realities in my life, and in doing so, I have learned to deal with it in both scientific and religious ways. For this reason, I want to help both religious and non-religious people alike.

When sleep paralysis happens to me, my eyes are still closed. I know some of you experience this after opening your eyes. In whatever way, the first thing that happens is that we become afraid, which is normal because we don’t have control. In this fear, the next thing we do is panic or enter a state of despair. Unfortunately, being somewhat still linked to the dream state, such feelings begin to manifest. Our terror becomes our reality as we begin to hear or see frightening things.

The solution to this, speaking mostly to non-religious people, is dealing with the fear. Not controlling our fear is what leads to a state of terror or despair. Consequently, being near the dream state, we become the source of our own harmful hallucinations. The key to dealing with this is to expect the fear and practice dealing with it. Take control of it and don’t let it bring you into despair. It’s natural to be afraid, but you don’t have to let fear become the source of your own misery.

How I propose to do this comes from how law enforcement is trained. They go through rigorous training to help them deal with the fear mechanism that can be overpowering. For instance, they are taught how to deal with a person pointing a gun at a loved one, demanding that the officer drop their weapon. Fear kicks in, and the natural adrenaline flows through the body, making you want to give in to the demands of fear, which would make you want to drop the weapon. They are trained to understand that what they are experiencing is a natural chemical reaction. This reaction is primal, a product of our evolutionary instinct to survive. If they give in and drop their weapon, things will be worse. As a result, they train themselves to think critically and work through their fear. This is what I have also found helpful in dealing with sleep paralysis.

For religious people, this experience of sleep paralysis might be spiritual. The principles for dealing with it are the same. The demon wants you to feel that you are alone or abandoned by God. Once they get you to believe that, they begin to terrorize you. Like the solution above, you need to deal with your fear. You should be afraid; this is natural, after all, it’s a spiritual being. However, you have been given many things to deal with this fear that they cause. The first is believing that you are not alone. The Bible teaches in Hebrews 13:5 that God never leaves you or abandons you. Most of the time, we just need to believe this, and when we do, the demon becomes powerless in tormenting us. The other and most important is from Luke 10:19, which says that these demons cannot hurt you. If you have given yourself completely to Christ, they can’t touch you. When we start putting these truths into practice, you will find the freedom you seek.

It took me many years to find freedom. Most of my problems came from not taking control of my fear. God helped me to do that. In my case, I believe a being was taking advantage of a neurological condition. It spent years tormenting me, and I felt like the Apostle Paul, who I believe experienced the same thing in 2 Corinthians 12. God’s answer to him was that His grace was sufficient. For me, it took many years to learn this, and now I can say with confidence that I have overcome sleep paralysis. This is my hope for you as well.

The Divine Narrative

 

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The Bible, as it has been handed down to us, is filled with errors and often depicts God as a cruel deity. This becomes problematic if one views everything in it as the inspired Word of God. The solution to this issue lies in how one chooses to understand inspiration. The Bible did not fall from the sky, and just because God inspired its writing does not mean that everything in it is of God. The key is to understand the Divine Narrative, which is sometimes found in the flawed presentation of the humanity of the author.

One way to achieve this understanding is to consider Paul's instructions to Timothy about rightly dividing the Word of truth. To do this, one must recognize that there was no single "Word of truth" during the time of Christ. Every Jewish community had its own set of scriptures and its own editors, or "scribes." These scribes divided the word based on the traditions they belonged to, often adding or removing from their texts.

This might come as a shock to some, but editing was considered a sacred duty. Scribes were tasked with removing errors from their texts, guided by their traditions. It might be of a surprise to many, but the  Hebrew scriptures, as we know them, were edited all the way into the 10th century CE by the Jews, primarily to remove elements that Christians used to prove that Jesus was their Messiah. This is well-documented in history. For instance, a 2nd-century Rabbi, Shimon bar Yochai, cursed anyone who used the term "Sons of God" for passages like we find in Deuteronomy 32:8 and insisted it be changed, and it was  it became  "Sons of Israel."

Similarly, Christian scribes edited their texts based on their traditions, adding and taking away. For example, the last part of Mark's Gospel is an addition by a scribe and not the original author. This editing continued until the 4th century when the Church established the canon of scriptures, and it has remained in this form since. Consequently, the work of editing these texts ceased, leaving us with many errors that are easily identifiable.

Returning to the idea of "rightly dividing the truth," now that we know the Bible is a work of editing, we can follow this teaching. While we cannot edit the texts, we can, like the scribes, seek out the Divine Narrative. This involves leaving out or ignoring elements that contradict this Narrative. For instance, recognizing that the instruction in Numbers Chapter 31 to take sex slaves is not of God, and viewing any scientific claims in the Bible as purely the product of the human author.

Just because God inspired the Bible as we know it today does not mean He removed the humanity of the authors. It should be evident what is purely human. The humanity is there for the greater narrative, and it is our duty to sift through the scripture to find that Divine Narrative. Although we cannot use an eraser like the scribes because we have a canon, we can use our traditions of faith and our understanding of God's goodness to discern what is of God. The Divine Narrative is in the Bible if we are willing to seek it out.