Divine Suffering and Forest Cathedrals

A collage I made inspired by this essay.

What my mother and the trees taught me was this - there are 3 places to touch the divine. The cathedral, the theater, and the forest.

The cathedral sparkles. There's exquisite suffering in Catholicism. And I really admire it, how aesthetically rich that suffering is, the way they dramatize it, the way they bring excruciating death to life. I love the gold, the scale, the awe, the detail, the light, the dazzling array of beauties reaching beyond one's tiny human form. To experience it, one had to shut themself off, contort themself; simmer in doubt, shame, guilt, fear; wonder and awe at the blood and sacrifice, the wine and incense, the dread secrets. The cathedral's music, soaring high, high, arced by the gay music director, then silenced by a new bishop. At least that was my experience of it.

If you don't grow up in a cathedral, you cannot possibly imagine (I imagine) the shame dug into your breasts and the fuzzy disappearance of the pelvic floor. You cannot imagine the twisted, exultant agony. You cannot imagine being this close to God, to the Platonic ideal, and how much it hurts to get there, and how much you love that hurt. You cannot imagine how much it hurts to love, scorned as you are for being queer. It is the trinity - the divine and the pain and the beauty all in one, impossible to separate from each other or even to understand where one ends and the other begins.

But, as you can imagine, I cannot continue to live like this, idealizing what (through another lens from another world) would very well appear to be a death cult. I also stopped believing in God when I was 12. It's just taken me a little longer since then to grapple with the full implications of it all.

When sacrifice is so exquisite, so holy, so beautiful, how do you say no to it? Even when it hurts people, repeatedly? Even when it hurts you, and contributes to you hurting others, a butterfly spiral out of hurt that your faith eroticizes?

Can you have faith and exquisite beauty without the harm? Can you worship this beauty without worshipping harm? Would you want to?

What would it look like to find those cathedrals elsewhere? To build them elsewhere?

My mother found the divine (or at least perhaps its baser form) in theaters. I was not there for the height of it. I can only imagine the camp, the backstage camaraderie, the holy ritual of performance, the hushéd darkness, the thunderous song, the sparkling stage jewelry. She traveled the world for opera, and I imagine she found something there amidst the fluidity and power.

My birth put a stop to all that, at least after a little while. Turns out when one parent sacrifices their career, they sacrifice their career. But I saw music's power still during her concerts. I saw the people she touched with her singing, the way her adoring crowd rushed to her after her performance to offer their compliments and thanks. I've felt the visceral power of her voice, how her throat would open up and her core would compress to rip from you, softly, softly, emotions you didn't even know you had. I've felt that wellspring of tears and awe and drunk deeply from it. I do think she's right about the spark of divinity in music. It's just a pity it's not my world, and how could it be, with two classical musicians for parents?

So where else?

There is, I have found, another faith, to be found in rugged rocks and dark nights and windswept moors. This is a stark beauty and an ancient one. This is where I first felt awe at the natural world, amid stone buddhas and the rain. Nature was our first companion on this earth - that and each other - and there is nothing so grounding as walking the land of generations upon generations upon generations of ancestors. As an adult, I joined the modern druids, with their practical focus on practice over faith. I encountered the divine in a murmuration of starlings in a muddy field in fen country, bird shit landing on my forehead like an incense blessing from a priest. I read a beautiful feminist Avalonian book by a horrid author that inflamed my imagination and rewrote my faith but reminded me, bittersweet, that Catholicism is not the only religious tradition that harbors the despicable. (But I suppose paganism did not harbor her, protect her, enable her. The faith at large was not complicit).

But nevermind all that now. I live in an old apartment in a grey city, disconnected from the particular nature that I love. My everlasting relationship to nature continues of course; it is everlasting. But these days it is mediated through travel and photographs and an astronomy tower that's the right kind of ruin and the wrong kind of accessible. Most importantly, it is mediated through imagination.

So again I pose the questions to myself - what would it look like to find the cathedrals from my youth elsewhere? To build them elsewhere? If I can presume to call upon my imagination, what would I find there?

Thus I imagine worship at a forest cathedral, where boughs bend and crown between the interstices of light and where the cathedral's spire peeks out from green canopy. Where detail reigns. Where stone and gold and colored light stand together with ancient trees, firm both in their absolutes. (There is, of course, nothing as holy on this earth as an ancient tree.) I imagine too (or I try to), a community of people who love me and my body and sexuality in all its kinds and who have a hint of the strangeness and the old and the divine that is needed for real holiness. I imagine the sons and daughters and children of the industrial revolution returning to the earth, ash to beautiful light to ash, dust to divine spark to dust.

I would build this green cathedral in my mind, warping and twisting druidism and catholicism together, like gnarls of roots and saints. I would warp together past and present and find a future there along the way. This is no blasphemy. Syncretism is my right, as it is the right of all colonized peoples. I would build a dazzling cathedral to trees, fill it with humans and the holy objects of humans, and break down for once if not for all the falseness of a human-nature dichotomy. My cathedral of the trees would bring the human into nature to worship, while recognizing the importance of the human still.

At the start of this I worried and wondered if the exquisite beauty of Catholicism was because of repressed sexuality. Can that beauty be recreated in a freer environment? I thought. Or is that level of beauty only available from the distortion of the self?

But of course by now it is clear. Of course it is possible. Of course the vital sexual pumping must be brought forth clearly into faith. It must be given place of honor, there in this holy place amongst the chalices and whispering branches, the acorns and wine. Sex can be exultation, the body the divine. Perhaps this is obvious to you, dear reader. It has taken me a very long time to be able to imagine it.

But imagination is only one step away from creation, and an individual only one step away from community. I will harbor this forest cathedral in my heart and work to build it, step by step, stone by stone, in the real world. But a faith tradition without community is just a funny way of life. So I turn now to you, dear reader. What is your equivalent of a forest cathedral? Would you care to join me, in your own way, amidst the trees?