Stratford Does Good
Jordan Stratford’s latest, Sophianic Religion: Starting from Zero, is a lovely reminder of Father Jordie’s mad romantic skills when waxing Sophianic.
There were, for me, always dragons at the bottom of the garden. I acknowledged, intuitively, that there were kinds of non-ordinary experiences accessible via imagination and play, and that the line between “real” and “imaginary” events was not always a precise distinction. Just as “real” things could have “imaginary” (mythic/psychological) consequences, so too could imaginary experiences impact and manifest in the “real”. This is generally frowned upon as “magical thinking”; a derogatory term which collapses two ways:
- “The Secret”-style “wishing makes it so” vapid (and invariably greedy) projection-ism, or
- discounted altogether resulting in reductionist nihilism
So the balancing act is to reject both kinds of materialism: magic as a means to an end, and magic as a random chemical event in the brain with no meaning or value. I was always drawn to and liberated by myth. But this path of magical thinking means walking in the verdant strip between two deserts, between flake-ism and radical materialism. It’s holding the Mystery. This is not an easy thing to do.
