Prophet of the Verdant Heart: John Moriarty and his Silver Branch Perception

In revisiting some elements of a previous article, I've felt the need to bring to the fore a man of whom all those of Viriditas-Seeking Hearts should make themselves well acquainted.

In revisiting my article on the Cosmic Priesthood and the Verdant Heart of Christ I would like to push back against myself perhaps a little. To expound on some things also, with the help of a certain gentleman whose brilliance has been nothing short of an inspiration for me in recent years. He is a wellspring of that good and holy green that is desired for the Christian life, and really, to highlight the life of this man is the real reason for the article.

Firstly, though, I’d like to state that I’m not expecting anyone (and I mean, I really don’t expect anyone), no matter their fervour for such things, to take on the title of, or for that matter go around introducing themselves as, Cosmic Priest. Please do not think it is something I, myself, do. It admittedly smacks of spiritual megalomania and is antithetical to the disposition of humility both spoken of in the article and inherent in the office of Cosmic Priest. In short, those who desire the title are probably least worthy of it.

In all playful seriousness though, segueing to the chap who has inspired this article I will say that there is also a certain new-age woo to the title of Cosmic Priest that does not go unnoticed regardless of my reluctance to concede ground to modern spiritualism concerning such things. Especially now, and now more than ever, where we are attempting to retake the grounds of the supernatural which has been occupied for so long by a movement that would make of the supernatural a fairground of spiritual fairy floss to excite the consumer sweet tooth of a people starved of spiritual meat and ready to settle for anything to satiate their impulse. This of course is not to attack those within said movement, to the extent that it can even be said that there are easily verifiable parameters that would outline an actual cohesive body that could be called a “movement”, for I have been there before, and find myself wandering those lands still. Those who happily dwell in that land of the “spiritual not religious,” with the spiritual and philosophical lines of thought they entertain, can often be fertile ground for catching glimpses of what Christianity has lost and indeed those things that it should be wrestling with in the future. And all too ready are many a good Catholic, many a good Christian, to disregard, dismiss, demonize anything and everything that may have to it the waft of new-age woo. They are the poorer, and so is the Christian tradition, for so easily doing so.

A certain - what should I call him? – Thinker? Author? … Philosopher? In the truest sense of the word, absolutely. Still, a sufficiently fitting moniker alludes me. Regardless, and despite having passed away almost 20 years ago now and despite my having only been aware of his work (this doesn’t seem the right word either), for a mere two or so years, he has been a mentor to me the likes of which only a handful of people have been.

This man has said, things along the lines of and in response to being asked what he will fast from for Lent, that he might fast from the doctrines and dogmas about Christ that we constantly try to take shelter in. That, and for Jesus’ benefit, he shall fast from the Christology’s that attempt to tie down the Living God and enclose Him in safe thought spaces.

He says this tongue in cheek of course but not without a sincere intent to strike a particular chord.

A woman walking a cow in through your home’s front door and out the back door. This is another image he evokes when stressing the importance of a knowing of the divine that does not stop and become comfortable in the tidy little theological houses we build for ourselves. Doctrinal and dogmatic structures meant to help us grapple with the mysteries of the cosmos and eventually propel us, theological gun-barrels as it were, into mystical states of awareness and knowing and love become, unfortunately, more like fortress walls against the divine and provide safe shelter only to the ego that wants to insist on having it all - the mysteries of the cosmos that is - squared away. As if the cosmic game of “whodunnit?” – creation, redemption, revelation, apocalypse, the whole kit and kaboodle – will see its mystery unveiled at the end of a series of sequentially rational, and propositionally based clues and answers that will have the faithful participant walk away confident in the fact that it was …

Jesus.

On the mountain top.

With the cross.

And with that conundrum solved, we can then direct our attention toward the more important things in life. The Dow Jones. The price of beef per pound. The news at 9pm. Then again at 10pm. Then the same news again at 11pm with perhaps another disaster added on to it. Those who know, will by now know of who it is I speak (and of course, his name be in the title!)

I speak of an Irishman named John Moriarty and what has been written above was only to segue into the opportunity to speak of this wonderful fellow and the person of whom, if I were to place one name at the forefront of people’s minds regarding all things re-enchantment, all things Viriditas, it would certainly be his.

I hope not to write at too much length here. His own words are not done justice by my own, but I will say as much as I think necessary that if at least one of my readers is not familiar with him then they make themselves so in the very near future.

Let us return to the “facts of Jesus Christ”.

Here indeed is a starting point for those new to Moriarty. As I have already alluded to, Mr. Moriarty would have it that we do not become comfortable in the theological structures and strictures that we place on the divine. On Jesus. Binds that in the end cannot hope to contain the God of Heaven and Earth and Under the Earth anyhow. Binds that are only so for our own spiritual transformation.

Moriarty tells us that the world, creation, is too shy to want to be facts. The trees don’t want to be facts. The rivers, the stones, the fields don’t want to be facts. How much more so Jesus?

Jesus does not want to be a fact. He does not want to be the “historical Jesus” in the sense of the cosmic game of “whodunnit?” mentioned above. It is the Christ child born in the womb of the soul that is the undeniable proof of the Godman who walked the shores of Galilee, not some long awaited archaeological exhibit A in the “Case for Christ.”

The dogmas and doctrines of the Church serve this end for far too many. And let me add now that the suggestion is not at all to do away with such dogmas and doctrines. It seems a tired point to belabour but apparently it is one that is in constant need of doing. The call is not to a deconstructed and eventually destroyed tradition that allows for any and every belief about Jesus Christ to take up residence in the mind of the man. To do so would be simply to replace the dogmas and doctrines of the Church with the doctrines and dogmas of the ego. The call is to a Christianity that does not settle for a faith of propositional statements alone or as the primary medium of the Gospel. The call is to ask, “what does Jesus mean when He says He gives life, and life to the full?”

We press on. The manufacturing of idols in the days of the Old Covenant were not simply images made of wood or stone or metal conveying something of God or a god in accord with the concepts of a primitive mind. They were the means by which Powers and Principalities were ritualistically called into the idol so that they could do the bidding of people in return for sacrifice and worship. It is not my intent to debate whether this is either possible or moral. Simply that such a thing cannot apply to the God of gods.

This may not be such a challenging idea.

“Of course! Holy God cannot be contained within an idol of wood or stone or metal.” You might resound.

But this is not my angle here.

I actually think it is indeed God’s Will that He be contained within wood and stone and metal, and for that, not merely contained. That “Creation is Incarnation” is something I hold to be true.

That is not for now, though I will say that we, as Christians know that “He who has seen me (Jesus) has seen the Father.” The Living God contained, again not the right word I know, become, rather, mortal flesh. Not so controversial, and far from the notion of idols of wood and stone and metal (though not so far as some might think, perhaps?)

Catholics, as well as those of a sacramentally inclined Christianity, also know that the Living God is mysteriously contained in the bread and wine of the eucharist, even the smallest particle of the host, we are told, does not merely contain, but is the fullness of the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ. Again, not so controversial but surely much closer to idolatry, methinks, and even a kind of nature worship perhaps? Too much.

And beside the point I am attempting to make, so I shall retreat.

The problem of idolatry, I believe, is not that wood or stone or metal … or bread or wine … or man, cannot house, indeed become, the Living God. The problem is not even whether to worship or glorify a creation is to stop short of the one who is alone worthy of that worship and glory. The problem of idolatry is that it is really a means to worship and glorify ourselves. We don’t actually seek to contain God or gods in those idols, even we are not so impudent (perhaps). We seek to set up a temple for the worship of our own ego in those structures. To say, “I have successfully placed the shackles of a rational explanation on the divine” is to put Him at our feet and place ourselves upon the throne.

Idols, in this sense, can indeed be of wood or stone or metal … or dogma or doctrine or, Lord save us, even of bread and wine and Jesus Himself, if – IF- we approach these with the shackles and chains of rationalistic conceptualizing at the bidding of the ego, or the conceptual self as it were.

And so this idolatry cannot apply to the Living God, not because He cannot be contained by the idol but because if we set ourselves up upon that throne in the conceptual kingdom of thinking that we have God squared away, shackled and bound, set beneath our feet, then we cannot hope to be of the necessary disposition to receive the abundance of what God has to give us. We cannot hope to contain the Living God in the idol of our minds and to do so is not about offence to God but disservice to ourselves.

For the caterpillar that thinks itself a finished art whilst housed in its cocoon will not come to transformation into butterfly. It will perish in that cocoon regardless of how comfortable it is and how uncertain it is of life as a transformed caterpillar. Of life beyond the cocoon.

More Moriarty:

After all, we do live in a universe in which a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, allowing us to wonder whether what happens to a part of the universe cannot also happen to all of it. Could it be that even now our universe is in a cocoon it has spun for itself, is undergoing complete metamorphosis and will soon emerge as something unpredictably different? …

… It is a question that many adults in our culture might ask: what has happened to the wonder child in us? And how come our culture didn’t do for us what Ceridwen did for Gwion Back? How come that it didn’t stitch us into a second womb or cocoon and return us into the genius of the universe. The universe in which a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The universe in which Gwion Back becomes a wonder child. The universe which, for all we know, might already have spun a cocoon for itself. It is what the story would teach us: better to trust the genius of the universe in us than to trust our trivial daily minds.

Better to trust in the Christ who dwells in us, who is becoming “all in all,” not that we can contain Him, but that His dwelling in us is our transformation.

Dearly beloved, we are now the sons of God; and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know, that, when he shall appear, we shall be like to him: because we shall see him as he is. - 1 John 3:2

“… it hath not yet appeared what we shall be.” Or “… we do not yet know what we will be.”

This is everything. Whatever God has to give us, it is transformational. It is the transformation of our very selves, and John says that we do not know what it will look like. How can this be if we have the facts of Jesus Christ and who He was in history two thousand or so years ago walking the dusty, sand-earth of Palestine?

But whether the end of days, the apocalypse, is a moment at the end of chronological history or a moment in the soul of the man that ends his old self and reveals himself in Christ, or both, 1 John 3:2 says that we shall be transformed to be like Him in a manner we know not of now, because we have yet to truly see Him.

And how can we hope to see Him if we have the blinders of rationalistic conceptualizing idolatry over our eyes?

I said that I wanted to push back slightly against myself and what I wrote in the previous article, but I indeed pushed back in the article itself. I maintain conviction that re-enchantment is not simply a new or renewed way of seeing, but in honest reflection there is a way at least initially it is. This much I stated: That for we who have become less than animal, bestial, the first thing that must take place is a return to the Garden, and that indeed is to cultivate, what John Moriarty calls “Silver Branch Vision”.

You cannot be a Priest until you are ordained. And you cannot be ordained until you hear the call. And you cannot hear the call unless you have, at least in some way, taken on the disposition of one who wishes to listen. The senses of hearing and sight are here analogously interchangeable. You cannot hope to take up the office of Cosmic Priest of the Verdant Heart of Jesus (call it what you will to disavail your ego of any megalomania) until you cultivate the Silver Branch Vision. Until you do indeed understand, truly, in a lived way that:

“Most probably we are in Eden still; it is only our eyes that have changed”.

This does not change that creation awaits the coming of the Sons of God with groaning. That our deification is the deification of the Cosmos. That our new eyes are new eyes for the whole cosmos. For Eden was not, is not, a finished art.

But I have not begun writing this to merely double down on what I’ve already said.

To the Silver Branch Vision or Silver Branch Perception of John Moriarty then.

He writes:

Great and renowned warrior that he was, it wasn’t something that Bran Mac Feabhail had ever done, but one day, drawn to he didn’t know what, he walked out of his fortress, down and away into the wet, wild lands where only snipe and herons and otters lived. Before long, he having always been a man among men, the silence and the solitude were getting to him. A red onslaught between mountains, that he could deal with, but this silence that you couldn’t spear, this solitude that you couldn’t bring a sword down upon, even the mist that came down, it all unnerved him. Suffering his first defeat, he turned for home. Soon, his walking a trudging, he heard music not of our world behind him. Turning round, he saw a silver branch. It was out of it the music came. Strangest of all, the branch didn’t play it. What he heard was the branch being itself. Being itself, it had perils for mortals in it. And it raided him. In the way that he himself would raid a triple-ditched ringfort, it raided him. It raided him, not with spear and torch and sword, with its unearthly sweetness it raided him. Almost, almost to swooning. Then it ceased, and, by the time he came back to himself and opened his eyes, it was gone.

Have you ever read a more beautiful summary of the things we have just now been speaking? The “great and renowned” (!!!) he who has built for himself a conceptual self, he who has sat himself at the highest ranks of the feast table, and a warrior at that, (for that is what the rationalistic mind is constantly doing; warring) wherein, this conceptual self, he is housed as if a fortress. But away from the comforts of idols he walks one day, into the wild lands, into silence and solitude. Into a space where who he thinks he is, who he thinks God is, who he thinks the cosmos around him is, cannot survive. The silence and solitude defeat him, and he turns back to the comforts of his fortress of conceptualizations. We do this, do we not, whenever we catch a glimpse of true silence. True solitude. Quick to claim God is not there in the silence. Quick to call it an unbearable anxiety (as if any anxiety could outdo the existential angst inherent in the realm of modernity!) we will rush to fill that silence with noise. To fill the solitude with numbers. Data. Facts. Conceptualizations of the world around us. We hurriedly turn back to our fortress, or, worse still, we build new ones right there and then. We enter the deep of the cave-stable of the newborn Christ-child, away from the census sense of the world, but we cannot bear the sight of the helpless babe. Many people ponder whether they would be able to stand at the Blessed Virgin’s side at the crucifixion. Most cannot even stand with her in the Silent Night Nativity of the God-babe.

Before Silver Branch Perception, before Paradisal Perception, first silence. First solitude.

Here the two great spiritual mentors of my life converge. Valentin Tomberg states in his Meditations on the Tarot:

Concentration without effort — that is to say where there is nothing to suppress and where contemplation becomes as natural as breathing and the beating of the heart —is the state of consciousness (i.e. thought, imagination, feeling and will) of perfect calm, accompanied by the complete relaxation of the nerves and the muscles of the body. It is the profound silence of desires, of preoccupations, of the imagination, of the memory and of discursive thought. One may say that the entire being becomes like the surface of calm water, reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its indescribable harmony. And the waters are deep; they are so deep! And the silence grows, ever increasing... what silence! Its growth takes place through regular waves which pass, one after the other, through your being: one wave of silence followed by another wave of more profound silence, then, again, a wave of still more profound silence. . . Have you ever drunk silence? If in the affirmative, you know what concentration without effort is.

It is something I’ve quoted before and will not doubt do so again.

Silence and Solitude. These are not “loneliness” or even necessarily “aloneness”. Silence and solitude can be returned to amidst the clambering noise of the most populated city square.

Moriarty again:

Caring not at all what druid or warrior or poet or harper or smith might think, I sat in silence that night, our usual bright life going on all around me. Suddenly, in the middle of loud but good-humoured uproar there was silence. Withdrawing my hand from before my eyes, I saw a woman surely not of our world and what startled me was that her singing was the singing of the silver branch. Having no care for us, having no mercy on us, fifty quatrains she sang celebrating the world she came from and, the thing seeming like a doom to me, she invited me, or was it that she commanded me, to come and live in it.

… also

So what then of the Orphic note? Does it exist? And if it does, are there people who in their very being become it? Is it immanent in all of nature, in rocks, in animals, in stars? Is the universe but a blossoming of it? Is it an astronomical exuberance of it? Is it the eternal divine silence in its adventure into sound that we are talking about? Is that what the Orphic note is, the sound of the eternal divine silence, that sound solid in rocks, stellar in stars?

Those who seek the Verdant Heart of Jesus, a life of Viriditas, a re-enchantment, we often speak of cultivating a sense of wonder and awe. A sense that a deep magic lay behind the seemingly suffocating ordinariness of modern life. Indeed, we seek the Silver Branch Perception. The Paradisal Perception. I would suggest however that just as the seed need not be fashioned by our own hands into its lush, green, full-bodied, fruit-giving plant-self, neither does the sense of wonder, awe and magic in the soul need directing, fashioning, manufacturing etc. it need only, as the seed, the right conditions for the greening power of Viriditas to spring it to life. The soul is a seed ready for Paradisal Perception, it need only the conditions of silence and solitude to sprout forth in awe and wonder to the cosmos around it, and in it, and as it.

Returning to the first quote from Moriarty look what happens to the soul in silence and solitude.

… he heard music not of our world behind him. Turning round, he saw a silver branch. It was out of it the music came. Strangest of all, the branch didn’t play it. What he heard was the branch being itself.

Here the Silver Branch Perception naturally springs forth form the silence and solitude.

There is more.

More than I can address here, I think. A future article perhaps. It is enough to say that over the last few months I have been consistently visited by, in accord with the image evoked by Moriarty mentioned above, an old woman walking her cow in through the front gate of my theological fortress and out the back.

A dear brother, of whose writings on this platform I hope you are all aware, has written previously the following regarding the notion that the world is an icon of God. It is not at all an ignoble vision this one of the world as God’s icon and it is one that is often taken up by those in this little corner of Christianity. It is a far more splendid and wonder-full vision of Christianity than the usual. Nevertheless …

It seems to me that to valorize the created world simply because it images forth the uncreated God is precisely not to valorize the created world at all. It is to leave all value in God, and the question of what the bestowal of value on the created world by God really means is left unaddressed. What does the created world itself contribute? Anything? Nothing? If something, then what, and how? - Loup des Abeilles

I believe Moriarty’s Silver Branch Perception gives clarity or at least points the way regarding the question proposed.

“… out of it the music came. Strangest of all, the branch didn’t play it. What he heard was the branch being itself.”

The world as icon of God would be the branch playing a music that comes from and images forth something of God. It would, as the brother suggests, leave all value in God. What if it be God’s good delight, however, that the Silver Branch simply emanate the music of it being itself?

And what if, for the branch to play its song in the fullness of itself, it was waiting, groaning in anticipation, for those who have been ordained in silence and solitude and given the charism of Paradisal Perception and of a bridgebuilding Priesthood that can knit together heaven and earth?

Moriarty himself states that the Silver Branch Perception is not the final resting place:

Here, in Slí na Fírinne, our confidence in ourselves as Christians enables us, no matter what it’s provenance, to listen to the wisdom of humanity. While we do not relapse into polytheistic credence in doing so, we listen to a Bhagavad Gita sung to us at sea by the god of the sea. In it he challenges us to come out of the prison-house of common perception into silver branch perception or, as a Christian would name it, Paradisal perception. In challenging us to emerge into silver branch perception he is challenging us to emerge into silver branch morality, into silver branch behaviour towards all things.

… also

Where there is no vision, expect moral failure. Contrarywise, where there is silver branch perception and a sense of silver branch being, it is likely that there will be silver branch morality.

Another time, perhaps, for all this. It will not be the last of the Moriarty inspired posts.

Until then, I will simply urge those who feel the soul-soothing balm of Moriarty’s words in the few that I have quoted and the musings they have inspired to seek him out more so. He is something of a piper whose own tune is itself a paradisal one.

A Silver Branch Song that calls forth one’s own holy melody in response.