Creation

Pictured is an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting the sacred scarab beetle, a symbol of self-creation in ancient Egyptian mythology. There's more mathematical elegance in this myth than in, say, the Big Bang theory. Let me explain.

Modern cosmology, unfortunately influenced more by religious mythology than by science, asserts the universe was created ex nihilo, or out of nothing. This, of course, requires a First Cause or Prime Mover -- a God, if you will -- to get the ball rolling with a big bang. But since science literally can't do the math, religion is gifted with a so-called God-gap and civilization must remain seated in Sunday school detention. The problem has not so much to do with the mathematics of singularity as with the Big Bang theory itself.

Back in ancient Egypt, the sacred scarab beetle rolls merrily along pushing its ball of dung. Miraculously, out pop little scarab beetles from time to time repeating the act of self re-creation, or so the story goes. This myth is a more apt symbol of the truth than is ours. Yes, I assert that the universe has simply always been here; that it evolves, devolves and then re-creates itself. And now, theoretical physics has proffered a new cosmogonic model named Loop Quantum Cosmology. The phrase "in the beginning" is rendered meaningless according to this model.

Abhay Ashtekar, Eberly Professor of Physics at Penn State, sat at his computer observing a Big Bang variable. In this particular instance, as the universe condensed toward a singularity, it suddenly exploded and reversed, re-creating itself with ancient birth-death-rebirth elegance: the Big Bang became the Big Bounce. While this theory wrecks havoc with the current Western version of the Babylonian creation myth, not to mention some of our more cherished metaphors, at least it's not yet more Sunday school fiddle-faddle.

But what of faith?

Arguments about whether God is a watchmaker who takes no interest in his creation, or a puppet master who controls it, proceed from a false premise: theism, or the existence of an anthropomorphic, personal god. Such argument causes religious wars and threatens civilizations. Humankind can do better; faith can remain strong, freed of silly superstition and religious dogma.

One could, for example, believe in God as a non-theistic Ground of All Being (Tillich, Spong, de Chardin). Or in a pantheon of gods and goddesses, dragons and faeries as metaphors for various biospheric conscious energy fields. My favorite philosophical argument for God's existence was the Teleological argument, a belief I have not completely abandoned, although it need not appeal to a theistic divine intellect. Simply put, our universe has a purpose; things do happen for a reason, and we all can experience, and indeed have experienced, the mysteries of the numinous. Better just to contemplate this rather than define it, I think. The devil's in the details.

New scientific discoveries at odds with religious beliefs can shake us up a bit. Always have. Next month, the movie Creation premiers. It's the story of Charles Darwin, who's theory still shakes us up, and his own personal test of faith. I look forward to seeing it.

Next: A few words about Jesus.

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The Numinous

To sense the numinous is to awaken the mind to the reality of spiritual experience, or that feeling, even that surety, that some-one or some-thing magnificent has inexplicably tapped your shoulder. What I believe and hope would come next, at least for most of us, is spiritual growth, or how to interpret this newly experienced reality and incorporate it into everyday life.

This quickly brings us to a crossroads or liminal space as we fashion a plausible and useful spiritual context. The subsequent journey can be never ending. The short road leads us to organized religion, to tired and ancient explanations, and even to an entropy of knowledge. Some reject this road and travel on. Others eventually will give up on the numinous and on religion itself, for one can remain satisfied in Sunday School for only so long. Our culture, it seems, is either incarcerated in a medieval Sunday School class or in spiritual crisis of some sort.

There is another path -- the never ending journey.

One summer, this path took me to Loreto, Italy. I went there to visit the Holy House where Mary and Joseph purportedly raised Jesus. In the 13th century, you see, angels relocated the little stone house from Nazareth (the proper theological term for angelic home relocation is translate) to Italy. Several million pilgrims now visit the site annually. Yet inside this phony little house in Loreto, I, too, had a profound experience of the numinous. Why?

Since I never subscribed to angelic translation in the literal sense, and trusting in the reality of my experience, this question arose: what, if anything, makes this 13th century home in Loreto truly sacred space? I have come to believe energy and consciousness lie at the heart of the matter, or we could say conscious energy, or even quantum consciousness. Furthermore, according to some theorists, Loreto-type energy fields consist not only of the conscious energy of today's devout pilgrims but also the local holographic quantum imprint of energy accumulated during 600-years of veneration by devout pilgrims. Conscious energy is seemingly indifferent to the veracity of the Holy House of Loreto. Indeed, the veneration of pilgrims both attracted to Loreto by conscious energy and contributing to that conscious energy themselves make the space sacred, spiritually potent and viable.

We can appeal to the Bible for a more familiar example to illustrate that truthfulness and "correct beliefs" have little, if anything, to do with the efficacy of conscious energy. This discovery was first made by Jacob, grandson of Abraham.

The patriarch, fleeing his twin brother Esau, stopped for the night near what likely was a site marked by standing stones sacred to the Canaanites. He utilized one stone as a pillow and went to sleep. During the night Jacob dreamt of a ladder reaching up to heaven with angels ascending and descending it and heard a prophetic voice promising him and his descendants the land of Cannan. We he awoke he said, "Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it" and named the place Beth-el, which means House of God.

Around 800 years later, when the Assyrians captured the Northern Kingdom in 721 B.C.E., what had become the city of Beth-el went into decline and eventually ceased to exist. Today, it's exact location remains uncertain but is some 10 miles north of Jerusalem. Perhaps one day Beth-el's holographic energy imprints, which may become manifest as telluric earth energies charged by the collective consciousness of Canaanite, Jewish and Christian believers, will choose to be re-discovered.

Be that as it may, intentionality can be a characteristic of conscious energy if focused and directed with purpose. In other words, a specific, purposeful energy field likely attracted me to Loreto. Two days before going there I knew nothing of its existence, although I'd heard of Our Lady of Loreto. A friend in Florence, where I was living at the time, said I should go there. So I did.

Confronted in Loreto with a Sunday School fables of angelic translation and the sight of pilgrim supplicants on their knees inching their way about the house's perimeter, I sought a contextual symbol or friendly prophetess for an explanation. My sense of the numinous occurred when I entered the house and saw a statue of the Black Madonna, a symbol not so much identified with Mary herself but with the sacred feminine and Mother Earth. It's said the Templars referred to Mary Magdalene as the Black Madonna, a subject perhaps better left to Dan Brown. It's also said that strong fields of telluric energy are found at Black Madonna pilgrimage sites, mostly in France. In any event, the exile of the sacred feminine has become a metaphor for the world's yin-yang imbalance and biospheric troubles (global warming, deforestation, etc.)

Whatever the source and purpose of this conscious energy is, and regardless of whatever metaphors and mythologies we prefer to attach to it, even the inane ones, it may be worth a few minutes of occasional reflection and Googling by modern minds given to scientific inquiry. If we indeed may expect a paradigm shift involving a new scientific cosmology in the not-so-distant future, quantum mechanics predicts conscious energy will play a vital role in achieving it.

The cosmological role of conscious energy is, I believe, a key to the widely anticipated 2012 event. I shall write more about this in my next blog.

(The energism artwork is titled "First Dream" by Julia Watkins.)

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Gaia Theory

Like never-ending whimpers from frightened children, the vibrations echo and reecho throughout the biosphere -- the realm of life on planet Earth. Buried beneath the daily chorus of busy lives, these plaintive cries are mostly unnoticed. Yet a few do stop and listen to this Music of the Spheres.

Those with ears to hear are like "vessels of wood and earthenware" (2 Tim 2:20). This tiny minority intuits a clarion call from Gaia and responds. It is an assemblage of poets writ large including some scientists who tirelessly warn of climate change -- a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions; some watchmen who await the dawning of a global social transformation -- a radical paradigm shift; the freethinkers who reject overwrought dogmatic religion -- a casus belli and planet-wide plague of Biblical proportions; various mythologists and cosmologists who anticipate biogenesis or cosmogenesis in 2012 -- either the date or the metaphor; the vigilant truth-seeking disciples of Huxley's metaphysical Perennial Philosophy, and those transhumanists yearning for a harmonious relationship with Gaia and an egalitarian, sustainable, peaceful society on Earth.

Gaia is real.

Simply put, the Gaia scientific theory named after the Greek goddess asserts that the biosphere itself is a living, self-nurturing organism comprised of lesser organisms that affect the environment in ways that make it more suitable for life. Author and scientist James Lovelock first formulated the Gaia Hypothesis in the 60s. It's further understood and appreciated through the teachings of the late Teilhard de Chardin, a renown Catholic theologian, philosopher and scientist.

Teilhard postulates the Law of Complexity/Consciousness. It states that matter, both inanimate and animate, complexifies upon itself and increases in consciousness; that evolution traveled the path from inanimate matter, to plant life, to animal life, to human life, and from geosphere, to biosphere, to noosphere, which is a metaphysical realm that includes humanity's collective consciousness plus its Jungian collective unconscious. The noosphere should be thought of as the planet's morphogenetic field, as explained by Rupert Sheldrake in his treatise Morphic Resonance. The transformative noosphere, our next evolutionary ascent, will allow us boldly "to go where no one has gone before."

The biosphere, according to Teilhard's teaching and the intuition of others, is transforming or morphing itself into higher consciousness, evolving a noosphere of spiritual awareness not unlike, he writes, the New Jerusalem of the Bible. Russian biologist Vladimir Vernadsky, who devoted his life's work to biospheric study, coined this transformative, chrysalis stage the "Psychozoic Era." It heralds an extraordinary evolutionary leap for humankind. The impetus compelling us to higher consciousness can be likened to Henri Bergson's Élan Vital.

There are caveats, however.

In 2006, Lovelock published The Revenge of Gaia, which contains its own Biblical correspondence. The subtitle, Why the Earth is Fighting Back - and How we Still Can Save Humanity, sums up the book. Lovelock argues that while the environmental damage has been mostly done, we still can mitigate the effects of global warming and climate change. A parallel caveat points to the religious component of morphogenesis, a component that has not had a thorough cleansing since the Age of Enlightenment and now seems mired ad absurdum in the backwaters of mucky fundamentalisms and exhausted proof texts.

From my perspective, the tiny, creative minority -- the Gaia Movement with Lovelock, Sheldrake, and a heretical scientific community at its forefront -- are like receptors tuned to the same creative energy (morphic field) or frequency. In the case of religious fundamentalists, UFO enthusiasts, and assorted alarmists, those folks perhaps have honed in on a distorted harmonic of this same frequency. The movement has its bona fide prophets. St. John, whose fever dream was recounted in the Book of Revelation, is one, as are certain Mayan, Vodun and First Nation shamans. Clearly, all of the above sense a biosphere on the verge of something big approaching an inflection point.

Lurianic kabbalah interprets, or prophesizes, this inflection point as the return of the sacred feminine, or Shekhinah, who repairs an unbalanced world, a mysticism not inconsistent with Chaos Theory. Many have noted an increase in the popularity of goddess art and in Neopagan nature-based, live-and-let-live religions that champion tolerance and inclusivity. For my part, I find Isaac Luria's kabbalistic mythology and discipline of mystical theoria to be most helpful in understanding and appreciating these difficult days.

Clearly, Gaia is in a birthing process attended by pangs of agony. Such is the natural order. Heretics, fanatics and visionaries alike anticipate her swaddled, nascent metaphor with supreme joy and excitement.

(The image above is titled Madre Natura, by artist Holly Sierra.)

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The Sibyls

The two great Mediterranean empires were at war. The second Roman war against the Carthaginians had dragged on for years but in 204 BC turned in Rome's favor, yet Hannibal's forces still remained entrenched on Roman soil. The wary Roman Senate consulted the Sibylline Books. The prophecies revealed that if the cult of Cybele, Asia Minor's great earth mother goddess, was imported to Rome from Anatolia, the foreign invaders would be driven out (and eventually they were).

Cybele's new cult officially began the following year, marked by construction of a temple dedicated to her as Magna Mater, the Great Mother, on the Palatine Hill, Rome's mythological birthplace. Today, a basilica dedicated to the Virgin Mary stands upon that site.

(The Cumaean Sybil -- from the Greek word sibylla meaning prophetess -- painted in the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo is pictured above.) A Sibyl is a seer who may receive her inspiration from a god or goddess.

Last week, we noted in this blog that the way the ancient Israelites, and subsequently Judaeo-Christian civilization, thought about time marked a historic paradigm shift. Repeating cycles were out; linear progressions were in. This left little room for the old goddess traditions, which became anathematized as pagan deceptions. Be that as it may, as Christianity advanced, new saints simply replaced the old goddesses. St. Mary herself has inspired Sibyls on many occasions. For example, at Fatima in Portugal Mary prophesied (divine inspiration) World War II and for disbelievers even conducted a miracle of the sun (divine intervention), which was reported at the time by the secular press (see link).

In the not too distant future, the secular press may devote coverage to another series of apparitions of Mary featuring even more Sibylline-style predictions. These apparitions, which have occurred daily since 1981 in Medugorje, a remote village in the former Yugoslavia, involve as yet unrevealed predictions of future newsworthy events. For now, the predictions are being kept secret by the apparition's six seers.

For now, these apparitions are either dismissed as hallucinations or regarded as supernatural visions of Mary within a Catholic context. The truth probably hides in the middle ground. It could be difficult to find since most Americans welcome advances in science yet resist advancing beyond medieval spiritual superstition. Incredibly, 46% of Americans still take a literalist view of creation that places the Big Bang 2,500 years after the ancient Sumerians learned to brew beer, exclaims Sam Harris in The End of Faith.

The Yugoslav apparition describes herself as mother of all people. Popes have described Mary similarly. Indeed, at Ephesus she was awarded the title, Mother of God. As a loving mother of all her children, including Muslims and Methodists, it cannot be rationally explained why she is portrayed as an uber-Catholic.

The scientific paradigm shift of the early 20th century, which involved discovery of the atom, relativity theory and quantum theory, inoculated many against credulous religious beliefs. While religious fundamentalists (the 46% previously noted) refused treatment, others left mainstream religion in significant numbers. This does not suggest they stopped believing in God. On the contrary, theologian Tom Harper asserts in his book The Pagan Christ that faith can be strengthened and liberated when freed from the bedrock of unyielding religious dogma. One can only hope the next scientific paradigm shift, the one occurring right now that involves string theory and M-theory, will free some of the credulous 46% from their delusions.

A brief word about the psychology of apparitions as synchronicity in the context of Jung's collective unconscious. Visionaries who see the Virgin Mary are hugely influenced by the Great Mother archetype, which floats about in everyone's psyche. The conscious mind naturally associates archetypes with cultural history: Greeks and Romans might experience ecstatic encounters with Cybele; Portuguese and Bosnians with Mary, and so forth. We should guard against literal interpretations and overt secularism, however.

Rupert Sheldrake's controversial hypothesis of morphic resonance could also help explain why divine communication, or, if you prefer, projection of the psyche, should more readily occur in locales such as Ephesus, Fatima, or Medugorje, a village devoutly Catholic for over 900 years where morphic fields could have been generated over time by shared beliefs and rituals. In Medugorje, many villagers claim the apparitions are, "a reward for their unflinching faith and centuries-old devotion to Mary." That's a skewed take on morphic fields, so who knows?

We do know this. When the world began, all the atoms in our universe -- and scientists have calculated the total number -- comprised a very dense orb of connectivity and entanglement the size of a green pea. Quantum entanglement explains, for instance, how objects can be in two (or more) places simultaneously, a feat once considered god-like but now scientifically termed superposition.

As quantum science blasts apart fossilized beliefs and chunks of bedrock, we eventually may evolve a synthesis of science and spirituality: the much anticipated New Paradigm for the Aquarian Age that welcomes the return of the sacred feminine and a rational appreciation of Magna Mater.

An informative and entertaining one-minute video starring Dr. Quantum is embedded below.

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Our Ladies of Ephesus

Not much remains of Ephesus, a ancient city in western Turkey (Anatolia) near the Aegean Sea. From the tourist guest houses on the hillsides of present-day Selcuk, it's a pleasant stroll down to the remains of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the great Temple of Artemis (Diana). One column and most of the temple floor are all that's left. But pilgrims still come to Ephesus to brush shoulders with the sacred past.

Paul of Tarsus visited Ephesus twice and addressed one of his letters to the local Christian church. Centuries later, the city hosted a historic Church council. The Council of Ephesus in 431 declared the Virgin Mary to be the Mother of God, clearing up a raucous theological debate. Christian tradition today holds that Mary spent her final days living in Ephesus. If true, it's fitting. Truthfully, it's fitting regardless. Pilgrims visit her old stone house and gardens on the sunny side of Nightingale Mountain, Diana and Artemis being long forgotten deities.

Artemis (the statue pictured above was the Temple eye catcher) herself evolved from a Great Mother goddess known to the Phrygians of antiquity as Cybele. The Phrygians inhabited this same area of Anatolia. Cybele was called the Mother of the Gods; Artemis was known as Queen of Heaven and Star of the Sea. These same titles were also bestowed on Mary, with reference to a singular god, of course. Relics of the Great Mother in Anatolia extend as far back as 7,500 BCE.

What, if anything, makes this history relevant for us today? After all, what's past is past and Artemis never existed anyway, according to modern theological certainty. The answer depends upon how you think about time.

Western civilization is an anomaly in world history. It's the only civilization to think about time solely as a linear construct. All other civilizations reckoned time either cyclically, or as linear progressions within a greater cycle, e.g. Mayan culture. No wonder we Westerners hold ancient wisdom, its myths and metaphors, in such low regard or even contempt. We see the distant horizon as a straight line knowing full well that it looks quite different from outer space. This blog seeks to widen horizons by invoking ancient wisdom; to shoot time, and truth, using a wide angle rather than a zoom lens.

Experts proffer various explanations of why the western world bid farewell to cyclical perceptions of time. This departure, however, is rather easily traced to the covenant between Yahweh and Israel that marked unique and unrepeatable events in human history. In Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger writes: "At the heart of the religion of ancient Israel is a break with the entire universe..." In other words, only in the monotheistic Judaeo-Christian tradition were things set in motion once and for all time by one, personal god.

That notion can lead to all manner of zoomed in reasoning. For instance, Sam Harris points out in The End of Faith that: "Most people in the world believe the creator of the universe has written a book." Or three, no less. Such a credulous worldview guarantees religious intolerance and bigotry as believers cling to limited, linear horizons; narrow, correct beliefs and notions of absolute truth, and then often kill those who disagree. History confirms this indictment, as might today's newspaper.

Returning to Ephesus with these refreshing thoughts, we are invited to reflect upon a patriarchal world run amuck in linear progression, a world where past is regarded as mere prologue to future progressions until the world endeth. With cyclical thought, the past is viewed more respectfully as prophecy. Ergo, we would do well to remember the future. We certainly have the capability to do so, but do we have the time?

Could the sacred past at Ephesus possibly serve as a road map to the future? Do our ladies of Ephesus have secrets to share? Yes, I believe so. And next week I'll explain why.

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Child of the Sixties

Novelist Robert Stone upon the death of Jerry Garcia wrote, "But of that holistic magic vision of the garden set free, the music of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead is the purest single remnant. It was supposed to be an accompaniment to the New Beginning. In fact, it was the thing itself, all that remains with us."

If that's true, what happened to our New Beginning? Seems it just faded away. Our bubbly cultural revolution (iconography above left) of boundless love and peace fizzed and fizzled. First, our prophets were assassinated. Now, our cherished flowers and inspired troubadours -- most recently Henry Gibson and Mary Travers -- flee this plane at an unprecedented pace, or at least it seems unprecedented. Do we approach the end of a beginning that was never to be?

I was surprised by my profoundly sad and empty feelings upon learning of Mary Travers' death, and of Henry's, as much as I was surprised at 65 by old age itself. I've come grudgingly to accept the latter, but sough better to understand the former, to understand in a metaphysical context what cultural icons symbolize for us and why we grieve their loss, quite often disproportionately to loosing someone we actually knew.

You could say the answer (my friend) is "blowing in the wind." By this I mean the answer, like our very being itself, is distended back through time. When our personal cultural icons, or demigods, pass away, a piece of us passes as well. Not physically, of course, but as Dasein, an individual's psyche distended throughout his or her lifetime. The more significant the symbol, the greater the sense of loss. To a child of the sixties, a decade of hope shot through the heart by Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, the passing of a cultural symbol can be huge. The event can represent another nail in the coffin of the New Beginning that never was; a dream bereft.

For my part, I hope our 60s New Beginning was somehow only postponed, that it's still out there in the cosmos somewhere. That from the muddy water of Woodstock, the flowered streets of San Francisco, and from bloody nightmares in Memphis, Dallas and Los Angeles, it will awaken from stilled distention, rise into being one starry night and set the garden free.

As long as one iconic flower lives, one who also dreamt the dream, perhaps I can avoid eye contact with mortality a while longer.

Where have all the graveyards gone?

Covered with flowers every one

When will we ever learn?

When will we ever learn?

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On Shadows

(Third and final in a series.)

"I am half sick of shadows, said the Lady of Shalott." The painting of the Lady of Shalott (left) is by Waterhouse; the poem by Tennyson.

For metaphorical purposes in this blog, we all are ladies of Shalott. We ourselves are embowered, or we allow ourselves to be embowered, in a linear reality of time and space wondering if this is as good as it gets. We are sure only of what we see, touch and feel although poets, artists and sages throughout the ages have assured us of a grander, more glorious reality.

Consider the painting for a moment (click it for a larger image). Our lady sees the reflection of Camelot in her magic mirror whilst experiencing a longing for love symbolized by the recently wed couple in the boat, but she's cursed and cutoff from this outside world. Our lady consorts only in the company of shadows and reflections in her castle bower. Consider her wistful expression and tranquil repose as she contemplates unseen, untouched and unfelt joys and sorrows of life in the world beyond. Yes, we all are like the Lady of Shalott.

Let's escape. Let's sail through the looking glass into Camelot, into distant shadows and skewed reflections of space time.

Here, metaphors become reality; the material world is co-existent, but pretty much a drag on our bower, i.e. the forward anchor on our otherworldly boat, or our imagination. Here, Camelot is a hotel for archetypes and ancestors, i.e. the collective unconscious. King Arthur is the resident psychopomp, i.e. concierge. You get my drift, so to speak.

We come here to greet our own personal psychopomp and to tour Archetypes of the Ages, a special exhibit found in this blog's psyche. We all inherited archetypes from our ancestors -- there's no other way, if one thinks about it. If we live in disharmony with our archetypes, we become prone to psychological imbalance and spiritual immobilization. We never individuate, a Jungian term meaning to fully develop one's potential. If we live in disharmony with our archetypes, we might actually become the Lady of Shallot, half sick of shadows, cursed and imprisoned in a very small bower of time, space and seemingly safe delusions. Many have.

Living in harmony with our archetypes infers harmony with our ancestors. This is not akin to ancestor worship. May God forbid it! Ancestor worship was one (misguided) reason the church tried to pave over the Celtic Feast of Samhain in the first place (see On Liminal Space). Throughout the ages, religious imperialism, however well intentioned, in this way obliterated liminal space, thus embowering many. Samhain was, and is, liminal; Halloween, and for that matter All Saint's Day, are liminoid observances.

Harmony with the unseen simply implies opening one's mind and heart to the possibility that, through archetypes and symbolism, our ancestors remain tangibly involved in our lives. Spiritually speaking, the "Camelot process" is conduced by simple awareness and acceptance of it. It's a gift to be freely opened, for spiritual gifts are never imposed. New worlds also are opened. New languages of symbolism are mastered and spiritual growth ensues. Balance (yin-yang) is restored. After all, what is Camelot to mythology if not the great symbol of world peace, beauty and enlightenment?

Expressive therapies, dance, art, music, theater, labyrinths and so on -- some already alluded to in this series -- engender imagination and creativity along with a sense of otherness. These methods in themselves reconnect us with archetypes and heal us, especially when practiced in community. Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner called this communitas, or intense community spirit. It underscores an importance of ritual at the crossroads of liminal space.

Please allow a personal aside. Eight years ago yesterday, I was in Anguilla, a tiny, neglected island in the Caribbean. I'd flown in several days before from London in response to a strong poke, shall we say. Upon arrival, the lady in immigration said, "Welcome home, Mr. Brooks." I replied, "But, I've never been here before." She replied, "Really! Well, 40% of this island shares your last name." I'm still not sure I understand why it was important for me to visit there.

Coincidence or Camelot?

In closing, a few words about pictures. In the first of this series, I included a Halloween picture featuring Hecate, a goddess of the ancient world. She is a metaphor/archetype for the crossroads marking liminality. In mythology, these crossroads are guarded by Hecate. Naturally, she's identified with Samhain.

In the second of this series, I included a painting by Stephen Schultz, with whom I have been privileged to correspond. Should you feel moved to closely consider his painting, Communion, the print on the back of the painter's blouse represents detail from Courbet's The Artist's Studio, an allegory of Courbet's life, as Communion is an allegory of Stephen's.

Thank you!

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