Hudson Valley Astrologer

“The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable.”

Anthony de Mello

Being born on Saint Patrick’s Day caused a big kerfuffle in the family. Apparently my grandfather wanted me to be called Patrick but mom had her own ideas. Patrick was relegated to becoming my middle name.

My brother Paul was born one year early, and then I was born, the number 5 son, in a line of consecutive boys, before mom finally had her first daughter. My younger sister was born 10 months after my birth, “Irish twins.” I would insert the eye popping emoji here because mom was pregnant for an entire decade, ultimately giving birth nine times. We are an Irish Catholic family coming of age in the 1970’s and mom was clearly picking names from sermons by the time the number 4 son came along. It was peak Catholicism and Paul and Timothy were trending.

Mass attendance fell from 55% when I was born to 20% today. Like those old Blockbuster stores where we could pick up movies to rent, Seminaries, across America have closed en masse, dropping by 90%. There is always an alternative to how we consume our trivialities, the commodification of religion for example offers numerous alternatives to being Catholic, just like the growing options to how we get movies piped in directly to the house through endless streaming services coming online, like Netflix’s, which you may recall started out as a competitor to Blockbuster. Instead of going to a store to get your dvd, you just signed up for a subscription and the company mailed you a complete diet of binge watching right to your mailbox. Similarly, friends who grew up Catholic have more or less opted out of that brand of religion, too set in its ways, and opted-in to some variation on the born again brand.

People are not really perplexed anymore by “non believers” like me, not in the way they were back in the 70’s, when it was a mortal sin to miss mass on Sunday (and yet even at its height, only 55% of Catholics attended mass regularly). But things change. We can get our religious fix in newer, more convenient ways than ever before. I suspect a new religion isn’t far off, some type of app combined with a new supplement (sacrament) company, that also offers movies and original series programming, all connected to a better version of god, brought to you by some BIG money AND by “viewers like you.”

Etymologically, the name Timothy suggests a deep reverence, indicating someone who values or honors God. This is definitely true and fitting for me, but with the caveat that from my view God is much bigger than any one religion, or streaming service. My practice is more or less private, meditative, and informed by various scripture from around the world but with a particular emphasis on Gnosis which means “to know God.” The Greek root of the word ties to our word “knowledge” or “awareness.” So, more specifically Gnosis suggests intuitive or spiritual knowledge. Names can be meaningful and significant, like opening a metaphysical window, if we are amenable to such possibilities, and a deeper connection to the universe, to our souls.

In the New Testament, Timothy was a companion of Saint Paul and an early Christian evangelist. In my life, Paul and I were thick as thieves for as long as I can remember. But like my friends, he’s opted for a new delivery system for his religious fix and can quote chapter and verse with the best of them. I’ve read the Bible, which is brutally convoluted, especially the Old Testament, with head spinning genealogy and numbers. Followers ought to be grateful that they don’t have to sift through the Old Testament for quotes themselves and can just got to Bible Gateway and run a search. This is a vast improvement over the first upgrade to the Old Testament, which when it finally came about was called the New Testament. But books are so old school now. We need another upgrade! Another delivery system! The Chosen, which can be seen on Netflix and started as a crowdfunded project raising $100 million, might represent the final push, the next level in the transformation of religious triviality, and all things related to hyper consumer Christianity, with a particular allure for “church shoppers.”

Ultimately, my experience of the religious is that piety is shallow and insincere. The focus on the surface, even in terms of those who claim a “personal relationship with Jesus,” is more egocentric than it is spiritual. People have bought and paid for their brand of religion and will defend that purchase with their life, but the very reason they’ve opted-in often relates to some personal crisis or trauma. They’ve been SAVED or they hope to be. That the good Lord has singled us out, from amongst the hordes of blasphemous heathens, must feel pretty special. Then we learn that we are not alone, that we are merely one among a very special group of people who “know,” sharing a similar ilk of faith and belief. We found our people.

Snakes never inhabited Ireland, and yet the apocryphal story about Saint Patrick banishing snakes from Ireland lives on. People believed, and still do, that he chased the snakes out, but the story is really a metaphor for him converting vast numbers of the population from their pagan influences to Catholicism, from Blockbuster, to Netflix if you like. If Timothy is “to honor god” then it is implied in the name that we must first have gnosis, we must first come “to know god,” a profound personal experience not found in a book, or made into a movie.

HVA

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