In Preparation to Seek Doom - a pilgrimage to Chaldon Church

An invocation - set as ramblings, whilst bleeding out in A&E:

Eschatology of the self is brought on by the dark night of winter. How can I face myself? 

The Mirror's Last Judgement… flickered spectres of a cheek, candlelit eyelids, red-galled lips… plumped by idle drunkenness. Fattened, round and split open like the seventh Seal. 

Lamb of God come forth, end-times rock in Winter’s cradle. There is too much to be said about Advent. The Birth and rebirth, Christ in his manger, us in ours. Each year folds in on itself and in that crystalline confusion of a snowflake, life is refracted. December is the witching hour. Before New Year’s dawn, before the light of life which thaws our trapped madness. Those four horses trample on the ice, cracking through the hexagonal prisms forged by fear: of the cold, of the dark, of the sinking Sun, of love we left behind, of our failing bodies, of ourselves. In those last days of Judgement, a Sun necrotises - cosmic inversion sees stars skyrocketing to stones below us. Stonehenge seems reasonable now.

 

“Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done.” Revelations 22:12 

Alpha and Omega, God’s of A and Z, of thanks and reproach, are scrawled on the walls of December churches. The Seven Churches of Asia live in the atriums of our hearts. Each murmur, each heartbeat, an Angel’s explanation. 

The Book of Revelations is geometric, like snowfall. Sixes and Sevens, eyes and horns, ruptured time causing psychedelic Armageddon. At the end, comes the beginning, “I am the first and the last” God booms. The Emerald Tablet drums with light - as above so below, it whispers. This time the sky is falling and the axes of life crash into each other. It all becomes inordinate to conceive. Like the work our wombs do, that cellular majesty, that explosion of a new universe - Judgement day lives in these conceptions. The perennial - the oneness, prisca theologia, your eyes in the mirror and the burning demons behind. Hell is here on earth in the screaming void and the waiting rooms and the guilt. But! There is salvation at the Judgement’s close. An ending unity befalls mankind when the Tropic of Capricorn turns. Christ’s first shriek thrusts our Sun upwards and it reddens with life. 

So to follow that red, we will walk to the Doom mural of Chaldon. Clasped by mediaeval imagination, watching those figures fall and climb and clamber and screech along the stone feels catastrophic. Sprawled across the West wall, Judgement’s troupers play day after day. The eternal Globe. I imagine them as Plato’s puppets, two dimensional figurines showing us a glimpse into a reality we’re not ready to see yet. Jagged teeth and cascading bodies - can’t we stay in our cave?  

The Chaldon Doom explains to us the Seven Deadly Sins, The Fall of Man, Elijah and Enoch, a drunken pilgrim (us), a mesmerised Devil, the weighing of Souls, and Benediction. Teeth chattering, knees buckling, we can look up to Archangel Michael in hope for Libran justice. Chilled blood, red creeping through our veins and in between the Sun and the Moon held on Christ’s white shoulders - can we hope for salvation at the oncoming solstice? 

Through our ability to discern, to judge, to criticise our shortcomings, is the ability to forgive. Imagine the dwindling veil, your arms reaching through for salvation like wading through water. Redemption is a hook in our souls like the anchor of Hope. It’s just about kindness - when you get rid of trad-Catholic moralising, Male-cramped atheism, all its inbetweens. I don’t want to weigh my own soul knowing it falls heavy with hate. With the light of winter’s end can we see more ways to love, to be free, to be unburdened by the darkness. 

William Butler Yeats

 The Falling Of The Leaves

Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,

And over the mice in the barley sheaves;

Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,

And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.

The hour of the waning of love has beset us,

And weary and worn are our sad souls now;

Let us patt, ere the season of passion forget us,

With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.