The Kookiest Thing You’ll Read Today.

I’m in Topeka for the final day of the Parish Life Conference for the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America. At this morning’s Hierarchical Divine Liturgy, His Grace, Bishop Basil, will ordain David Lewis to the Diaconate — and next week to the Priesthood — to serve the Western Rite community of St Peter, Forth Worth. Prayers coveted.

Now for the kooky …

Remember John Tavener? I’ve always found his music to be bizarre. Once, after someone loaned me a CD, I gave my review: “If I were you, I’d burn it.”

It’s nice to be right, even if once in a while.

In recent years he has begun to broaden his spiritual horizons, he tells me over tea in the garden. “The path I follow is still an Orthodox path,” he says. “You have to follow a path, otherwise it becomes a little bit new-age, a bit of this, a bit of that … But I suppose I had a dream vision after a visit from an Apache Indian medicine man. Many people when they’ve met American Indians have very strong dreams afterwards. I had a kind of vision from the Sufi Frithjof Schuon, who was a believer in the inner transcendent unity of all religions. And he seemed to be giving me permission, in a way, to work musically within other traditions. It wasn’t that the Christian thing was failing me in any way, but rather that it enriched it by going into other things, particularly Hinduism and Sufism.”

The idea of the eternal feminine is important to Tavener. He tells me about a visionary to whom the Virgin Mary would appear, always naked. I am not sure Pope Benedict would approve. He says Mary “feels closer to me than Christ. I can’t explain that – she’s much more mysterious because there’s so little known about her, yet she seems very active in the world in an extraordinary way.”

More … if you must.

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