#salvation
HOMILY for the Epiphany
Isaiah 60:1-6; Ps 71; Eph 3:2-3,5-6; Matthew 2:1-12
At evening prayer today, the Church sings this antiphon: “Three mysteries mark this holy day: today the star leads the Magi to the infant Christ; today water is changed into wine for the wedding feast; today Christ wills to be baptized by John in the river Jordan to bring us salvation.”
At first glance this seems puzzling and might even appear to be an odd conflation of three events in the life of Christ. But this only is problematic if we think about the celebration of Christmas and the feasts around it in a chronological way. Likewise with the Holy Rosary, when we think that this devotion is meant to present us with a chronological or sequential newsreel of the life of Christ. In fact, as I said on the 1st of January, the feasts of Christmas, like the Rosary (as I say in my book Mysteries Made Visible) need to be viewed theologically – they tell us about the person of Jesus Christ, about what God is doing for us in Christ, and about the life of grace now, and how we can thus receive from God, “grace upon grace” (Jn 1:14).
As such, today feast of the Epiphany is about the revelation to the nations that God has been born among us, that he is “true God and true Man”, truly God with us, Emmanuel. The cosmic-changing implication of the Incarnation is thus set out for us in the Second Reading today. St Paul says: “it was by a revelation that I was given the knowledge of the mystery. This mystery that has now been revealed through the Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets was unknown to any men in past generations; it means that pagans now share the same inheritance, that they are parts of the same body, and that the same promise has been made to them, in Jesus Christ, through the gospel.”
Except that the reading doesn’t make explicit what is meant by “the inheritance” and the “same promise” that has been offered now to all peoples, all nations, both Jew and pagan alike. But if we pay attention to the Preface of the Epiphany, we will hear this: “today you have revealed the mystery of our salvation in Christ as a light for the nations, and when he appeared in our mortal nature, you made us new by the glory of his immortal nature.” We take it for granted, perhaps, that God should offer salvation to all peoples, and yet the fact is that until the coming of Christ, until the Incarnation of God as Man through which he took on our mortal human nature, it had been thought that salvation was only for a particular race, a chosen few.
The coming of God as a human being makes it clear that God has chosen humanity, even though we had fallen into sin and disobeyed him. God has chosen us for himself, and called us into his marvellous light, into intimate friendship with him through the person of Jesus Christ who is both God and Man. Why? So that we might be renewed by the grace of Christ, and so come to share in his immortal and divine nature as the Preface says. This is the theological heart of today’s celebration; this is the wondrous truth that is revealed as an Epiphany to the nations today.
The three mysteries that mark this day, therefore, express this theological truth and they invite us to think about it. Firstly, the Gentile Magi come to adore Christ and they offer their treasures before him. This tells us that salvation from God is now offered to all nations through the person of Jesus Christ. All peoples, therefore, are called to seek him, to journey towards him, and to offer to him, the God-Man, their treasures, their joys, their sorrows, their all. This is the principal sign of this feast that reveals the fact that salvation is now open to humanity, should one desire it, should we seek God out, and open our lives and desires to him.
All that Man can offer to Christ is like the water at Cana. All these, all that is of our human nature, God will transform by his grace and make like unto wine. Just as, in the Mass, Christ takes what we bring to the Altar and transforms it into his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, so Christ takes all that we offer to him, all that is of our mortal human natures, and he transforms us by his grace and divinises us. The water changed into wine at Cana is hence a sign that Christ comes to make us “new by the glory of his immortal nature” as the Preface says. The fact that this takes place at a wedding feast tells us that in the person of Christ, God and Man is forever united, made one in a love and a bond that is like marriage. This reveals the interior sign of this feast, of the saving effect of Christ’s grace on the human soul and person; it tells us howwe are saved interiorly, through the invisible action of grace.
And thirdly, the sign of Christ’s Baptism shows us the external sign, the Sacrament that causes and effects this grace. Baptism is thus called the “Sacrament of Salvation” because the Lord wills that it is through Baptism that we receive the grace of divine adoption, that we share in Christ’s life and divine nature, and that we are thus saved. The third mystery of this feast day, therefore, affirms that ordinarily we must be Baptised in order to be saved. Yes, salvation has been offered to all peoples, but God does not force himself onto us, so we express our acceptance of salvation by seeking Baptism. Christian parents can and should do this for their infant children, but the assumption of the Church, repeatedly expressed in the Rite of Baptism, is that baptised children must be brought up in the practice of the Faith so that they grow in knowledge and love of Jesus Christ. Hence the Collect today also prays: “Grant in your mercy, that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory.”
For our Faith in Christ, and our friendship with God involves a journey: This begins at Baptism, and, as in a Marriage, it is a love that must be deepened and that will need to endure “for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.” And at the end of the journey, if we are choose to persevere and walk by the light of Faith, a light which shines like a star in the night but which, like the stars, is not always so clearly visible, then we shall finally enter the home of Mary and Joseph, and there, in heaven, behold and adore Christ our God, face to face.
This is the journey of the wise men, the journey of faith that each of us, like them, are invited to make in our lifetime. So, at the start of a new year, let us press on in our journey; let us seek that elusive star in the darkness; and let us remember the words of the Lord: “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” (Lk 11:9) Jesus, on this feast day, promises us not worldly or earthly things, not the luxuries and consolations of gold, or incense, or myrrh, but rather, understood theologically, Christ gives us his own self. Therefore, let us give him open our treasures, our whole self before him, and receive from his fullness of divine humanity, “grace upon grace”.
HOMILY for the Christmas Mass during the Night
Isa 9:1-7; Ps 95; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14
Many of us, I’m sure, are grateful that we live in these technological times in which virtual reality is possible. Thanks to video cameras, and a stable internet bandwidth, we can be physically distanced and yet virtually, spiritually present. Some of you might be watching this Mass on our livestream on YouTube for example, and many of us will have worked from home, participated in Zoom meetings, and attended classes and talks online. And I am grateful for the respite and opportunity these have afforded us. I, for one, am glad I was able to witness via WhatsApp my only niece’s first birthday party, held in North Carolina back in February. Last month, via Zoom, I also preached at my last surviving grandfather’s funeral held in Kuala Lumpur. And like so many of you who may have had to do this kind of thing, I acknowledge that this was better than nothing at all; virtual presence is better than absence.
But all our Zoom meetings and hours online staring at screens can leave us brain-dead, feeling like ‘Zoombies’. And although a virtual birthday party is better than nothing, it just reminds us of how empty or unsatisfying a virtual presence can be, like a hug emoji when you’re down, or a photo of flowers or sunsets on your anniversary, when what you want is to smell, feel, touch, see, and experience the real physical embodied material thing.
So, one thing we can all realise after almost two years of all the above and more, is that we’re not disembodied souls - ghosts. Neither are we dis-ensouled bodies - zombies. We’re not pure spirit like the angels are, nor are we just bodies of flesh, blood, nerves and sinew without transcendent intelligence as mere beasts are. Rather, to be human is to a marvellously unique and complex unit of body and soul: we’re spiritual and capable of great ideas and thoughts and of enjoying beauty and music and books. But at the same time, we hunger and thirst, and feel pain and sickness, pleasure and delight. For such is our human nature, to be both physical and spiritual creatures such that the physical uplifts the spirit, and the spiritual delights the body such as when we appreciate good food with friends and family, or listen to our favourite song, or receive a hug from a beloved granddaughter.
Christmas, therefore, focusses us on the reality and marvel of being human, with all its ups and downs. For at the centre of Christmas is the mystery of the Incarnation, the marvellous (and for some, scandalous and incredible) claim that God became Man, born in Bethlehem in Judaea, born of Mary and swaddled in a manger. The Gospel we’ve just heard attends to all the human elements of this claim, for if we’re talking about the birth of a human being, we immediately place him within a family, a society, and a history, and a cultural context – St Luke fills us in on all these human details. It is these circumstances and the concrete facts of culture, relationships, and material objects like swaddling clothes and a manger, that serve to make the Incarnation real and not just virtual reality.
So, of course, from the start people have made note of these real locations, and been on pilgrimage to these places, and preserved as relics the material objects connected to the birth of Jesus. For this is what human beings do, and one of the things I love about being Catholic is the very human bodily manner in which we relate to Jesus. For, quite rightly, we’re not content with just hearing about the birth of Jesus, nor do we want to just see it through a screen, but rather we want to journey there too. Hence every church has a Nativity scene where we can go, and see and touch and experience the wonder of the coming of God as Man – born as one of us, a human being like us, and thus located in human history and a human place. Indeed, he is to be located now, tonight, in this church, here.
All those years ago the prophet had foretold that there will be “a child born for us”, and then the shepherds were told by angelic messengers: “a Saviour has been born to you”, born foryou. And rightly do we rejoice that Christ has been born to save mankind fallen into sin. And yet, in our excitement over the end result we might miss the marvel of the process: A child has been born forus. And who is this us? Mankind, you and I with our human nature. So God has been born for us human beings, taking on a human nature himself in the person of Jesus Christ. Thus the Offertory carol tonight says: “Then was I born of a virgin pure,/ Of her I took fleshly substance/ Thus was I knit to man’s nature/ To call my true love to my dance.”
This last bit tells us, again, what it means to say that a child has been born forus because the reason that God became Man, the reason that God took on a human nature like ours, was so that he might communicate with us through the bodily and physical ways that we understand well, and the reason he does this is to call us to his dance. And here is the core reason for Christmas and for tonight’s celebration.
Now, arguably, only those who have bodies and who live in time and space can dance. Therefore, when this carol speaks of God’s dance, it is referring to the Incarnation of God, and for us human beings to be called to God’s dance means that we are being called graciously to move in co-ordination with God, to learn to sway in sync with Christ and to follow his lead along the ways of goodness and of love. Anyone who has been watching Strictly Come Dancing knows what happens when the partners in the dance are not attuned to each other! So, to speak of us taking up God’s dance is to speak of our Christian moral lives, and so Christ comes to teach us how to be human.
For the human person is a unity of body and soul such that with his whole being he can freely choose to love. Therefore, Christ comes to show us, by his words and by his teaching and by his actions and example, how to love. In Christ, God comes as our true love to show us how to truly love. As human beings we love not in disembodied ways, not only with our minds, nor only abstractly in our imaginations, nor only through virtual reality – we’ve been forced to do this kind of thing over the past year and a half and we know it doesn’t really satisfy. Neither do we love by only satisfying our bodily desires and pleasures, for to only pay attention to the bodily or only to the spiritual would be incomplete, inhuman, and therefore sinful. Rather, we must love as human beings, which means we love with our whole beings, body and soul, with all the joys and fears and sorrows and pains and music and art and food and amazement and wonder that comes with our full human experience. Therefore Jesus said: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” and “love your neighbour as yourself.”
Therefore, when God becomes Man, he is born into a family, a society, a culture because it is likewise in our families, our communities, our parishes, our homes that we shall exercise love and learn to love well as Jesus does. Christ worked and toiled; he knew the oppression of governments, and the humiliations and injustices done by others; and he knew the sorrow of missing a friend, a father who has died. But he also laughed, and joked, and enjoyed delicious feasts and the smell of perfumed nard, and the company of friends and the comfort of his dear mother. Through all these genuinely human contexts, Christ exercised love, and so it is for us too. Through our ordinary and daily human circumstances, the joys and sorrows of being human, we have been called to become like Christ, to be moved by his grace so that we are attuned to the rhythm of the divine dance, doing ordinary things with true love so that we shall become like God who is Love, Incarnate. So St Athanasius sums up the core message of Christmas, the great central mystery of the Incarnation: “God became Man so that Man might become God”.
The mistake many make is to think that this should happen abstractly, merely spiritually, or mentally. The mistake is to think that religion is disembodied or that it denigrates the human body, or suppresses the world’s authentic pleasures and freedoms, or that it is only about what I believe but not what I do. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to Christianity. For ours is a bodily incarnational faith so, as Tertullian says, “the flesh is the hinge of salvation.” If so, then the great marvel of the Incarnation is that our God becomes Man in each one of us, he desires to be really present in each of us, whom he calls his “true love”. So, in each of us, in our bodies and in our lives, Christ comes to be born again and to take flesh in each of us through his gift of grace. So St John of the Cross said that “each of us is the midwife of God”. And God knows that a virtual presence is not sufficient for us, so he comes to us in a spiritual-material way, really present for us here and now in the Holy Mass; he comes tonight in the Eucharist to dwell in us. So, let us offer the Christ Child the hospitality of our hearts and of our homes.
For as the Servant of God Dorothy Day reflected: “I am so glad that Jesus was born in a stable. Because my soul is so much like a stable. It is so poor and in unsatisfactory condition because of guilt, falsehoods, inadequacies and sin. Yet, I believe if Jesus can be born in a stable, maybe he can also be born in me.” Indeed, so let us rejoice. For today a Saviour has been born to us, for us, in us: he is Christ the Lord!
HOMILY for 24th December
2 Samuel 7:1-5,8-12,14,16; Ps 88; Luke 1:67-79
A number of us have been watching the Masterchef Professionals, and quite a few people have mentioned this year’s champion to me because his winning menu was comprised entirely of Singaporean dishes. However, many others around the country have been captivated by another even more popular television programme, Strictly Come Dancing. Last year, in the first year of Covid, it brought much-needed cheer to people, and so too this year as Covid again occupies our headlines. The Strictly Come Dancing Final last Saturday was watched by eleven million people, more than double the viewership of the MasterchefFinal.
However, the dance highlight of this week is not the BBC’s annual dance extravaganza but, rather, what we shall do tomorrow. Don’t worry, the Filipino party was last night, so we won’t have to dance and play games tomorrow! Rather, what I have in mind is God’s dance. For the 24th of December always brings to mind the beautiful medieval-inspired words of one of my favourite carols which will be sung during the Offertory at Midnight Mass tonight. It says: “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day;/ I would my true love did so chance/ To see the legend of my play,/ To call my true love to my dance! Sing, oh! my love, oh! my love, my love, my love,/ This have I done for my true love”.
Christ is singing this carol, and he enters the play, the drama of our human lives wherein the drama of our redemption is played out. He desires that “we so chance to see the legend of [his] play”, meaning that we would take the opportunity tomorrow and in these hopefully quieter days of Christmastide next week to contemplate and to see the meaning, the significance, the legend, ie, the things-to-be-read regarding his birth. Why, as St Anselm pondered, did God become Man? What is it that he desires for us, for me, whom he calls his “true love”?
The carol’s answer is simple: that we may dance with God.
In every dance there is a song; there must be some music. And so Zechariah breaks forth into song, a canticle that is sung by the Church, by us, every morning. And this song begins the dance, foretelling that Christ has come to “guide out feet into the way of peace” (Lk 1:79).
As anyone who’s watched ballroom dancers will know, footwork is essential, and the feet of the dancing pair has to be co-ordinated and work together. And in every dance one leads while the other follows. Many a Strictly Come Dancing participant has floundered and fallen when they fail in this regard. So it is with us. Because of Adam’s sin Mankind has floundered, lost his footing, and fallen. The steps we sinners take are inelegant, we dance to our own individualistic tune, and in our own erratic and uncoordinated way. Hence God himself comes in the person of Jesus Christ to become our dance partner. Christ comes to guide our steps, to lead the way in God’s dance, and so to teach us the footwork that enables us to dance into the way of peace, that is, into the way that unites us to God in love.
So, let us allow ourselves to be led by Christ, to be co-ordinated with his grace, and so to move according to God’s rhythm and the heavenly music of the angels. Together with Christ and only with him can Man take up the beautiful dance of salvation. Only this brings deep joy and true Christmas cheer to our hearts. So, today the music begins – the psalm today even calls us to sing of God’s love – for tomorrow shall be our dancing day as God, our true love, calls us to join his divine dance. For on Christmas day all are strictly called to come dancing!
HOMILY for 3rd Thursday in Advent
Simbang Gabi Day 1
Isa 54:1-10; Ps 29; Luke 7:24-30
When I lived in the Philippines I observed that Filipinos loved to keep anniversaries. And not just once-a-year commemorations, but even ‘mensiversaries’, which was a once a month commemoration! Actually, I think it was just an excuse for a celebration, for rejoicing in the gift of life, and I know how much Filipinos love life. “Mabuhay”, after all, is nothing less than an exclamation of joy in being alive! And perhaps, after almost two years of the pandemic, and with all the uncertainty that surrounds us again, we are just simply glad to be able to gather and celebrate life and being alive!
But every year we hear these same readings, and every year from the 17th of December onwards, the Church’s Liturgy recalls for us the wonderful events surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ, beginning with the Genealogy of Christ. Why does the Liturgy do this? And why are we here for this Novena of Masses? Because the Church is calling us to celebrate an anniversary. Just as married couples observe the anniversary of their marriage, or dating teens keep the ‘mensiversary’ of their first date, the Church recalls annually the unending love of God for us. Indeed the prophet Isaiah proclaims: “For now your creator will be your husband, his name, the Lord of Hosts”.
Our Creator God is our husband! And how does this come to be? How does God marry Mankind? Well, the story is told over the coming week before Christmas as we remember again how God united himself to our humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, in the womb of Mama Mary. It is though Christ, with Christ, and in Christ that God becomes our husband, and that we are united to God – each of us, through our Baptism, and then through the Sacraments, through the most precious Gift of Holy Communion that unites me to Christ my God. Thus, as the Lord says in the Gospel, even the least in the Kingdom are greater than St John the Baptist the greatest of those born naturally of women, for we Christians have been re-born of water and the Holy Spirit, we have the supernatural gifts of grace whereby God becomes our husband!
So, every year, when you gather for these Masses, you’re gathering to keep an anniversary date with God, to thank God for his love, for his coming among us as Man, and for the gift of Himself in the Sacraments, uniting us to him in an unending love.
And this is why these Masses are filled with song because, as St Augustine said, “only the Lover sings”. We sing because we are loved, and we have known and experienced the love of God. We sing because we are joyful because we have a Saviour and we recall in these dark days that God is with us. He who is the Light of the world has been born for us, as this parol proclaims. And we sing because we have each been called to be, like St John the Baptist, joyful messengers to go before the Lord, to prepare a way for him, to prepare the world, our friends, our neighbours, our colleagues to receive him.
Tell your friends what you are doing these nine nights, and invite them here to discover also the love of God for each of us. For God our Creator will be our husband, our spouse, married to us through the infusion of saving grace. Therefore we sing with the psalmist: “I will praise you, Lord, you have rescued me.”
HOMILY for St Francis Xavier
Isa 29:17-24; Ps 26; Matt 9:27-31
Throughout my teenage years, growing up in Malaysia, this sentence from the Gospel of St Mark captivated me: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?” (Mark 8:36). This same sentence of Scripture, I learnt today, was the one that at last caught the attention of St Francis Xavier. He was eighteen when he first met St Ignatius Loyola at the University of Paris, and they stayed lifelong friends. But it was this sentence from St Mark’s Gospel that St Ignatius had used again and again to persuade St Francis Xavier, and turn them into fellow missionaries for the Gospel. In 1534 St Francis Xavier would join St Ignatius and five others as the first members of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, who would endure all kinds of deadly dangers and perils to go to the ends of the world to preach and teach the Gospel. Today’s Saint, therefore, who travelled to India, Malaysia, and Japan is known as the Apostle of the Far East, and the Patron of the Missions.
In today’s Gospel, Christ heals the blind men who call on him to have pity on them. So, too, St Francis heard the call of the peoples of the Far East. Full of love and mercy for them, he felt deeply their longing for faith and salvation through Jesus Christ, and so he baptised and catechised thousands, thus bringing sight to the blind. As he said in one of his letters to his friend Ignatius Loyola, “I noticed among them persons of great intelligence. If only someone could educate them in the Christian way of life, I have no doubt that they would make excellent Christians. Many, many people hereabouts are not becoming Christians for one reason only: there is nobody to make them Christians.”
For me, St Francis Xavier’s words resonates to this day: the world cries out, as one who is blind, for the light of faith and longs for the vision of Christ, for God’s justice and mercy and love. But for this, we need generous souls, moved by divine mercy and compassion and charity, who will risk themselves as priests, catechists, religious, lay missionaries, and even as volunteers in this parish for the various missionary journeys that need to be made – not necessarily to the ends of the earth, but even just to the margins and the boundaries of our local communities and families and homes – and sometimes, these are the hardest places in which to preach! But making Christians must begin with ourselves being made Christians by God’s grace.
So perhaps we feel too weak, too small, daunted by the immensity of the task of being a Christian. But St Francis Xavier would say, just “be great in little things.” This is the frequent refrain of many of the saints. You may have heard people say that they want to change the world, or they want to make a difference, and sometimes we can feel overwhelmed in the face of the turbulence and uncertainties of our times. So, a feeling of helplessness, of despair, or even of anger can be the response of many in these days.
And yet, the wisdom of the Saints such as Francis Xavier is to remind us to be great in little things, to do what we can by cooperating with God’s grace which is given to us each day. Sometimes we can become deaf and blind to the grace of God, to the opportunities presented to us to grow in holiness and in friendship with Christ. Oftentimes, the place that needs to hear the Gospel most is not some distant country but the hinterland of our own hearts. Hence St Francis Xavier wrote a letter from Malacca, Malaysia in which he said: “God our Lord gives to all sufficient grace to serve him and to preserve themselves from sin … all our good and evil consists in making good or evil use of his grace.” So before we can change the world, let us be mindful of the one thing we can change: our hearts. This Advent, then, let us call out to Christ in faith, and seek his healing touch; may he open our eyes to turn from sin, to make good use of God’s grace, and so to find new ways to serve him.
Therefore in 1549 St Francis wrote these wise words from Japan to his fellow Jesuits in Goa: “I ask you to base all that you do entirely upon God and not to trust your own abilities, knowledge or reputation; and, in this way, I shall know that you are ready for all the great trials, spiritual as well as worldly, which can afflict you. For God raises up and supports the humble, especially those who in small and lowly matters have seen, as in a polished mirror, their own weaknesses and have conquered them.”
Yes, by God’s grace, we can change our lives. We may not become great missionaries and preachers like St Francis Xavier, but if we live in Christian love for ourselves and for others, if we depend entirely on God and his grace, then we shall surely see a difference in the world around us. For as Isaiah promises: “the lowly will rejoice in the Lord even more, and the poorest exult in the Holy One of Israel.”
What is alchemy? Is it a wizened old man locked up in a laboratory, experimenting with metals and minerals to discover a miraculous stone which will turn any material into anything else he desired? A man who scoffs at Heaven and contorts the substances of Earth into whatever he wants?
Well, yes and no. First off, there were a not inconsiderable number of female alchemists who made important discoveries which led to their veneration by male successors in their craft, and many alchemists were also devout in their faith! The legendary alchemist Avicenna was said to have prayed for an answer anytime his research flummoxed him, and many monks at the very least studied and lectured on alchemy.
Not just Christian monks, either! Many Buddhist monks practiced Indian alchemy, a discipline sometimes known as Rasayana which deals primarily with herbal concoctions intended to extend one’s lifespan and is closely tied to disciplines like Ayurveda and yoga. There’s also a Chinese alchemical legacy which often pursued immortality and would, at times, overlap with qigong, Taoism, and other traditions of the world’s oldest extant nation.
However, if you’re talking just about Western alchemy, then you need to understand that it doesn’t end or begin in a laboratory. While I do advocate doing research and experimentation in order to understand the natural world, like the Druids who would study the cycles of the moon and the ways of the forest for 20 years before being able to step into their appointed role, alchemy is not fundamentally rooted in science as we know it today.
One could even make the argument that all the alembics and athanors are, in principal, just pageantry to cover up the true nature of alchemy. I’m sure most of you are not strangers to the fact that alchemists used much of their symbols and terminologies to baffle outsiders who they’d rather prefer made light of their craft as nothing more than mad science.
This was the view that alchemists would particularly prefer of the Church. This is because, at its heart, alchemy is not about turning lead into gold or developing a cure for all human diseases. It’s about transmuting your tarnished soul into its rightful divine state, and about providing a remedy to illnesses of the spirit like ignorance, hatred, and dissatisfaction.
Alchemy was so hated by the Church because it is a way to find salvation within oneself. Salvation from misery, salvation from despair, salvation from the illusion that people are powerlessly being tossed around in the storm known as life. When we study alchemy, we find the rhythms of nature and of human existence, and learn to either play along in tune or make our own song be known.
Where, then, is a person meant to start? Well, it’s not by going on to Amazon to grab an alembic or by practicing drawing transmutation circles from a certain excellent anime. Those can come later, don’t worry; life is too short not to have fun even in the pursuit of innate human divinity!
First, though, you need to understand the building blocks of alchemy. Those are the four elements, and that’s where we’ll be going in my next post on this subject! I’m so excited!
For now, I recommend that any of you who wish to put this into practice start by doing some meditation and research. Try to learn to clear your mind and be present in the moment, and spend some time indulging your curiosity in both the scientific and magickal aspects of plants, minerals, and animals.
Thank you for reading! May the Tree of Life always shelter you.
