Fugitives from Wholeness and the Gospel of Leo

Path Notes # 13

I’ve been waiting for Leo to show up for a while now.

It’s 1989, and I’ve just arrived in southern Alberta to visit an initiative that’s bringing Indigenous Elders and community leaders together with systems practitioners. Two of the founders generously invite me to stay with them, and I sleep the night in their home office which is in a detached garage. It’s a wonderful sanctuary after an intense journey.

That night, I dream.

I am practicing ninjutsu. (In the everyday world, I had been introduced to the art by a childhood friend who became an adept and the translator for Japan’s foremost lineage holder of the ninja traditions, but it would be another seven years before I would study it formally). Somehow, in the dream, I have found my way to the essence of the art that lies far beyond physical form. My opponents grow irritated because I won’t assume the conventional stances of conflict that they’re expecting. I’m able to defeat them easily through spontaneous moves that I don’t even think about. We’re playing completely different games.

I walk away and enter a large, bright, crowded church. The preacher is giving a sermon and I listen for a while, growing increasingly frustrated at the banality of the message. Finally, I can’t take any more. Standing up I exclaim ‘this is all a bunch of shit!’ and walk to the back of the church, followed by many pairs of angry eyes. To my surprise, the last pew has been turned to face the rear where there is a small pulpit glowing in the darkness.

From it a man is preaching from the Gospel of Leo.

I don’t pay too much attention to the words but have the feeling of something new and potent emerging in the fertile shadows of a brightly lit church that has no idea what is happening. To my surprise, I am now carrying several animals. They include a wounded wolf or dog whose rear left leg has been badly damaged, along with three wolverines – one black, one mottled grey and one the usual shades of brown. I let these wild ones go into the church….they have work to do. I become aware of other animals that I cannot see clearly at the periphery of my vision and beyond them, to the left of the pulpit, the dimly lit presence of a primordial forest softly glowing.

I am woken early in the morning by the phone ringing. The person on the other end asks me to give a message to an Anishinaabe artist who apparently lives in town but has no phone.

“Tell him Leo just died” the voice simply says and hangs up.

The dream caught my attention and, as you can imagine, the potent synchronicity of the phone call has kept it fresh.

So I’ve been waiting for 36 years to hear the gospel of Leo. Not because of its specific content. But because I sensed that whenever it showed, it would be a portent of something emerging from the deeper dreaming. A tipping point of sorts towards greater wholeness. The primordial forest breaking through the walls that have been built to keep it out.

I don’t really know what to do with any of that and don’t pretend to understand it at all.

But here’s a cautious welcome to Leo Francis and his big church.

I’m sorry for releasing that wounded wolf and all those wolverines back into your flock.

Not really!

And I’m open to being surprised. Startled even. Woken from my slumber by a call. Open to seeing emergence in the most unlikely places. Open to releasing my conventional stances – including my familiar stories of collapse and change along with any vestiges of unmetabolized rage towards the church - so I might move with and serve the deeper dreaming.

Open to trusting the wild intelligence of the primordial world – the self-organizing grace and regenerative powers of the wild world that lie so far beyond my comprehension.

Original nature.

Because I just can’t shake the feeling that something wild and beautiful is emerging in the fertile darkness. The edges of long-standing institutions and structures might be more permeable than we can possibly imagine.

If you’ve studied any of the so-called internal or energetic arts, you know the bright and fiery solar currents tend to build energy in the centre which then flows or gets directed out towards the periphery. The practitioners of most such arts tend to put their focus here - cultivate the energy and move it outwards.

(They will often say ‘up’ rather than ‘out’ but, as Buckminster Fuller reminded us, the word ‘up’ is simply a two-dimensional descriptor for a three-dimensional experience!)

The darker lunar currents however move the opposite way. They flow from periphery to centre and ask something quite different of us. We have to soften and be permeable to them. A kind of intentional surrender that is at once subversive and terrifying to the isolated self and its many stories and structures.

But if you only focus on the rising Apostolic Flame and forget about the descent of the Holy Dove, you risk burning up the world with your zeal and conviction. The kataphatic must be balanced by the apophatic. The governing vessel with the conception vessel. The light with the darkness.

And that thing in the darkness that we sense has been trying to get us? The terrifying shadow figure. The malevolent pursuer. The devourer. The wrathful deity.

Perhaps it’s time to let it have its way with us.

I’m feeling the presence of my beloved soul brother David as I write this. He was killed four years ago and today – May 15^th - would have been his birthday.

I’m sure you’ve had dreams where some nameless terror or predatory figure has been chasing you. Sometimes malevolent. Sometimes alluring. Sometimes both. Something at the door, out in the forest or crawling up from the cellar trying to get you. Or trying to get you to do something you are certain is a terribly bad idea.

And, if you are like most of us, you probably did your best to run away.

David dreamed of being chased by grizzly bears from a very young age. In his twenties, while on his way to fast in the Stein Valley to grapple with his own great life dilemmas and the whispered imperatives of his own soul, an Nlaka'pamux elder asked him about the animals in his dreams. David told him about the grizzly bears.

And what was he doing in the dreams asked the old man?

‘Are you kidding? I’m running away from them!” was David’s response.

“That’s too bad!” said the elder. “You’ll never discover what they’re trying to give you!”

This made no sense whatsoever to David but the next time he had the dream, he found himself remembering the elder’s words and, to his utter horror, turned to face the pursuing bear. He was instantly transported to an underground cave glimmering with warmth and magic.

Inside, there were two bears. Grizzly bears.

The bears welcomed him as a cherished guest and gave him three gifts - one of which was a hand drum. David was a trained percussionist and had been longing for a hand drum – but he couldn’t bring himself to buy one in a store.

Exactly one year after the dream, he was gifted a hand drum. By a man called Rick Two Bears.

And the songs that subsequently flowed through him and that drum inspired and shaped an entire generation of earth lovers.

That’s how it works when you stop running from the wrathful deity, accept the gift that is uniquely yours and give it away to the world.

Because generally that’s what wrathful deities are all about.

Initiation.

In many of our cultures, something has been lost in our deep knowledge of the sacred. Wrathful deities have come to be seen as agents of vengeance and retribution. Destroying cities or unleashing floods and plagues as a form of divine punishment for our supposed moral failures. Medievalists of all stripes still crawl out from behind the sewers whenever calamity strikes to berate the rest of us with their sadistic fantasies of supernatural linear causality.

Even in the dreamworld, we think they simply want to devour, punish or torment us and so we flee from them - even when they’re bearing the gifts we most need or long for!

We forgot something vital about the nature of the sacred, and in that forgetting, we became fugitives from our own wholeness.

I drop back into the dream and stand between the two pulpits—one brightly lit but hollow, the other shadowed but alive with possibility. The sounds of the competing gospels fade as I sense something more ancient than words calling from beyond them both.

Perhaps this is Leo's true gospel—not a text to be preached, but an invitation to remember what we've always known. That our deepest becoming requires us to stop fleeing from what pursues us, to turn and face it with open hands rather than clenched fists. And in that holy not-knowing, something altogether ancient recognizes itself through us.

Maybe our real work only begins when we become fully ourselves.

I don’t mean that in a trivial or self-serving way and I’m not saying it won’t demand everything of us. I’m sitting with a deep mystery here.

For David, who learned to face the bears in his dreams and received their gifts, would ultimately lose his life to a bear in the waking world.

Four years ago, he was killed by a grizzly bear while running in the forest behind his home.

He became one with the dreaming.

I've grappled with this contradiction ever since …with this wound that refuses easy meaning or closure. I sat the other night – as I do every year – offering a prayer and song at the place where his final encounter unfolded. Being with the not-knowing as the darkness fell. Feeling the presence of the same bear who is still out there. Offering some kind of companionship, some kind of solidarity – some kind of awareness – there at the threshold.

And maybe there is no contradiction. Maybe the gifts and the dangers are inseparable aspects of the same wild intelligence I’m writing about. Perhaps what pursues us – in dreams, in waking life, in the shadowed corners of our own psyche, in the perilous ecological tipping points that we’ve set in motion – is neither wholly benevolent nor malevolent, but simply true. Authentically, devastatingly real in a way our constructed, self-referential persepctives rarely allow. When I think of David now, I don't imagine him running. I see him standing still, arms open, receiving whatever comes – the drum, the songs, and yes, even the claws and teeth. Full surrender to a greater mystery that includes both his becoming and his unbecoming.

And isn't that ultimately the initiatory message whispered from the shadowed pulpit at the forest’s edge? That our task isn't to survive the encounter with the wild or the sacred but to be transformed by it – whether that transformation leads to life abundant or to the dissolution we so desperately fear.

Either way, we stop being fugitives.

And either way, we finally come home.

Bowing helplessly before the Mystery

Julian