Like many of my fellow citizens of the imperial experiment called “the United States,” recent events have left me aghast.

Well, partially; there is a part of me that crumples under the unfolding horrors unleashed by cravatted cowards on the government payroll as pundits and propagandists cheer on a wave of inhuman violence against the most vulnerable members of society, while at the same time the present administration sets up a record-breaking speed-run of World War III in the waters off of Venezuela and Greenland.

And in the background pipes up another part, reciting the words of Qoheleth: “vanity of vanities, all is vanity; indeed, there is nothing new under the Sun.”

Indeed, good Brother Sun has seen it all. This historical moment is not the first time that holy obedience has called those of conscience to place their bodies and their very lives in on the line in defense of those targeted by an imperial Power.

Nor is it the first time that an imperial Power, possessed of a demagoguic and demiurgic spirit, has sought violently to remake the world in its own image. We’ve been doing this as a nation for centuries, after all; it’s the American way.

(On that note, we conscientious resisters do well to remember that ICE has more in common with slave patrols than the Gestapo. My fellow White-socialized people tend to resist that comparison because the line connecting those particular dots goes straight through the heart of the very institution of policing in this nation. But that is another sermon for another day.)

Many are asking what this moment beckons forth from us individually and corporately. But my curiosity is this: what specific action does this moment beckon forth from me and from people like me whose field of activity has principally been in the inner realms, the imaginal, the liminal spaces where the ocean of Being raises sandbars and tidepools on the shore of History?

In other words, what is the invitation for those of us who are mystics, ritual specialists, bridgers-of-worlds? For those of us who are magically operant, imaginally attuned, awaiting the prompt from that higher level of Being which flows into manifestation as power and grace? For those of us who strive to cultivate communion with the Ancestral field unto the purposes of healing and reconnection with all that breathes?

What does this moment call forth from those of us who have the gift of a living sense of attunement and participation in all arisings around us, and the grave responsibility such sense carries with it? “For when the angel is troubling the waters,” as the Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly said, “it is no time to wait on the bank and recite past wonders.”

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Many have shared the spine-steeling remarks made by the Rt. Rev. Rob Hirschfeld, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, at a vigil held in honor of Renee Nicole Good, an unarmed woman who was shot point blank in the face by an ICE agent while trying to leave their operational zone.

In those remarks, Bishop Hirschfeld shared that he has instructed the clergy under his ecclesial supervision to get their affairs in order, prepare their wills, and begin preparing in body, mind, and spirit to stand between the agents of Empire and the most vulnerable in our society, as the time for eloquent statements has come to an end. In no uncertain terms, he made clear that he intends to take up his cross and follow Christ wherever that leads.

Le Fort’s novel, written as a prescient allegory and subtle warning as the Nazi imperial project was beginning its ascendancy in Germany, tells a fictionalized version of the true story of the Carmelite sisters of Compiègne who were martyred at the close of the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution.

The sisters comprise a small community of women religious in the same tradition that, notably, produced St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Ávila. Toward the twilight of the Terror, the administration first expels them from their convent as French monastic communities are forcibly dissolved. Yet before they depart, they commit themselves to continuing to abide by their vows and their rule of life in secret, and continuing to pray for the French people, up to the point of offering their lives as an oblation if it comes to that.

The sisters’ minders eventually discover this, and they are jailed, “tried,” and summarily guillotined in Place de la Revolution on July 17th, 1794.

In von Le Fort’s telling of the story, a young postulant named Blanche de la Force, who is beset by anxiety and terror over the rising historical moment, enters the convent as a means of protecting herself from the shadows that loom over her aristocratic family. As the story unfolds, she waffles, hesitates, and eventually succumbs to her terror and flees Paris, abandoning her sisters to their fate—including Sister Constance, who had become her best friend in monastic life.

The nuns are jailed, tried, and marched to the scaffold as the final scene of the opera rolls around, which opens on the Sisters gathered in the Place de la Revolution. After a lugubrious introit from low flutes, the women begin singing the hymn that the sisters sang at the scaffold in von Fort’s telling of the story, the Salve Regina. (Historically they were remembered as having sung the Veni Creator, the invocation to the Holy Spirit their community would have sung at their monastic tonsuring.)

Sixteen women begin singing, but as the sisters meet their end one-by-one—Poulenc notates each stroke of the guillotine in the score—the choir diminishes to four, then three, then two, then a final voice, that of Sister Constance, whose voice breaks mid-stream as though she has remembered something crucial.

Turning around as she mounts the scaffold, Sister Constance sees the face of her beloved friend, Blanche, appear from the scowls and jeers of the crowd. Blanche’s face is radiant, resolute, set with Paschal courage. The sisters’ eyes meet—the music swells with the “vocation” leitmotif, a sweetly leaping gesture in the strings that bounds across three keys in four beats—before continuing to march forward. The guillotine falls on Sister Constance as she sings o clemens, o pia, o dulcis virgo Ma—

and then Blanche begins to sing the final verse of the Veni Creator: Deo Patri sit gloria, et Filio qui a mortuis surrexit ac Paraclito, in saeculorum—the guillotine falls a final time on Blanche. The orchestra bathes the scene in a luminous and somber halo of strings and crotales, and one final pianissimo pulse punctuates the falling curtain.

The thing about opera is that you know where it’s headed before the overture starts, unlike a film; when I saw this with my fellow choristers from my evangelical holiness college we all expected there to be a guillotine on stage. More on that in a moment.

Yet nowhere on stage was a guillotine to be seen that evening, to our relief, for the Lyric had staged the well-loved and highly regarded minimalist setting by Robert Carsen. In this staging light, bodies, curtains, and motion create the scene, allowing the depth and subtlety of the text and the coolness of the music to weave the imaginal structure in which we encountered this masterpiece.

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And so it happened that Bishop Hirschfeld’s remarks moved me to pull up the recording on YouTube on Monday morning. (Take seven minutes and watch it, then take ten minutes in the bathroom to go collect yourself. Then come back.)

In Carsen’s setting of the final scene, the sisters, clad in nothing but white linen shifts, sing illuminated by cold white light. On all sides, the chorus surrounds them as a black-cloaked human wall—noted as la foule, “the mob,” in the score—filling in the harmonies on long, closed vowels. While they sing, the sisters perform a slow, hieratic dance that grounds the music in physical action, lest the singing become completely disconnected from the staging.

The first few times I saw it, I simply chalked it up to stage direction and needing to fill the space. But having now studied and practiced the Christian Wisdom path as taught by Cynthia Bourgeault, which blossoms at the confluence of the streams of Benedictine (whence Carmelite!) practice and the Gurdjieff Work, with its emphasis on embodied presence as conveyed through the Movements, it becomes clear that this staging—intentionally or not—seems to function as an initiatic container through which one may receive a transmission.

At least, for those with ears to hear.

When we saw it at the Chicago Lyric Opera in 2007 in the middle of Lent, it was the final night of the run, and the curtain call lasted 25 minutes. Many were cheering through sobs. Others in the crowd that night found it boring or banal; I was not one of them.

To put it as plain as I can, this work of art converted me.

To what, I’m still unclear. Certainly not to Roman Catholicism, nor to Benedictine virtue or anything else that could be so neatly contained. But I was not the same person after seeing this opera. It cracked open something in my inner patterning that has never been shut since, a clear transmission of a higher order of Being, a flowing luminosity which nineteen years later I am still trying to make sense of.

At the center of the opera’s plot is the confluence of eros, desire—Blanche for her safety, Constance for her friend, the Sisters for their country—and kenosis, the pattern of self-emptying, of surrender, of love that “squanders every gift that God bestows,” as Rumi sang. And this movement of eros and kenosis crests in the final scene, as the sisters make good on their covenant to offer up their lives for the life of the very people whom they have spent the long tedium of their monastic vocation lifting up in prayer.

The driveshaft of the Christian pattern is the willingness of the self-sovereign individual to empty themselves in love for the life of the world and in solidarity and identification with the most vulnerable, even unto the point of death. Yet kenosis is not simply the making of a good story; kenosis is, ultimately, a cosmogonic (world-creating) pattern expressed in the symbol of the crucifixion.

The kenotic path that Jesus walked is a metaphysical reality, and serves as the core of our tradition’s power to redeem reality by force of love offered. Without it, Christianity loses its charter, and quickly degenerates under possession by imaginal parasites into the worst sort of blasphemous claptrap such as that presently being bandied about by DHS social media staffers and cross-clinging grifters.

But it seems that when kenosis shines, that’s when hearts change and, in the great patterning of fate, the tides of history turn. Ten days after the sisters of Compiègne offered themselves for the life of the world, Robespierre himself mounted the scaffold, bringing the Reign of Terror to an end.

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This furnishes an answer to my query—or at least the start of one. I suspect that, in moments like the present reign of terror that swells over history’s shore here on Turtle Island and elsewhere, circumstance is inviting those of us who are magically or mystically or imaginally operant, by whatever training, transmission, or initiation, to root in and to move between the worlds as living prayer, claiming nothing of what we do for ourselves but all of it, all of it, as an offering for the life of the world.

That may indeed look like taking a bullet, or mounting the scaffold, or entering the chamber, or of any of the other paths that those innumerable ones who have imitated Christ have taken into the feast of life.

But most of us are not called to that.

More likely, it looks like a consistent practice of allowing our every action, no matter how small, to be offered in remembrance of the Worlds that flow through us, with full, embodied awareness. For that the quality of Presence with which we tend sick neighbors or wash dishes or mount operas or send emails can offer the Being that fuels those simple acts as Help in the imaginal realm. And in so doing, we claim nothing of that Being for ourselves but rather offer it all in love, allowing it to move as It Will Be. So we continue, then, to show up to our Practice, and to our practices: to our altars and cushions, our beads and books, our silence and singing.

But in returning us to our Practice I do not mean to imply that on-the-ground activism is not also important. Showing up, protesting, all of it matters deeply. And. The quality of Being with which those activities are performed has a direct impact on the success of the intended outcomes and the patterns operating under the surface. Given that, it becomes deeply important for those of us who are imaginally operant to be selective and focused in which modes of on-the-ground activism we will engage, for the actions to which we can show up with the most Presence are the ones where we will get the most ROI, so to speak.

If we are moving from a place of restriction or reaction, it will scuttle our energy before we even get out of the CVS checkout line with our foamcore and paint markers. Competing egoic priorities can hamstring even the best-laid plans for direct action; ask anyone who’s been an organizer for longer than a month.

But if we can bring a quality of three-centered Presence to our organizing, to our walking, our watching, our witnessing—a quality which we distill for ourselves bit by bit through the simple practice I noted above—we open the possibility for those activities to have outsize impact and to galvanize the wider noosphere which comprises those who march and act alongside us to effect deeper change in the inner realms—the kind of shifts upon which history turns.

The Carmelites have a contemplative vocation, and I suspect that the Sisters of Compiègne, spiritual descendants of John and Teresa as they were, managed to pull something like this off radically and effortlessly, singing as they went, because of their rootedness in contemplative practice—and were buoyed, no doubt, by the Love that moves Brother Sun and all the stars.

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Bishop Hirschfeld is not my ecclesial authority as a Congregationalist, but his words have me seriously considering the extent to which I am willing to step forward and put my own life on the line in this moment of historic public witness. Am I called to join the Sisters? To join Hirschfeld’s clergy? To join Christ himself? At 3:03 on a Wednesday afternoon I am not prepared in body or mind or spirit to do so.

But should the moment ever come where I do find myself invited by circumstance to mount the scaffold, to place my body in the line of fire and my life in the hands of the Divine in solidarity with those whom the Powers that Be would devour, I can only pray that I will be buoyed in that consent by that same Love that buoyed the Sisters, that Love whereby shines Brother Sun and all the elder Stars as they move in their silent witness.