About

This is The Common Wild. We make things by hand and mean them: essays, small liturgical booklets you can print and fold, and the occasional tool.

I'm Damion. I'm currently a catechumen in the Episcopal Church, a learner now and at the hour of my death. Most of what's here is mine to answer for, and a good deal of it comes out of working alongside other people.

What I read shapes what I make here: the Christian East, the early Christian West, the saints, and a fair number of writers outside the church who take it seriously that the world is alive. Francis is where those meet for me. He called the sun his brother and the water his sister, and he meant it. He meant they were creatures alongside him, made by the same hand. The world is awake, alive, and full of neighbors.

They all point the same direction, toward re-enchantment, re-wilding, and re-membering what was once known. Anamnesis; un-forgetting.

Why Episcopal

Because what is held in common is the prayer, not the opinion.

Many traditions gather around a statement of belief and ask you to agree to it. Anglicans gather around the praying itself. The book is where it is written down: the Book of Common Prayer, common meaning shared, held between us. You are not asked what you have settled. You are asked to say the same words as the person beside you, who has almost certainly settled them differently, and to keep doing that.

It makes for a wide room. There is space in it for incense and space for silence, for the person who arrives certain and the person who arrives with nothing but questions. No one is asked to pretend the questions are closed before they are. Seeking gets to be actual seeking, and it gets to take years.

I find comfort in the discomfort. I do not necessarily share beliefs with the people I share a community with, and learning to live in that space together is where you practice the two commandments Jesus called the greatest: to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-39). In Rite One those verses open the Eucharist as the Summary of the Law, said aloud and in common. The second is the one I find harder, and a wide room is where you find out.

Colophon

The mark in the masthead is the labyrinth laid into the floor of Chartres Cathedral in the early 1200s. It has one path, no wrong turns and no way to get lost; you walk it slowly, all the way in and all the way back out, and the whole pilgrimage happens inside a room. That seemed like the right sign to hang over a site about praying where you already are.

The drawing is by Ssolbergj, from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 3.0. I simplified the file for the web, and it is offered here on the same terms.

The lamb beside Kalendar in the Workshop is the Agnus Dei window in St. James' Church, Glenbeigh, County Kerry. The photograph is by Andreas F. Borchert, used under CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped to a square and reduced for the web.