The Cyrenaian Hedonic church

Summer does not whisper.

It arrives with sweat already on its brow, with fruit splitting on the branch, with thunderstorms that soak you before you’ve decided whether to seek shelter. It stains your shirt with pollen, your hands with soil, your lips with wine. It asks very little except that you step outside and participate.

There are seasons for restraint. This is not one of them.

Hedonics do not begin by asking, “What is true?”

It asks, “What awakens you?”

Truth is important, but awakening is lived before it is explained:

Think too much and you drift away from your spirit. Chase frenzy without pause and your body becomes only an instrument. Feed only your hungers and your mind begins to starve.

Mind. Body. Spirit. These are not compartments, not separate kingdoms.
They are names we give to the currents moving through the same river.

Perhaps your inner landscape is a Monk, a Beast, and a Trickster.
Perhaps it is a Detective, a Shield, and a Caregiver.
Perhaps there are seven voices within you, or a thousand, or only two you know by name.

It matters very little what you call them. The better question is this:

What awakens them all? What calls every part of you to the table?

And I do not mean the table symbolically.

I mean the salt drying on your skin after dancing too long. A bottle of wine passed around so many hands no one remembers who opened it. Juice from an overripe peach running down your wrist before you can catch it. The smell of leather warming in the sun. Dirt beneath your fingernails after tending a garden. A bruise you smile at when you notice it in the mirror. Music too loud. A dance in the thunderstorm instead of waiting for it to pass.

The body has a thousand ways of saying,

I am still alive!

Perhaps your appetite is for books.
Or difficult conversations that refuse easy answers.
Perhaps it is travel, or beautiful people, or strange ideas that rearrange the furniture of your mind.
Perhaps it is art.
Or risk.
Or the delicious electricity of flirting with someone whose smile makes time stumble. Perhaps it is kink, where trust and desire become a language spoken in flesh instead of words.

Whatever your appetite, do not confuse it with greed.

Appetite is how the living lean toward life.

Read voraciously.
Kiss deeply.
Dance until your calves ache.
Take lovers, if that is your path.
Nap beneath trees.
Stay out too late.
Laugh louder than you meant to.
Make something with your hands.
Grow something.
Cook for your friends.
Get grass stains on your knees.
Collect bruises that remind you where joy found you.

Let this season stain you.
Let it stain you with garden sweat. Dungeon sweat. Dance-floor sweat. Ink. Sunlight. Smoke from bonfires. Another person’s perfume lingering on your clothes.

Stains as evidence that you were here, as evidence that you participated.

How long has it been since you stopped apologizing for delight?

You need no permission to experience joy. But if some forgotten part of you still believes it does…

Then let this be your permission.

Communion has never been only about what nourishes you. It is also about what only you can bring.
Not as obligation.
Not as transaction.
Not as performance.

Simply because no one else can arrive as you.

No one else asks your questions. Laughs with your voice. Touches the world with your particular combination of tenderness, curiosity, hunger, irreverence, and wonder.

That is your place at the table. That is your gift.

Someone has already saved you a seat. Someone will smile because you arrived.

The feast is already underway.

So come hungry.

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-by Father Ridire