The Cyrenaian Hedonic church

Someone recently asked me when they would be able to meet Father Ridire.

I’ve written one Sermon-Poem in this Season of Rupture, which runs from the Autumnal Equinox to the Winter Solstice (Dec 21 this year), and it was, basically, a (re)run, with some nominal commentary, of a previously published poem. It has been over a month since I posted.

This afternoon, I am listening to Penance [Spotify Link], a playlist I made a year ago for a scene I did for my birthday: The Penance of Father Ridire.

You could say I am contemplative. But that would not be entirely accurate. I have been thinking about one of the core words I used in writing the foundations of the Cyrenaian Hedonic Church: embodiment.

While hedonism is the Church’s ultimate goal and vision, hedonism itself requires  embodiment, which is woven through every aspect of the Church’s existence, philosophies, practices, and rituals.

From the Church’s Mission:

It exists to support meaning-making through embodied experience, ritual, and reflection, where pleasure and desire are treated as sites of inquiry rather than doctrine.

From the Five Core Principles:

III. Pleasure Is Our Morality

The body possesses forms of knowledge that cannot always be accessed through intellect alone.

Desire, attraction, aversion, joy, curiosity, comfort, discomfort, delight, grief, and longing all contain information. They are signals worthy of attention rather than enemies to be conquered.

Pleasure is not an obligation, nor is it inherently virtuous.
Pleasure is information.

To live ethically requires listening carefully to what nourishes us, what harms us, what sustains us, and what diminishes us.

The Church rejects both compulsive indulgence and needless self-denial. Instead, it encourages conscious engagement with desire and embodied experience.

Pleasure is our morality because the body often notices truths long before the mind learns how to speak them.

and

IV. Flesh Is Our Temple

Human beings live within bodies. Every experience, relationship, sensation, thought, and aspiration is encountered through embodied existence.

The body is neither a prison nor an obstacle to transcendence. It is the place where life occurs.

Each person’s body is inviolate. Every individual possesses the right to determine how they live within their body, care for it, present it to the world, and define their relationship with it.

The Church recognizes this same right in all people.

No person’s pursuit of authenticity grants them authority over another person’s body, identity, autonomy, or self-expression.

Flesh is our temple because existence is not elsewhere. It is here.

The Body knows things

And it has just as much intelligence as we assign to the Mind which, in the Church’s opinion, we treat with too much primacy. We dismiss the body too easily, consider its aches and pleasures too guttural, too vulgar, too “earthly.” But in the body lies our deepest truths (Others have turned some into Sins, which I absolutely reject). Not mathematics, abstract notions of justice, or academic readings of mythologies, but identity, love, loyalty & trust, and self-hood, among the rest. This is not a condemnation of the intellectual, but an attempt at equivocation. The body doesn’t need to defeat the mind. It needs to be taken seriously as an equal participant.

The body needs to be heard

And this is where I have been this past Season. Deeply embodied, living both past and present, listening to my body as it reacts to memory, partners, and the friction of living. Something has felt off, broken, volatile, and sometimes that takes a while (and therapy) to find understanding.

So, to the person who asked when they would meet Father Ridire, and to those of you who have missed seeing the collar out in the world, know that you have already seen him. I am here. Father Ridire is not someone waiting apart from me to be summoned. He is one of the ways I inhabit this life, one of the ways I recognize and reveal myself to the world.

Sometimes he inhabits the collar, sometimes the words I write, the rituals I practice, the people I love, the desires I pursue, and the responsibilities I accept. The collar does not make the man. It gives the man a way to be recognized.

I am still learning to listen, still discovering, even after a lifetime, what this body knows, what it remembers, what it needs, and what it is capable of. I do not need to have arrived at some perfect understanding of embodiment to live within it, or to call this flesh my temple.

Father Ridire lives here. In this body. In this life. In the beautiful, difficult, sometimes volatile experience of being human.

And perhaps that is what it means to meet him.

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-by Father Ridire