Permeance

I’m occasionally asked about the symbolism of the Grail, in relation to its historical significance and Grail Strength’s branding.

In passing, I often remark that it’s representative of “a striving toward higher ideals.” This is true, in a relative sense. The grail, symbolically, is an objectification of all that is worth aspiring to - it’s a perennial Western symbol of supreme achievement, representing the culmination of all strife and struggle. It’s a victory banner, fundamentally - it proclaims that the kingdom lives on, because we still have a King.

Simply, Grail Strength is rooted in a firm conviction that man is nearly always capable of higher degrees of activity, service, vitality, creativity, and alignment with something Truer than the immediate conception of self. Physical effort is one method, of many, to separate the proverbial wheat from tares within an individual. It’s a pathway deeper into interior repose and exterior dynamism. It’s a hammer, a sword, and a scalpel; it’s a chalice, a salve, and a shelter.

An individual’s reasoning for pursuing physical training is personal - it may be as simple as wanting a six-pack, to wanting to hold their own in a fight, to a desire to improve health and vitality. All of these reasons to pursue training are important as stepping stones, but, whatever exterior fruits are bore from training will eventually be consumed by time - be it technical skill, physical form, or otherwise. “Nothing gold can stay,” as Robert Frost wrote.

I’m interested in what penetrates beyond time and beyond personality.

What can stay?

The Grail, in an Absolute sense, represents the unity or singularity of those ten-thousand individual, personal desires and ambitions. It is a reconciliation of opposites - birth and death, pain and pleasure, sympathy and antipathy; in the Grail Romance of Parzival, the Grail is cared for by the Neutral Angels - those who never stepped from spirit and eternity, into matter and time.

Despite the intrinsic link between time and all forms of duality, that which is unchangingly True, and Good, and Beautiful is inflected in every aspect of material creation. To see the Grail is to see God made manifest in all things, inwardly and outwardly - to “live, and move, and have our being” in Him, as Saint Paul wrote.

The Grail is the Truth, unchanging, occupying the centermost-point of man and the cosmos. It’s the sunlight that fills the room at dawn, no longer seen “as through a glass, darkly.” The curtains have fallen from the Holy of Holies, because the King is here among us.

The work that inspires me, fundamentally, is that which uncovers the Truth within an individual, the work that rends the veil of sin, sickness, and death. Man, in his unregenerate condition, is Herod; man, totally subservient to the True King alone, is a doorway to the Godhead.

The Grail, definitively, represents the FACT of Christ - the Absolute Truth, realized intimately and experientially. It penetrates and permeates beyond words, beyond psychological abstraction, beyond personal idiosyncrasies and positionalities. It runs over with Living Water - ebbing and flowing, crashing and breaking; to submit is to float, to resist is to drown.

Made manifest in time, the Grail creates and destroys, as tides change - when it moves, it is the responsibility of the individual, or the tribe, or the nation, to move with it. Refusal to do so is an exaltation of death; it is a choice of “I, and me, and mine,” over the infallible guiding hand of Divine Providence - the War in Heaven wages on, in the hearts of men.

When the Grail ceases to occupy the centermost-point of an organism, the organism slips into varying degrees of insanity, criminality, degeneracy, dysfunction, error, conflict, or disarray. The clarity of the Garden is lost, replaced by the swirling mists of Klingsor’s Castle. Most of the great societies of antiquity suffered this fate - severance and rejection of Spirit, followed by slow, and sometimes painful, descents into oblivion. Yet, nothing Real can ever die. The Living Truth cannot be contained; it permeates and penetrates all it contacts, as a mountain stream cuts through bedrock.

Open your windows, trampling asps and adders underfoot, and rest in the FACT of Christ.