The Speech of the Grail

The moment that soul and spirit meet, nourishment becomes available for the starving people in the castle-body.

For the initiate-speaker, storytelling becomes a means to become reacquainted with this tradition through practicing it.

When soul and spirit marry in the initiate-speaker, the door to the Grail castle, though still hidden, opens.

The question then becomes, what, besides the physical body, is enlivened by rhythm? One answer might be the soul. One school of thinkers says that the soul only enters the infant with its first breath, so for them, at least, the soul is animated by the rhythm of the breath. There are other opinions, but it is not necessary here to outline the many

Questions free our minds to fly.

To be free means one has the power to “begin,” to create anew, which is why Christ — most moral and most free of beings — can say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

As curious children, we ask questions. If as adults we have kept the soil of wonder well watered, we will continue to ask questions. Such questions, always leading to more questions, are the pre-eminent teachers of thought. Spiritual teachers in all traditions ply their students with riddles, koans, and perplexing parables.

By remaining attached to habits or codes from the past which need to be released or at least re-examined, the initiate-speaker will likewise make mistakes. But this is not to be mourned, because the bitter harvest of mistakes activates the whole journey — if one has cultivated a healthy sense of shame.

Parzival's first words in the story are noteworthy because they are framed as questions, and questioning is the engine of contemporary initiation. Questions form the connective tissue by which we join the world with ourselves. A question is uniquely personal; something matters, and the questioner wishes to know about something or someone. At the sa