"The Fisher King" a sermon by Rev. Brian J. Kiely

Unitarian Church of Edmonton January 10, 1999

There is a young Germanic knight named Amfortas - meaning 'powerless' and he bears the banner on which is written the single word, "Amour" - love. It is right, for he is a young man in search of life and life and he is prepared to give his all for the chivalric values.

But he is soon deflected from his vision by the appearance of a pagan knight, just arrived from the Holy Land. In his youth he is troubled by the paradox of a pagan in the Holy Land. He lowers his lance and charges full tilt. What a transformation! The young man of love is changed into the engine of destruction ready to kill because of his training in the knightly arts.

The two clash and there is a dreadful wounding and destruction. The pagan is killed and young Amfortas is castrated. A piece of the pagan knight's lance remains struck in Amfortas' thigh and the wound will not close. He is too ill to live, but unable to die. He grows cold and can never again get warm.

The young prince, soon to be King of the land, suffers so severely that he is unable to stand erect and is incapable of performing his duty to the Kingdom, which withers under his neglect. Only one thing assuages his suffering; he feels a little better when he is fishing. When he is occupied with fishing from his boat in the lake surrounding the castle, his suffering is diminished. Otherwise he lies on the litter in his castle suffering a thousand torments.,

But here's the thing. The Fisher King's castle is the resting place for the Holy Grail, the cup from which Christ gave the Last Supper. It is believed to be miraculous.

Every night in the castle there is a magnificent procession: a fair damsel carries the Paten, the plate that held the bread. Another carries the lance that pierced the Christ's side and a third carries the grail itself which glows from a light within.

Each person in the royal assemblage is served from the Grail and instantly receives whatever was wished for, even though the wish was not articulated. Everyone, that is, except the Fisher King who lies on his litter groaning with his unhealed wound and without the solace of fishing. He tries to receive nourishment and healing from the Grail, but because of the wound, he is unable to take the healing.

But there is one hope. There is a legend that says one day a fool will come to the withering land, he will see the great procession and ask one simple but pertinent question that will heal the Fisher King and remove the blight from the land.

The young man is Parsifal - literally 'young fool' -

Parsifal was born after his father's death and after the death of all of his brothers in battle. His mother does all she can to keep the boy from learning that the men of the family were all warriors for she despises the foolishness of chivalry. His mother keeps him in a garden of innocence and clothes him in a single homespun garment symbolizing a rustic upbringing. But one day Parsifal learns of the world of knights and answers the call of blood flowing in his veins.

Riding through the forest one evening, now a knight errant, the young man can find no place to stay and faces the prospect of a night in the wet woods. But just as he gives up he meets a man in a boat on a lake, fishing.

The man says there is shelter "Just down the road a little way, turn left, cross the drawbridge, and you will be my guest for the night."

Parsifal follows the directions, goes down the road a little way, turns left, crosses the drawbridge which snaps closed the moment he crosses it.

He is welcomed and watches the awesome procession and watches as the Grail brings healing to all except the Fisher King.

Everything is there for the legend to come true, except one thing...the young man does not ask the question. In the morning he leaves seeing no one.

Many years later Parsifal is now middle aged and grown weary of warring and heroics. In a far distant land, he encounters a crowd of pilgrims who berate him for wearing his armor on Good Friday, a thing of which he is not even aware. The pilgrims convince him to remove his armor and go to confession with an old hermit.

The hermit is severe with Parsifal and recounts all of his sins and mistakes. The worst of these is that he failed to ask the burning question at the grail castle, which would have redeemed the suffering Fisher King. The old hermit instructs Parsifal, "Go down the road a little way, turn left, cross the drawbridge.." The same instructions as were given 20 years before.

Again in the great hall he sees the procession. This time he asks the crucial question, "Whom does the Grail serve?" and is instantly made aware of the answer, the Grail serves the Grail King. The Grail King is the Fisher King's father who lives hidden away in the castle never seen by anyone. At the moment of the asking, the Fisher King rises from his litter and is restored miraculously to health and strength. The whole Kingdom rejoices and a new springtime dawns.

The healed Fisher King dies after three days, released forever from his wounds.

Homily

A dozen years ago I took my first class in storytelling. My goal was simply to help develop my public speaking skills and to add another dimension to my preaching. But by the end of that one day seminar my eyes had been opened to something far deeper and more meaningful than simple skill development. Even in that first class my teacher revealed the power of stories. It was, among other things, my first introduction to Jung's analysis of images put into practice.

That class led to Joseph Campbell and his work on myths and heroes, to dream work with Unitarian minister Jeremy Taylor and to more classes with Vancouver storytellers Melanie Ray and Nan Gregory.

From them I learned that stories contain a mythic dimension that touches us deeply where we live. It's as if the words of story pass through the intellectual defenses we often create to shield ourselves and lodge straight in the heart...because in the end, we make every story we hear a story about us.

Not surprisingly both the women's and men's movements have picked up on this power and have used the idea of story as a way of helping men and women open up to themselves and as a prompt to have people tell and explore their own life stories.

While preparing to lead a retreat for Unitarian men in B.C. and Washington last November, I came across a wonderful little book by Robert A. Johnson entitled The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden(1). Johnson contends that the ability to feel has been wounded in our culture in both men and women. He argues that, "Thinking is that cool faculty which brings clarity and objectivity - but provides no valuing; sensation describes the physical world - but provides no valuing; intuition suggests a wide range of possibilities - but provides no valuing. Only feeling brings a sense of value and worth; indeed, this is its chief function. Without feeling there is no value judgment. To lose one's feeling function is thus to lose one of the most precious human faculties, perhaps the one that makes us most human...The feeling function is a casualty of our modern way of life."

He goes on to assert that men and women have different struggles with this feeling function, that each gender tends to suffer from different kinds of wounds that impede our ability to feel fully. And then he turns to two different mediaeval stories to draw out this idea. In this service and in the one on January 24th, I wish to explore these two stories. Today, of course, I begin with the story of The Fisher King, a story about male woundedness. Next time we will consider female woundedness as revealed by The Handless Maiden.

The story of the Fisher King begins with a young man, full of feeling and seeking adventure in the name of love, even as he seeks to do his duty. He ventures out proud and carefree his banner reading 'love' unfurled. He is full of feeling. But as he encounters the pagan knight, his training takes over. Love and feeling are shoved into the background and he attacks. In the end he succeeds in killing the pagan, but the cost is castration, a wound to the male generative or feeling function. In this most graphic manner is he cut off from feeling. Our modern day work worlds with their posturing and hiding behind the "I'm alright Jack" masks create the blinding sense of feelingless duty that leads to today's woundedness in men.

Amfortas is so severely wounded that he loses all creative ability. He returns home unable even to stand erect and incapable of performing his most basic duties. He is cold all the time, a symbol of emotional withdrawal that survives in our language even today. The Kingdom withers around him.

The only thing that makes him feel a little better is to sit in his boat fishing on the castle lake. In Jungian terms, any image that deals with two levels, such as going into a basement, or underwater usually suggests a visit to the subconscious. In this instance, the Fisher King can only find peace by going inside, by plumbing his own depths... but because of the nature of the wound to the feeling function, he catches nothing. Introspection is of little value unless we are willing to face the real issue, the real cause of the wound. For whatever reason, Amfortas cannot do that, and so like the modern day person who visits therapist after therapist or who has a shelf full of the latest self-help books, he doesn't regain his health, for he cannot or will not deal with the real wound...with his inability to feel.

But help appears to be available, as revealed by the elaborate Grail ceremony every night. Those among the guests who are properly prepared, who have honestly faced and confessed their greatest failings and have been returned to a state of grace, they partake of the Grail and are granted their every wish. But the poor King because of his wound cannot take the healing of the Grail.

I find a personal resonance with this part of the tale, for as a Catholic child I faithfully received communion and remember well the feeling of grace and safety that would suffuse me after that ceremony. As I grew older and lost faith, a wound in itself, I lost that simple and childlike ability to feel grace. My beliefs have moved so far away from Catholicism, that I feel I cannot no longer return to that child-like innocence... and that is a dimension of my woundedness. My make-up will no longer allow me to believe in such simple miracles... but there are times when in pain and distress, I dearly wish I could surrender myself again like that.

Every person, male and female, carries around the scars and wounds of loss, failure, pain and grief in some form. Many of us cope with them very well, but some, like the King, are deeply incapacitated. Or perhaps we are all incapacitated in some dimension or aspect of our lives. I know of no one in my world who can boast truthfully that every relationship they have is healthy and complete.

According to Johnson, the wound is the preparation for consciousness, for true self-understanding. Whether one looks at biblical stories or Greek myths, or at the stories of vision quests among the native peoples of this land you can find a theme that suggests that knowledge, wisdom and consciousness only come to those who have endured the pain of a wound, of deprivation or of loss. It is the things we suffer that give us our power in this life. It is woundedness that transforms us from being Amfortas (powerless) to people of fortitude. Or as the old saw would have it, that which does not kill me makes me stronger.

Still, there is hope for the Fisher King, that one day the fool will come, ask the right question and heal his wound.

Enter young Parsifal, the innocent abroad, sheltered for most of his life, dressed in rustic garments but still seeking to fulfill his birthright. The King is at the mercy of this boy. Or to consider it another way, the youthful feeling function that the King lost on that long ago battlefield can only be restored by a return to that, " boyish, inventive, capricious, youthful quality" that was cut off so long ago.

The boy encounters the King fishing and asks for shelter. Johnson suggests we should memorize the directions. There is no dwelling within 30 miles, which is to say no relief in our three dimensional everyday world, but -- go down the road a little, turn left (into the realm of the unconscious or the world of imagination and fantasy) cross the drawbridge - (the division between our conscious world and the world of inner imagination) and he will arrive at the Grail castle, a place of miraculous healing, a place not of this world.

The directions remind me of other famous markers. In Peter Pan the fantasy world of Neverneverland lies "past the second star to the right and straight on till morning," , and in the Wizard of Oz, that magical place lies "Somewhere over the rainbow." Our myths are full of lands of imagination and fantasy, places where we are free to find again that lost youthfulness and the magical transformations they bring.

But in this first venture into such lands, the innocent fool, for that is what the name Parsifal means, simply doesn't get it. He does not know what this liminal world is all about. So he fails to do the one thing that would heal the King. He does not ask the question...he does not take the experience of the castle and make it conscious. And so the King remains trapped in the litter of his own making..

Fast forward 30 years and Parsifal encounters the hermit monk who tells him the sins of his long road weary and violent life. He realizes that he has failed his one great duty, healing the Fisher King. He follows the hermit's instructions and is once again in the castle and this time asks the question "Whom does the Grail serve?" and the answer is the Grail King, a shadowy hidden figure greater than the Fisher King.

Says Johnson, "The meaning of life is not in the quest for one's own power or advancement but lies in the service of that which is greater than oneself... If asked what is the meaning of life, most people would answer that it is to serve me - my ego plans and involvements. The revelation of the Grail castle is that life serves something greater than one's self."

To cast it in yet another way, the message of the Grail is very like the Buddhist idea of non-attachment. We have to put aside the ego and the desire that blinds us and in that way will we find peace and enlightenment.

Hard to do, relocate the very center of the universe from 'me' to something else and to concede that it might just be greater than me.

The moment Parsifal asks the question, that is brings it to consciousness, the Fisher King rises from his litter.... and then he dies in three days. This might seem strange until we realize that the Fisher King exists in the realm of Parsifal's unconscious. They live parallel lives. Now that the healing has taken place and that completeness has been restored in the road weary knight, the King is no longer needed to haunt Parsifal's dreams. What he earns is the freedom to die, in that same way that our bad dreams fade away when we have resolved whatever daytime problem was causing them.

Most men today do not have the dramatic lives of Parsifal and Amfortas, but that does not suggest we do not suffer from grievous wounds. Typically our work separates us from the home and family we are trying to support. The weight of responsibility and expectation and the culture of 'toughing it out' cut us off from our creativity and from much that is generative and life affirming in us. It is a struggle to find ourselves, to heal our own Kings, to regain completeness.

Recognizing at least part of ourselves in characters like the Amfortas or Parsifal is the beginning of the process which brings the question and the self-acceptance into consciousness.

Next time I will look at the wounds Johnson suggests afflicts women today.

1. . Johnson, Robert A. The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden. (HarperSanFrancisoc, 1993) 103 pages.