Discourse on the Cup

Brethren, we are five years old. In the life of an Order that is nothing; in the life of a person it is the age at which one begins to ask what things are for. I want this evening to ask what we are for, and I want to do it by asking what the Grail is, since we have taken its name and ought to be able to say.

The romances do not agree. The Grail is a cup, a dish, a stone, a cauldron. It feeds the company with whatever food each most desires. It heals the wounded king. It is carried by a maiden, or by angels, or by no one. It is seen by some and invisible to others in the same room. It asks a question, or waits for one. I have spent a good part of my life with these stories, and I am persuaded that their disagreement is not confusion but instruction. The Grail cannot be described because it is not a thing. It is a condition. The romances are not describing an object; they are describing what happens to those who come near it.

What happens is this. The Grail reveals the state of the one who approaches. To the pure knight it is a cup of light; to the proud one it is a thing seen through a veil; to the one who has not forgiven, it is invisible. It gives to each the food that each desires, which is to say that it gives each person back to himself or herself, and the question is whether one can bear the gift. The wounded king is healed not by the Grail but by the question asked in its presence, and the question is one of simple compassion: what ails you? The Grail, in short, is the point at which the inner state becomes outwardly visible and outwardly effective. It is the heart made manifest.

Now, the Tradition we have inherited has three words for the heart. The Hermetic philosophers call it the microcosm: the little world in which the great world is mirrored, and from which, if it is rightly ordered, the great world may be known. The Rosicrucians call it the Rose: the flower that opens upon the Cross of incarnate life when the Cross is accepted and not before. The Martinists call it the place of reintegration: the inner sanctuary where the fallen human being turns, in silence, toward its Source, and finds that the Source has been waiting. Three words; one heart. The founders of this Order did not invent its synthesis. We merely noticed that the three streams were describing one Cup.

What, then, is the Cup? It is the heart emptied. I choose the word with care. The Cup is useful because it is hollow; a cup filled with stone is a stone. The whole of the work of the Outer Court, the study and the practice and the service, is the emptying of the heart of what fills it: the pretences, the fears, the grievances, the small ambitions, the need to be seen. This is slow work and it is not pleasant. The alchemists called it dissolution and painted it black. But nothing can be poured into a vessel that is already full, and the Light, which is always being poured, finds in most of us no room.

The Cup is the heart cleansed. A hollow vessel that is foul holds only foulness. The Rosicrucian work of the Second Degree is the scouring of the vessel, the transmutation of the passions, the healing of the wounds we carry and, since we cannot heal our own wounds without touching those of others, the healing of our neighbours. I have said elsewhere that the healing mandate is the true test of the Second Degree and I say it again. A Squire who has scoured the hearts of others with kindness has scoured his or her own.

The Cup is the heart offered. This is the Martinist work and the work of the Third Degree. A vessel emptied and cleansed and kept on a shelf is an ornament. The Cup is lifted. It is held out. It is offered to the Light to be filled and to the world to be drunk from, and in the offering, by a law that I cannot explain but have seen operate in every life I have watched closely, it is filled. The knight who at last asks the wounded king what ails him is not performing a courtesy. He is offering the Cup. And the land is healed.

You will notice that I have described the Grail without once describing a ceremony. This is deliberate. Our ceremonies are good and I would not be without them. But they are the picture of the thing and not the thing. The thing is a heart emptied, cleansed and offered, and it may be found in a Commandery or a kitchen, in a Knight of this Order or in a person who has never heard of it. We have no monopoly on the Grail. We have only promised one another to seek it, and to hold one another to the seeking.

Why, then, the chivalry? Why the Pages and the Squires and the Vigil and the sword? Because the heart offered must be carried, and the one who carries it must be trained. The Grail knights were not contemplatives; they rode. They went out into a wasted land and did what was in front of them: fought, protected, kept faith, endured. The chivalric Rule is the discipline of the carrying hand. Without it the Cup is spilled in the first encounter with a rude person, an unjust master or a long dull Tuesday. With it the Cup may be carried through a life. The Twelve Articles are not an addition to the inner work. They are the inner work walking.

I will end with a confession. We did not set out to found an order. We set out to keep a promise, three of us, to one another and to what we had each received; and we found that a promise kept in company becomes a Rule, and a Rule kept in love becomes a Fraternity. If the Order of the Grail endures, it will not be because of our Charter or our degrees. It will be because in every generation a few people find the Cup in one another and refuse to put it down. Lux in Calice. The Light is in the Cup, brethren, and the Cup is you.