Bealltainn Fire: What Endures When Power Fades

Remembering the Old Ways in a Changing World

As Bealltainn returns, I reflect on fire, faith, and the quiet endurance of the old ways. While popes change and power shifts, the land remains—welcoming, remembering, and renewing without permission.

Introduction

The frogs have emerged, singing their damp and ancient hymns from the shaded corners of the garden where winter’s breath still lingers in the earth. Baby hares dart this way and that across the hillside, legs too long for their bodies, as if the world is so thrilling they’ve no choice but to leap headlong into it. The hawk circles overhead, precise and imperious, whilst across the road, the owl—my owl—returns to her perch in the pine, blinking slowly as the dusk unfurls around her like a veil. At night, when the wind hushes and the stars press close, I hear her low call echo, a soft incantation to something older than churches.

The lizards have begun their lazy sun-drunk reappearances, warming themselves on flat stones, flickering tongues catching invisible truths from the air. Squirrels are digging furiously again, unbothered by ceremony, returning to the business of remembering where they hid the past. Life is in motion everywhere—rustling, blooming, scratching, watching. It is Bealltainn’s threshold, and I can feel it in my bones before I even name it.

There is no trumpet here, no incense, no chant. Only the unrepentant arrival of spring in its full sensory theatre—unscripted, ungovernable, and gloriously alive. The kind of sacred you do not need permission to enter. The land does not ask if I’ve tithed. It does not weigh my worthiness. It knows me. It always has.

Bealltainn is not a date I mark on the calendar. It announces itself in frog-song, in paw prints, in the first scent of something sweet returning to the wind. The world does not whisper—it declares. Life returns, not as a privilege, but as a birthright. And I, in my small and peculiar way, remember that I belong to it. Not as a servant, not as a sinner—but simply as part.

Reflections on the Passing of Pope Francis

It is the 24th of April as I write. The hills are still green from the winter rains, but the chaparral has begun its slow turn toward gold. I have the day off from school—an ‘unassigned day,’ as the calendar puts it, sterile and unspeaking. But we all know what day it is. It is the day we remember the Armenian Genocide. Even if we do not name it aloud.

A few days ago, the news of Pope Francis’s death reached me through a quiet headline, unhurried, almost subdued. There was no great mourning bell for me, no rupture of feeling—only a moment of stillness. Of recognition. A man is gone. An institution lives on. Popes may die, but the Church does not truly change. It adjusts, reshuffles, ritualises. The theatre of succession begins anew, ancient and elaborate. A white cassock becomes vacant, and soon another will wear it, as if no breath ever stopped.

And I find myself wondering—again—what the Church has done with its centuries of power. On this day of remembrance, I recall the encyclicals, the public prayers, the hesitant acknowledgements. Pope Francis did what many before him would not—he named the Armenian Genocide for what it was. And yet even then, it was couched in caution, in diplomacy, in the delicate phrasing of Vaticanese. The archives tell us that Popes knew. That Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI—they were told of the horrors. Letters were sent. Pleadings were made. But did it do anything?

I don’t ask with bitterness, but with weariness. With the ache of one who has seen too often how institutions offer words when the world needs action. How power mourns from a distance. How statements are made, but lives are still taken. From Armenia to Rwanda to Nanking to Gaza to Darfur to the Pine Ridge Reservation, and on and on.

There is something unbearably passive in the Church’s posture. As if witnessing, when draped in silk, could ever be enough. And yet—I do not condemn. I reflect. I name the dissonance. The pope is dead. The Church remains. The blood-soaked earth remembers what neither encyclicals nor vestments can cleanse.

The Old Ways are Not Gone

Latha Bealltainn is nearly here again. You can feel it in the soil, before the calendar catches up—the breathless pause before the land exhales into bloom. A threshold day. The fire festival. A hinge in the wheel of the year where life steps across the line from potential into presence. Where light and warmth return, not in a blaze, but in a gathering glow that touches everything with intention. This is the time when the veil thins, when the Fae stir, when animals act strangely wise, and when even the wind seems to carry secrets, half-whispered, half-remembered.

Before there were pews and popes, there were flames and flowers. The rites of Bealltainn belonged to no one and everyone. It was the shared language of field and forest, glen and grove. Fires were lit not in dominance, but in reverence—to protect, to renew, to mark the return of the sun. The cattle passed between them, the smoke a blessing. People danced, not to impress gods, but to commune with them. They lived in the hedgerows, in the stone circles, in the stories passed from hand to mouth by firelight. These were not “false beliefs.” These were relationships.

The Church, of course, did not know what to make of such intimacy with land and spirit. In my own life, Catholicism was present, but never warm. We went to Mass for funerals and feast days. The rituals were beautiful, yes—incense, Latin, candlelight—but they were never mine. I wanted to belong, truly. My adoptive parents asked for me to attend St. Mary’s School. But I was odd. My questions too strange. My mind too much. I was rejected. My family was known in the parish, but I was not welcome in their halls.

So the Church faded to the background, and into the foreground stepped my grandmother. Fierce, Marxist, full of old mischief and older stories. She had a garden that felt like a portal. A row of picture books about selkies and wild geese. A teacup she filled with a wee dram when she looked after me at night—“Just to settle you down, wee’un.” She knew the land. She knew the lore. Not in a scholarly way, but in her bones. She didn’t call it Bealltainn, but she lived it.

She sowed her seeds with intention, turned the soil with reverence, and left crumbs for birds that might be more than birds. She didn’t need Rome. She had fruit trees and rituals of her own. And in her presence, I learned something I’ve carried since: that the old ways never died. They just became quiet. Waiting. Watching. Ready to be remembered by anyone willing to listen to the wind and watch where the hares run.

This Bealltainn, I light my own fire—not in rebellion, but in reunion.

Excommunication as Revelation

I remember the first time I read the phrase, “We make good men better.” It was printed neatly on a Masonic petition, handed to me one evening by my employer, who had only recently joined the Craft himself. He had invited me to dinner at his Lodge, not with grand ceremony, but with quiet sincerity—an act of camaraderie, not recruitment. I went, curious and open.

Walking into North Hollywood Lodge for the first time was, in retrospect, something like a soft apocalypse. The Tracing Boards on the walls—the symbols, the colours, the quiet dignity of it all—struck something deep in me. It was as though a part of my mind, long hungry and overlooked, had finally been invited to sit at the table. The structure, the rhythm, the visual-spatial anchoring of complex ideas—this was a place that communicated in ways I could understand. My autistic, gestalt-processing mind wasn’t a barrier here; it was a bridge. I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but I knew I’d found something that made sense to me.

It was later, after my initiation and whilst I was still marvelling at the ancient architecture of the ritual, that the Church reasserted itself. Benedict XVI, a man of hard edges and historical certainty, re-issued Rome’s long-held position: Freemasonry and Catholicism were irreconcilable. The softening under John Paul II—where some priests would quietly say, “Just turn your ring inward”—was gone. We were, once again, excommunicated ipso facto.

One white Brother I knew, from a liberal parish, told me how his priest had simply advised him to keep his Square and Compasses discreet. But among my Filipino Brethren, the announcement landed like a thunderclap. In the Philippines, Catholicism and Freemasonry are both deeply woven into public life. To be told you could not be both—that you must choose—was to be asked to sever your identity. Some wept. Some left. Others remained, confused and wounded, wondering how an institution that had baptised them and buried their parents could so suddenly declare them unworthy.

And me? I had always known, on some level, that I wasn’t welcome in Rome. I had been turned away by the Sisters of St. Mary’s long before the word “trans” had formed fully in me, back when I was simply “too much” in all the ways no child should have to carry. And so, the excommunication didn’t devastate me. It clarified something I had already learned: that my value to the Church had always been conditional. That to belong, I would have to disappear.

But the land does not require such terms.

The hawk above my house still flies. The owl still guards her tree. The frogs still sing their low, joyless hymns in the puddles after rain. They do not ask for allegiance or orthodoxy. They ask only that I witness. That I remain present. And in doing so, I remain part.

Where the Church offered conditional welcome, nature extended unconditional belonging. And that, in the end, was the truest revelation of all.

Continuity Without Permission

The Earth does not ask permission to turn.

No conclave is convened before the first poppies bloom. No doctrinal debate delays the return of the swallows. The deer do not seek theological approval before calving. The trees do not pause their budding whilst Rome considers succession. The rhythms continue—unbothered, unbroken, and beautifully indifferent to human systems of power.

That is the quiet defiance of Bealltainn. It returns not because we celebrate it, but because it is. Because the Earth has always known how to warm herself back into motion. Because the sun knows how to climb higher in the sky without needing to be crowned. Because life longs toward life, regardless of who claims to preside over it.

I’ve watched this for years now—this contrast between what changes and what endures. Between the ceremony of institutional religion, which offers the appearance of renewal through the pageantry of succession, and the true continuity of the seasons, which ask nothing of us. The Church, with all its declarations and excommunications, still debates whether to bless what the Earth has never cursed. It questions whether to acknowledge what the soil already embraces. Whether to name love, identity, or belonging as real—when nature has been naming them all along, without shame, without judgement, without the need for dogma.

There is an arrogance in declaring beliefs “false” simply because they do not conform to one story. As though belief is something that must pass through doctrinal vetting before it becomes valid. As though the sacred only resides in buildings sanctioned by men in robes. My beliefs are not conceptual. They are relational. Ancestral. Embodied. They live in the crow that watches me hang laundry. In the scent of sagebrush after rain. In the old stories whispered through the wood-smoke of childhood kitchens and the breadcrumbs left for birds that may be spirits in disguise.

Bealltainn does not wait for the Church. It arrives like it always has—in the unfurling of leaves, in the low thrum of insect wings, in the simple fact that life has chosen, once again, not only to return, but to celebrate its return. It doesn’t need canonisation. It is the canon.

And in that truth, I find something stronger than permission: I find belonging.

A New Liturgy

The rituals that shape my spiritual life now are quiet things—unofficial, unwitnessed by clergy, unrecorded in any book of hours. They unfold in the rhythm of my days: in the way I notice the lizard’s return to the sun-warmed stone; in how I pause to greet the owl across the road with a nod and a soft “I see you, sister”; in the careful way I step around fresh hare prints in the morning dirt. These are not ceremonies in the traditional sense, but they are liturgical all the same—movements of reverence, gestures of belonging.

I leave offerings sometimes. Not because I expect something in return, but because giving is a language older than words. A bit of flaxseed bread left near the rosemary. A thimble of honey. Water poured for the roots of a thirsty tree. I do not ask the Earth to bless me. I thank her for doing so without condition.

This is my new liturgy. And it is no less holy for its lack of formal recognition. It is rooted in presence. In care. In the deliberate act of noticing. The theologians might not call it doctrine, but it is a theology nonetheless—a theology of reunion. Of finding again what was once obscured by incense and iron.

The name Bealltainn is what my ancestors called it—my kin from the Highlands and Isles. The Gaels marked it with fire and threshold-crossings, with cattle and song. But they were not alone. Across the Celtic world, it had other names. The Welsh marked Calan Mai. The Manx called it Boaldyn. Each nation had its rhythm, its tongue, its rites. And far beyond these shores, others felt this same turn in the wheel. The Maya celebrated Ix Chel and the fertility of the earth. The Ainu honoured Kamuy, the divine spirits of nature. The First Nations of this land gathered for spring dances, for renewal rites, for the green return. In India, Akshaya Tritiya was a day of prosperity and planting. In Zimbabwe, it was time to honour Mwari, the giver of rain and fruitfulness.

None of these peoples needed Rome to validate their knowing. They did not wait to be told that the greening of the world was sacred. They knew. And I know it too.

So I walk, slowly, every morning. I listen. I leave what I can. I say thank you often. This is my prayer. This is my offering. This is my theology—handed down by the land, not written in a book, but etched into the soil of my being.

Final Thoughts …

When I light a flame for Bealltainn, it is not a fire of judgement. It does not speak of sin or salvation. It is not the fire of damnation that once flickered behind pulpits and dogma. It is a fire of return—of continuity—of the quiet, fierce certainty that life persists, transforms, and begins again.

As the Church prepares to name another pope, to carry forward its ancient pageantry of succession, I tend to a different rite. I gather what the land offers—fallen twigs, dry sage, a bit of bark from the pine—and I kindle something older than empire. This fire is not for spectacle. It is not for proclamation. It is a signal. A greeting. A reminder that I am still here. That we are still here—those of us who were never quite allowed to belong within the sanctified walls, who learned to hear divinity in the rustle of leaves rather than in Latin.

The Church may continue to name excommunications, to close its doors to those it does not understand or refuses to see. But the fire does not exclude. It warms all who draw near. It dances for no one and everyone. It transforms what it touches—but never erases.

In this fire, I see the truth I have come to hold: that we are energy, not error. That nothing is lost. When the body ends, the energy remains—moving through soil, wind, water, memory. My belief in an afterlife is not built on reward or punishment, but on the principle of conservation. Matter becomes mushroom. Breath becomes breeze. Flame becomes ash becomes soil becomes seed. We do not vanish. We continue—not in pearly gates, but in the veins of trees, the migration of birds, the springing of grass after rain.

So I light the Bealltainn fire not in mourning, but in motion. Not in defiance, but in alignment. The Earth does not bow. She does not kneel. She simply is. And in her rhythm, I find my home—not as someone waiting to be judged, but as someone already welcomed, already held.

The fire burns. And I remember who I am.