Scratching the Sacred Surface

 

See in a new way 

~Lensbaby Motto

Gradually I came to understand that these events, or recognitions,

 have to do with something mystics have always tried to convey;

 that the knowledge and the truth and clarity we are seeking isn’t

 “out there” at all, but deep inside.

 

~Carol Lee Flinders

Yesterday I put my Lensbaby Sweet 35 Optic lens on my very old Nikon D60 camera and walked over to the two tulip trees that we have in the complex where I live. As I snapped away, trying to figure out where the focus would be and therefore also where the blur would be, plus where the light would be just right--a lot, but not too much--the tree shuddered in a slight breeze, and a host of large petals fell, like sweet spring rain, bouncing off my cheeks and my head on their way down.

I love Lensbaby lenses not only because of the amazing blur but also the great beauty of the bokeh, which is the quality or effect of the blur itself. Also, the mystery and adventure of never quite knowing how a photo is going to turn out, most likely because these lenses have a big learning curve that I haven't ever quite mastered. It's either going to work or it isn't, like the Holga cameras my daughters loved, and each time I snap it on the front of my camera, this small thrill of anticipation, possibly even joy, runs through me. 

I recently began a twelve-week online course about women mystics and goddesses, "A journey of tenderness, fiery empowerment and radical transformation," with Mirabai Starr, whose book, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics I loved so much. From the very first lesson two weeks ago I have been trying--and utterly failing--to put into words my thoughts and feelings about the nebulous, numinous, profoundly mysterious world of spirit and god. It's hard to bring into focus and see clearly, never mind find words for...  a lot like a Lensbaby photo, I realize suddenly. 

When I was ten my mother had a sudden, blink-of-an-eye conversion, becoming a born-again Missouri Synod Lutheran overnight. Just after dawn on an Easter Sunday morning, we sat in our Rambler station wagon at the drive-in near our house listening to a local pastor preach Christ's message of redemption from the roof of the snack shop/restroom building. Through the small, crackling speaker attached to our window we heard all about how God had sacrificed his only son to save us from our sins. We heard about Jesus' suffering and death, about the women finding his tomb empty, that we have been saved for all eternity by our act of faith alone. We all sat freezing in the crisp morning as the sun rose over the hills, except our mother, who heard something that warmed her hardened heart, and swept her away as though she had lost her balance in a flash-flooded desert stream. 

She quit smoking, threw my alcoholic father out, declared that she was so close to god she never had to experience normal, human feelings again, and began a life-long study of the Bible; from the Old Testament through the Book of Revelation, especially the gospels that told of the life, death, and resurrection of her new best friend, Jesus the Christ, and the letters of St. Paul, who had had his own out-of-the-blue conversion experience on the road to Damascus, and who she identified with and came to seriously love. Day in and day out, as she cooked, ate, and sewed beautiful garments to keep food on our table, our home rang with the radio voice of Dr. J. Vernon McGee, teacher and Bible scholar, who took her on years long journeys through her beloved scriptures. She became the first woman ever Bible teacher in our church, and she lived the godly life as a fine Christian woman, no needs, no wants, no desires, no emotions until a cold January night twenty-two years later, my younger sister and I at her hospital bedside holding her hands as that very same pastor, the one from that Easter morning where her life changed in a heartbeat placed his hand tenderly on her head and read from the Psalms as she took her last ragged breath and passed gently into the night to meet her sweet Jesus face to face.

It wasn't until lying in the dark this morning, hearing the first bird call in the dawn, thinking about all those years ago that I had a startling epiphany: my mother's journey and mine have actually been quite a lot alike, strikingly similar in fact... just in polar opposite directions. 

She was thirty-eight when she found the church, I left the church the year I turned forty. Her arriving and my leaving began each of our journeys to the sacred, and heralded the beginning of profound passages for each of us, literally changing our lives, and our passion for our subject led us to deep inquiry and study. Though there, the similarities end. For my mom it was Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, James, and Paul, for me it was women writing about women and about women's spirituality; women writing about their souls, their wild natures; women reimagining goddesses from patriarchal mythologies; women writing about their journeys from the "he" god to a god who looked like them, women writing about antiquity and how devastatingly far we have come from our matriarchal, matrilineal, goddess-loving roots. I devoured titles like Women Who Run With the Wolves, A Woman's Journey to God, At the Root of This Longing, Circle of Stones, The Goddess, Crossing To Avalon, The Feminine Face of God, When God Was a Woman, Odyssey with the Goddess, and countless more.

The path that appeared before me took me not only to Her, but into the labyrinth, and to the often joyful, often painful holy messiness of living life as a human being. While my mother's journey was out and up, mine was down and inward, a much more common path for women I read again and again, traveling not away from myself, but closer, where I discovered my own soul, and descended to my own inner being. It took me to the archetypal divine feminine, the archetypal wild woman, the archetypal great mother, She, who looked like me, was like me, is like me. Who for years and decades I read about, dreamt of, retreated with, wrestled with, rejected, reclaimed, lost, refound, was ashamed of, gloried in, wept with, and ultimately, like my mother did her God, loved with my whole heart. Wild and untamed, ferocious and gentle, passionate, courageous, earthy, wise, compassionate, sensuous and unashamed, warrior-when-necessary Divine Feminine.

As the sun rises this morning, just days from Spring Equinox, as life bursts back after winter darkness, as I struggle to write that which feels impossible to name, I will admit something that I have never spoken outside of my therapist's hearing: If I could be anything, anything, I would choose to be a mystic. I would choose to be a wild, unadulterated, unconditional lover of whatever it is I feel but cannot find words for. I would choose a contemplative, devotional life, not in a monastery, but right here in my own home, in my own life. I admit my ironic longing, after all these decades, after all the damage inflicted by my mom's conversion and the church itself, that I yearn for mystical union with whoever and whatever is out there; for a profound, life-altering, heart-to-heart Teresa of Avila-type love for and merging with the Divine, the Beloved. 

I have been a seeker for decades. And still, I have no more handle on what "god" is than I did years ago, though I do have a lot of ideas about what "god" is not. It's also true, I am coming to realize, that the divine is not something that can be understood cognitively, but known with the body, and felt with the heart. That in all my seeking, in all of my desperation to know, to name, to figure it out, to understand, I'm beginning to think that I have missed what is right here, right in front of me. 

The first sunrays. That lone bird singing in the dark. The glorious tulip tree, its petals hitting my face. Our earth and every creature that lives upon her, the moon in every phase, the falling star, the tender green coneflower shoots bursting through the soil. It's the very breathe that flows effortless in and out of my body; the beat of my heart. It's in human connection, and also in our aloneness. In confusion, yearnings, pain, sorrow and in our joy; it's our passions; it's in the profound love we feel for those closest to us, my daughters, my granddaughter; her sweet, joyous or sad or frustrated, always animated face on my iPad screen: the grief at our separations, the happiness in our reunions; the way our hearts break when we witness suffering; it is whatever moves and touches us that puts us squarely onto sacred ground. 

God is love is a well worn, ridiculously tired cliché that defies logic, not to mention a staggering amount of evidence to the contrary. Still, at the heart of the esoteric traditions of all major religions is just that: love. It's the not so secret mystery all mystics long for and experience. Love, pure and simple. Everyday love, ecstatic love. What else is there that truly matters; what else is there that has the power to heal us, our wounds, our earth, our world, our minds, our hearts~

See in a New Way. 

Sweet invitation.

Ferocious Love

I remind myself that the heart can simply break, or it can break open. 

A broken open heart is awake; it's alive and calls for action. 

It is regenerative, like nature.

In my experience, to have eyes wide open is to hold a broken heart
every day. It's a grief I rarely speak, though my work calls
on the power of voice.

~Katharine Wilkinson

 

A friend told me the other day that she was so enjoying the emergence of spring. It is the sign of renewal that she needs right now, she wrote, especially the tulip trees in her neighborhood right now, with their dazzling profusion of pink blossoms. 

Just a couple of days before I had noticed that overnight the tulip trees in my complex had exploded into bloom. But unlike "normal" times, my heart didn't skip a beat, I didn't stare doe-eyed, I didn't rush for my camera. Instead, all I thought about was the climate crisis, and how it is way too early to be spring. That we haven't had near enough winter, near enough rain, the temperatures stuck in the sixties, the January and February skies for the most part just blue, blue, blue, day after day after day. 

Reading about my friend's experience, I saw that I was missing the moment, the beauty, the exuberance, the renewal, the very hope of spring. My denial wasn't stopping it from happening, it was stopping me from enjoying it, communing with it, and deeply appreciating it.

That afternoon I looked up from my book and out the window and there in the tree, for the first time this year, were robins. Sweet red-breasted robin, one of my favorite birds~as if it's possible to have favorite birds. Harbinger of spring if ever there was one; symbol of abundant new growth. When I looked around I saw that they were actually everywhere. In my tree, in other trees spread out around the grassy area, on the grass itself. Oh my goodness; they had arrived. As I watched, cedar waxwings joined them, the two species often seen together in spring. There were also the usual goldfinches and a few house finches. Even through the closed window I could hear all of their raucous, glorious singing. They flew in and out of the patio, back and forth, back and forth, all of them; fat robins bathing themselves in a too small birdbath, goldfinches in the fountain, even sparrows, I saw, clinging to my little leafless Japanese maple. Constant, frenzied movement and chatter, as though they were celebrating some invisible something that I, in my grief masquerading as stubbornness, could not see. 

My friend's words threw light on what I was doing, but it was the robins, and the great bird party that I was so joyously privy to that snapped me out of my climate change despair, allowed my spring fever permission to blossom, and opened my heart not only to these sweet, life-affirming creatures, the quickening of this, my very favorite time of year, but also the sorrow that is never far from anything I am witnessing in nature. 

It is not only the birds that bring me back to hope. At the same time, in mysteriously synchronistic fashion, I happened upon an interview with feminist, writer, and environmentalist Katharine Wilkinson, who when speaking of the climate crisis work she is involved in, uses the words ferocious love to describe the approach of women she sees who are involved in the work no matter their particular corner; their incredible love and conviction, their commitment to forging a just and livable future. 

Speaking on the climate crisis podcast, Outrage and Optimism, she recalls a time when she was told to check her emotions at the door, to play by the rules; those rules being you don't bring emotion into the equation: "It is sort of hilarious," she says, "to think that we ever thought we could address this challenge with only the powers of the prefrontal cortex. Why would we leave the is whole of the human super powers to the side?" She peppers their conversation with terms like radical imagination and emotional muscle; integrating head and heart; nurturing the vision. She speaks so beautifully about showing up with our human wholeness, and the deep, raw emotions that are not only present, but wholly appropriate. "You can't watch it all and not have grief," she says, "not have fear, or rage, but also courage and determination."

I am so profoundly moved, so affected, so infused with optimism, so utterly grateful for her presence, her work, and her feminist platform. It is like spring breaking out in my own heart and soul. It makes so much sense it is mind boggling. As Einstein said, we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. Emotionless climate communication hasn't worked, Katharine points out. We can and must lead in this movement in this way, she reiterates. Her eyes glisten with unshed tears in her TED Talk when she speaks of how the climate crisis is affecting women and girls so disproportionately, and how if we can turn their fortunes, we will turn the fortune of this crisis, we can save them and our earth. She sees a shift coming; she speaks of the much needed change that is, albeit slowly, happening, the "flowering" of the climate leadership; the passionate involvement of women and youth; the all of a sudden broadening appeal for the Green New Deal. 

And, she says, you can indeed be taken seriously and recite poetry. 

Ferocious Love. 

Of course.