There are some "spiritual" stories that are so cheesy that they richly deserve to be parodied... and sometimes the parody itself achieves greatness - well beyond what might have been expected.
Two examples spring to mind. Footprints and The Giving Tree. Both of these stories express a passive and quietist view of life which I find deeply disturbing.
There is a wonderful Discordian parody of the footprints story which expresses a Pagan ethic of independence and laughing at life.
And Victoria Weinstein has done a brilliant parody called The Demanding Tree, which expresses feminist and ecological concerns beautifully.
Showing posts with label divine feminine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label divine feminine. Show all posts
Thursday, 25 October 2012
Sunday, 16 January 2011
Mother Spirit
a prayer by Yvonne Aburrow
God our Mother: the source and origin of all life
Who is in both the starry heavens and the fruitful Earth
We sing to you of your beauty,
And we cry to you when we are in pain,
We whisper your many names into the night.
Your presence is everywhere
Your song is the music of creation, perpetually renewing itself,
Reflected in the patterns of Nature and the movements of the stars.
You feed us from the bounty of Nature’s store
And nurture us when we are in pain,
When we have hurt others,
And give us the strength to heal and forgive.
May we not harm the delicate web of existence,
But help to heal and strengthen it.
For yours is the beauty, present in everything,
The ever-changing beauty of Nature,
Throughout all existence
Amen.
God our Mother: the source and origin of all life
Who is in both the starry heavens and the fruitful Earth
We sing to you of your beauty,
And we cry to you when we are in pain,
We whisper your many names into the night.
Your presence is everywhere
Your song is the music of creation, perpetually renewing itself,
Reflected in the patterns of Nature and the movements of the stars.
You feed us from the bounty of Nature’s store
And nurture us when we are in pain,
When we have hurt others,
And give us the strength to heal and forgive.
May we not harm the delicate web of existence,
But help to heal and strengthen it.
For yours is the beauty, present in everything,
The ever-changing beauty of Nature,
Throughout all existence
Amen.
Thursday, 2 April 2009
The Divine Feminine
(an address given at Frenchay Unitarian chapel on 8th February 2009)
Recently it was Imbolc or Candlemas, on the 2nd of February.
In Ireland, Imbolc is the feast of Brigit, originally a Goddess, and now a saint. The Goddess Brigit is associated with healing, poetry, and smithcraft. The saint is associated with them too, and with the perpetual flame tended by the nuns of Kildare - which possibly goes back to pre-Christian times. There are numerous folk-customs and stories associated with Brigit.
Candlemas is the Christian festival of the Purification of the Virgin, when Mary presented Jesus at the Temple forty days after his birth, to complete her purification after childbirth in accordance with the Law.
Both these festivals have traditionally also focused on the increasing light and life as the days lengthen and the trees start to blossom and bud. They are also a celebration of the Divine Feminine. This is an aspect of the divine that has been neglected in Christianity, due to its patriarchal traditions and its negative view of Eve as the one who brought sin into the world.
But mystics of all traditions have honoured the Divine Feminine. Julian of Norwich, the great Christian mystic, referred to God the Mother (in the context of Trinitarian theology):
In the Orthodox Church, there is also a long tradition of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom (known as Sapientia in Western Christianity); indeed the great church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was dedicated to Her. She is both the Bride of Christ and the feminine aspect of Christ. Also, many liberal Christians regard the Holy Spirit as the feminine aspect of God.
In Judaism, there is the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, and the Ruach, the Breath of God, both of which are seen as feminine. The Shekhinah is believed to descend on the Sabbath eve at the lighting of the candles (usually done by the lady of the house). The Shekhinah is exiled in the physical world and trying to rejoin the Godhead. We can help reunite them in the process of Tikkun - the exercise of compassion, which helps to heal the rift between the worlds. Also, it is regarded as a holy thing to make love on the Sabbath eve, as this helps to reunite the Shekhinah and the Godhead.
In Islam, there is the Sakina, the peace of God, which descends upon believers, who is mentioned twice in the Koran.
In Buddhism, there is Kwan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion. She has taken a vow not to pass in to Nirvana until all souls have achieved enlightenment.
There are also many goddesses in Hinduism and Paganism, and it is in these two traditions that we see the Divine Feminine in all her glorious variety. And yet, one would expect that the presence of goddesses in a religion would guarantee respect for women. That has been the assumption of feminist theologians who pressed for inclusive language, or wanted to throw out the masculine imagery and language and start again. But women didn't have equal status with men in Hinduism until recently - indeed, Rammohun Roy had to campaign for the abolition of widow-burning.
In Paganism, it is probably the existence of priestesses and the influence of feminism that have ensured the equality of women. Also, very importantly, all aspects of womanhood are represented: the maiden, the mother, the warrior, the sexual woman, the crone who is the embodiment of wisdom.
However, a certain amount of gender-role-stereotyping is present in Paganism, and perhaps Pagans need to think more about the Divine that transcends gender - this is one reason why I became interested in Christian mysticism, since that tradition has always insisted that God is beyond gender, even if they refer to the Divine with masculine nouns and pronouns.
The early advocates of the Great Mother Goddess were social conservatives. Jacquetta Hawkes, a prominent enthusiast for the Goddess in the 1930s, believed that women and men were fundamentally different and that the role of women was to remain in the home and bring up children. This is rather ironic in view of the next generation of enthusiasts, the separatist feminists of the sixties and seventies. Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca, was influenced by the idea of the Great Mother Goddess. This is apparent from much of the material that he wrote for use in Wiccan ritual. He was also (embarrassingly for most Wiccans who are largely left-leaning) a member of the Conservative Party. However, the women he portrays in his two novels are very feisty and independent characters.
In Unitarianism - the first denomination to have a female minister, Gertrude von Petzold, in 1904 - women are of course regarded as completely equal to men. Unitarians have also embraced the Divine Feminine to a certain extent, and use inclusive gender-neutral language wherever possible.
Nevertheless, when I hear the word "God", I hear it as a masculine noun. When I hear Spirit of Life, or the Divine, I hear it as gender-neutral. But it doesn't explicitly include the Divine Feminine - the Goddess.
So, how does the Goddess differ from traditional views of God?
The Divine Feminine was recognised by some Unitarians as early as 1980. A quick search on the web reveals that quite a lot of UK Unitarians honour the Goddess.
I think it is important, in honouring female images of the divine, not to start gender stereotyping, and assuming that some qualities are inherently masculine, and others inherently feminine. This is clearly not true; and in regarding the Divine as being beyond gender, Unitarians are ahead of the game. But rather than always using masculine and gender-neutral language to describe the divine, it would be great to use feminine language sometimes too, however you regard the Divine.
As Maud Robinson, of Dublin Unitarians, writes:
Recently it was Imbolc or Candlemas, on the 2nd of February.
In Ireland, Imbolc is the feast of Brigit, originally a Goddess, and now a saint. The Goddess Brigit is associated with healing, poetry, and smithcraft. The saint is associated with them too, and with the perpetual flame tended by the nuns of Kildare - which possibly goes back to pre-Christian times. There are numerous folk-customs and stories associated with Brigit.
Candlemas is the Christian festival of the Purification of the Virgin, when Mary presented Jesus at the Temple forty days after his birth, to complete her purification after childbirth in accordance with the Law.
Both these festivals have traditionally also focused on the increasing light and life as the days lengthen and the trees start to blossom and bud. They are also a celebration of the Divine Feminine. This is an aspect of the divine that has been neglected in Christianity, due to its patriarchal traditions and its negative view of Eve as the one who brought sin into the world.
But mystics of all traditions have honoured the Divine Feminine. Julian of Norwich, the great Christian mystic, referred to God the Mother (in the context of Trinitarian theology):
And thus in our creation God Almighty is our natural father, and God all-wisdom is our natural mother, with the love and goodness of the Holy Spirit. These are all one God, one Lord. In the knitting and joining he is our real, true spouse and we are his loved wife and his fair maiden. ...The Second Person of the Trinity is our mother in nature, in our substantial making. In him we are grounded and rooted, and he is our mother by mercy in our sensuality, by taking flesh. Thus our mother, Christ, in whom our parts are kept unseparated, works in us in various ways. For in our mother, Christ, we profit and increase, and in mercy he reforms and restores us, and by virtue of his passion, death, and resurrection joins us to our substance. [http://www.gloriana.nu/mother.htm]
In the Orthodox Church, there is also a long tradition of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom (known as Sapientia in Western Christianity); indeed the great church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was dedicated to Her. She is both the Bride of Christ and the feminine aspect of Christ. Also, many liberal Christians regard the Holy Spirit as the feminine aspect of God.
In Judaism, there is the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, and the Ruach, the Breath of God, both of which are seen as feminine. The Shekhinah is believed to descend on the Sabbath eve at the lighting of the candles (usually done by the lady of the house). The Shekhinah is exiled in the physical world and trying to rejoin the Godhead. We can help reunite them in the process of Tikkun - the exercise of compassion, which helps to heal the rift between the worlds. Also, it is regarded as a holy thing to make love on the Sabbath eve, as this helps to reunite the Shekhinah and the Godhead.
In Islam, there is the Sakina, the peace of God, which descends upon believers, who is mentioned twice in the Koran.
In Buddhism, there is Kwan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion. She has taken a vow not to pass in to Nirvana until all souls have achieved enlightenment.
There are also many goddesses in Hinduism and Paganism, and it is in these two traditions that we see the Divine Feminine in all her glorious variety. And yet, one would expect that the presence of goddesses in a religion would guarantee respect for women. That has been the assumption of feminist theologians who pressed for inclusive language, or wanted to throw out the masculine imagery and language and start again. But women didn't have equal status with men in Hinduism until recently - indeed, Rammohun Roy had to campaign for the abolition of widow-burning.
In Paganism, it is probably the existence of priestesses and the influence of feminism that have ensured the equality of women. Also, very importantly, all aspects of womanhood are represented: the maiden, the mother, the warrior, the sexual woman, the crone who is the embodiment of wisdom.
However, a certain amount of gender-role-stereotyping is present in Paganism, and perhaps Pagans need to think more about the Divine that transcends gender - this is one reason why I became interested in Christian mysticism, since that tradition has always insisted that God is beyond gender, even if they refer to the Divine with masculine nouns and pronouns.
The early advocates of the Great Mother Goddess were social conservatives. Jacquetta Hawkes, a prominent enthusiast for the Goddess in the 1930s, believed that women and men were fundamentally different and that the role of women was to remain in the home and bring up children. This is rather ironic in view of the next generation of enthusiasts, the separatist feminists of the sixties and seventies. Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca, was influenced by the idea of the Great Mother Goddess. This is apparent from much of the material that he wrote for use in Wiccan ritual. He was also (embarrassingly for most Wiccans who are largely left-leaning) a member of the Conservative Party. However, the women he portrays in his two novels are very feisty and independent characters.
In Unitarianism - the first denomination to have a female minister, Gertrude von Petzold, in 1904 - women are of course regarded as completely equal to men. Unitarians have also embraced the Divine Feminine to a certain extent, and use inclusive gender-neutral language wherever possible.
Nevertheless, when I hear the word "God", I hear it as a masculine noun. When I hear Spirit of Life, or the Divine, I hear it as gender-neutral. But it doesn't explicitly include the Divine Feminine - the Goddess.
So, how does the Goddess differ from traditional views of God?
- In all traditions, she is regarded as immanent in the world, not transcendent.
- She is not just an aspect of a male God, but a being in her own right. (If you want to be properly Unitarian about this, perhaps you could regard Her as an emanation of the Divine source.)
- She is associated with Nature and the wilderness.
- She is often seen as a mother who gives birth to the Universe and who also IS the Universe.
- But she is also the wise crone and the wild maiden.
- She is the embodiment of compassion and wisdom.
- She is not interested in imposing laws from on high, but on the emergence of harmony at the grass roots level.
- She is much more than a Virgin Mother - this is an image which has been very damaging to women by holding out an unattainable ideal and denying the validity of sexual pleasure.
- Her worship includes sacred sexuality.
The Divine Feminine was recognised by some Unitarians as early as 1980. A quick search on the web reveals that quite a lot of UK Unitarians honour the Goddess.
I think it is important, in honouring female images of the divine, not to start gender stereotyping, and assuming that some qualities are inherently masculine, and others inherently feminine. This is clearly not true; and in regarding the Divine as being beyond gender, Unitarians are ahead of the game. But rather than always using masculine and gender-neutral language to describe the divine, it would be great to use feminine language sometimes too, however you regard the Divine.
As Maud Robinson, of Dublin Unitarians, writes:
God does not have a gender and although we can readily accept that intellectually, we should be aware that many of us have a deep history of the use of male-centred language in prayer and that it is embedded in our collective psyche. The word God, in itself, causes me problems, it is a word, which despite our modern sophistication and political correctness can’t but conjure up images of a male godhead for many of us. How can we escape from these deeply ingrained images of a male godhead?I think the answer to her question is to look at images of the Goddess in various religions, and start to explore this imagery in your preferred tradition, or traditions. There are numerous books and websites devoted to Her; and in a tradition dedicated to inclusivity, it seems only right to include both genders.
Friday, 26 September 2008
balance and cyclicity
An address given at Frenchay Chapel on 21 September 2008.
The Archangel Michael, whose feast day is associated with the Autumn Equinox, was a dragon-slayer. The dragon that he slew, according to the Book of Revelations, was the Adversary, the serpent from the Garden of Eden.
What a tangle of mythology is involved in this story! In the West, dragons are seen as ferocious fire-breathing beasts; in China, they live at the bottom of the sea and of wells, and bring rain and other blessings. And in other ancient stories, serpents are a symbol of wisdom. Indeed, the Gnostics saw the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a manifestation of Sophia, the personification of wisdom.
So why is a being of light slaying the dragon? To find out, we need to look at the evolution of another dragon-slaying story, that of St George. In the earliest version of the story, George tamed the dragon and led it into the city by the golden girdle of the maiden who was to have been sacrificed to it.
If we see the dragon as a symbol of the beast within all of us, we can see that it is better to tame it and harness its energies for good, not to try to kill it (for it will assuredly resurface somewhere else, when we were least expecting it). We need to balance the energies within ourselves.
So why did the story evolve into one where the dragon was killed? Because the dragon was seen as the untamed power of nature, which must be subdued wherever it was found – in women or in the wilderness.
In China, meanwhile, they saw life as the balance of opposites – yin and yang, night and day, life and death, eternally cycling around each other in the great dance of existence. Hence dragons were the dynamic energy of the elements, bringing rain and growth. They were part of the dynamic equilibrium of nature. Equilibrium means “equal freedom” – freedom to move, to grow and to change; freedom of choice.
This dynamic balance of opposites can also be seen in the dance of the seasons – “a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted”. The wheel of the year turns; falling in the autumn, rising in the spring. As it falls in the autumn, and the nights draw in, we turn inward, towards home, and hearth, and spiritual things; baking, and making jam and wine; creative projects.
It also means that, instead of being harsh with ourselves when we get things wrong, we need to forgive ourselves; as Mary Oliver writes in Wild Geese:
In Judaism, the Autumn Equinox is the birthday of the world. According to the Jewish website “Tel Shemesh”:
The Archangel Michael, whose feast day is associated with the Autumn Equinox, was a dragon-slayer. The dragon that he slew, according to the Book of Revelations, was the Adversary, the serpent from the Garden of Eden.
What a tangle of mythology is involved in this story! In the West, dragons are seen as ferocious fire-breathing beasts; in China, they live at the bottom of the sea and of wells, and bring rain and other blessings. And in other ancient stories, serpents are a symbol of wisdom. Indeed, the Gnostics saw the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a manifestation of Sophia, the personification of wisdom.
So why is a being of light slaying the dragon? To find out, we need to look at the evolution of another dragon-slaying story, that of St George. In the earliest version of the story, George tamed the dragon and led it into the city by the golden girdle of the maiden who was to have been sacrificed to it.
If we see the dragon as a symbol of the beast within all of us, we can see that it is better to tame it and harness its energies for good, not to try to kill it (for it will assuredly resurface somewhere else, when we were least expecting it). We need to balance the energies within ourselves.
So why did the story evolve into one where the dragon was killed? Because the dragon was seen as the untamed power of nature, which must be subdued wherever it was found – in women or in the wilderness.
In China, meanwhile, they saw life as the balance of opposites – yin and yang, night and day, life and death, eternally cycling around each other in the great dance of existence. Hence dragons were the dynamic energy of the elements, bringing rain and growth. They were part of the dynamic equilibrium of nature. Equilibrium means “equal freedom” – freedom to move, to grow and to change; freedom of choice.
This dynamic balance of opposites can also be seen in the dance of the seasons – “a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted”. The wheel of the year turns; falling in the autumn, rising in the spring. As it falls in the autumn, and the nights draw in, we turn inward, towards home, and hearth, and spiritual things; baking, and making jam and wine; creative projects.
It also means that, instead of being harsh with ourselves when we get things wrong, we need to forgive ourselves; as Mary Oliver writes in Wild Geese:
You do not have to be good.Many religious traditions call upon their followers to empty themselves and allow the Divine to fill them. This sounds to me like a painful process. Rather, I think the work of spirituality is to relax, to find the inner stillness and space that is already there. All we have to do is to remember who we really are; to reconnect with the ebb and flow of the cycles of life. Everything is cyclical – the seasons, the tides, the orbits of the planets – why not human life? But it is not just a ceaseless round of the same old things, repeated ad nauseam. Everything changes; everything is always becoming something else; nothing is ever lost.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
In Judaism, the Autumn Equinox is the birthday of the world. According to the Jewish website “Tel Shemesh”:
Rosh haShanah, in Jewish legend, is the anniversary of the day on which God created humans and animals—the beginning of the world. God creates humanity out of the dust of the earth, and out of God’s own spirit. Of humans, it says that “God created the human in God’s own image, in the image of God God created the human, male and female God created them.” Adam and Eve are born on Rosh Hashanah, as is the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. The first of the year falls on a day that reminds us that the Divine is within us and all beings. We blow the shofar, the ram’s horn, to signal the thunderous impact of this Presence on our lives, and we engage in memory—considering all that we have done during the year, seeking to make right where we have erred, seeking to become whole where we have been in turmoil, seeking to make ourselves new. It is a time of conception in all its forms. There is a tradition that the Jewish year has a “mother”—Rosh haShanah, the 1st of Tishrei—and a “father,” the 1st of Nisan (both are new years according to the Jewish calendar). If Rosh haShanah is the mother, then the shofar is the womb through which our spirits pass on the way to redemption. The ram’s horn represents the power of the Shekhinah to be hollow, to be a vessel for creation. Yet the shofar also reminds us of the ayil (ram) who sounds like El (God)—the masculine forces of the Divine. The liturgy of Rosh haShanah focuses on avinu malkeinu—our father, our king, the stern but loving father of Jewish tradition. We cast bread into bodies of water in the ritual called tashlich (throwing away), to cast away those behaviors we no longer want or need. Yet we can balance this image with the phrase in the Rosh haShanah liturgy: “hayom harat olam”—today is the birthday of the world, or more accurately, today is the pregnancy of the world. On Rosh Hashanah our world becomes pregnant with God, and God is pregnant with us. It is a time of mutual awareness and understanding. It is the time when we enter the inner world, the world of the womb, in order to be reborn into change.Joseph Campbell wrote about the journey of the hero, who descends into the underworld, confronts his deepest fears, and returns to the everyday world bringing back a blessing for humanity. This story appears in a thousand different forms: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Jonah and the Whale, Jesus dying and being resurrected, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and the plot of just about any film you can think of; they all conform to this pattern. We are all heroes on our own journeys, bringing back wisdom from the depths for the benefit of humanity.
Saturday, 26 July 2008
The androgynous divine
Rabbi unveils a secret of God
Finally the mainstream has noticed what mystics and occultists have known for centuries: the "divine" contains both masculine and feminine, but transcends them.
source: Wikipedia
Finally the mainstream has noticed what mystics and occultists have known for centuries: the "divine" contains both masculine and feminine, but transcends them.
"This is the kind of God I believe in, the kind of God that makes sense to me, in a language that speaks very, very deeply to human aspirations and striving," Sameth said. "How could God be male and not female?"Rabbi Mark Sameth noticed that the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) read backwards spells 'hu, hi' (he, she in Hebrew). How marvellous. This will give new impetus to people trying to use gender-inclusive and gender-neutral language in both Judaism and Christianity. Hurrah!
| Hebrew | Letter name | Pronunciation |
|---|---|---|
| י | Yodh | "Y" |
| ה | He (pronounced "hey") | "H" (or sometimes silent) |
| ו | Vav | "V" or placeholder for "O"/"U" |
| ה | He | "H" or silent |
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