The Radical Self

“Paradise is simply the person, the self, but the radical self in its uninhibited freedom.”

--Thomas Merton, from his journal Learning to Love (1966-67)

(Image: Avalokitesvara by Alex Grey)

The radical self lives in the world of material forms with all its pleasure, pain, and drudgery, while also being acutely aware of the divinity in each moment; that is to say, in constant prayer, contemplation, and renewal. The radical self feels the sensation of resistance [in life] intuitively like the gentle pressing of the back against the chair and leaning into it, knowing resistance, surrenders entirely. The radical self knows its bounds only in order to know no bounds. Life becomes a continuous free fall into the arms of Magnitude. The radical self hears itself lying and corrects the words spoken. It hears the gossip, distortion, complaint, or self-pity which is always in discourse with another person, and rings the bell...Ding! Slay the imposter! The radical self is watching every single event, experience, interaction and thought from a slight distance; from a few feet away in a quiet corner. The radical self is simply Love aware of itself. The fruit, seed and stem. The earth, rain, and sun. It accepts all questions as Mystery and all answers as Possibility. The radical self is the conduit of All-Life, like a live wire carries electricity and so becomes electric.

Reading The Long Loneliness

I began reading Dorothy Day’s 1952 autobiography, The Long Loneliness, out of interest in her life’s combination of writing, service, and faith. Day was a journalist, social activist, and convert to Catholicism who lived 1897 to 1980 in the great northern cities of 2oth century America: Chicago and New York. This is important because she reached adulthood during the teens and 20s, taking part in the women’s suffrage and worker’s rights movements, and fraternizing with anti-capitalist groups like the communists and anarchists of the early 20th century. She endured WWI, the Depression, WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam,... This is a woman who witnessed the greatest suffering of last century.

Her early Bohemian lifestyle was one of radical political activism and literature. Day was a woman of singular mind and intention, doing as she pleased, struggling as she chose. This endears her to me. She averted spirituality for most of her youth, but upon having a daughter could no longer ignore her attraction to Catholicism. She lost her common-law husband and various friends in the process. But Day lived a life led by her own heart. And reading her account in her own very direct words brings her alive in the room, palpable, aromatic. However she also brings alive her particular perspective on suffering, poverty, self-denial; the qualities by which she found meaning (or perhaps comforting explanation) amid the Catholic Church.

Having struggled to untangle myself from the crippling ideologies of original sin, mortal sin, glorification of poverty (by the rich Catholic church), and sometimes glorification of suffering (by use of the Crucifixion story) for the better part of my adult life, a discordance began between myself and the book. I had turned to Day’s life story for inspiration at a tenuous time, instead finding the fear-based terrain of my childhood conditioning magnified tenfold.

How can we deny the body when the body is a miracle of creation? How can we proclaim poverty, when “riches” can be shared? When success is blessing found in achieving our highest potential? (Our highest potential = giving life to the Life within.) If we focus on suffering, on how terrible life is, on how our “cross” will take us to the Heaven of Thereafter, what are we creating in this life (which is a gift to be cherished)? How are we honoring the beautiful Mystery of Life by fixating exclusively on the prevalence of suffering and some “world” to come instead of relieving the suffering that is present now and reveling in the heavenly joy that is now?

Day must have asked some of these questions herself, for she quotes Saint Catherine (247) “All the way to heaven is heaven.” Perhaps she also struggled with the dichotomies even as she took refuge in the comforting Catholic rituals and long-standing presence. Perhaps the struggle between living in joy right now and believing that we are sinful creatures that need to deny body and life to “sit at the right hand of the Father in Heaven” is the exact source of the long loneliness.

I had to put the book down. At page 250 of 286, I had to put the book down out of self-preservation. Childhood conditioning holds too strong; it’s what we revert to in our weakest, most tired and dark moments. I want to rise above that. I choose to create a life out of love and joy and compassion, the exact humanity that Jesus preached about in the Gospels. The Judeo-Christian fixation on fear does not serve either love or joy, and certainly not compassion.

But Dorothy Day was no stranger to compassion. Instead she ultimately became the poster-woman for compassionate action. When recounting the time she was jailed and went on a hunger strike with other women in DC as protest against the unjust treatment received by arrested suffragists, she says this:

“What was right and wrong? What was good and evil? I lay there in utter confusion and misery.

When I first wrote about these experiences I wrote even more strongly of my identification with those around me. I was that mother whose child had been raped and slain. I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own breast every abomination. Is this exaggeration? There are not so many of us who have lain for six days and nights in darkness, cold and hunger, pondering in our heart the world and our part in it. If you live in great cities, if you are in constant contact with sin and suffering, if the daily papers print nothing but Greek tragedies, if you see on all sides people trying to find relief from the drab boredom of their job and family life, in sex and alcohol, then you become inured to the evil of the day, and it is rarely that such a realization of the horror of sin and human hate can come to you.” (78-79)

Through the harrowing human conditions she witnessed, Day came to her own conclusions about remedying the long loneliness of modern life, indeed the long loneliness of human life.

“Community”, she says later, “...was the social answer to the long loneliness.” (224) And she’s right. But true community requires not only that we love and forgive and practice non-judgement toward others, but also toward ourselves, something that Catholic doctrine has historically overlooked. Self-awareness, then, could be seen as the spiritual answer to the long loneliness. You and I are both emanations of the Divine; we are the children of God as well as the Mother and Father. Each one of us is All as much as we are part. If I deny myself, how can I serve you? But if I know myself, how can I overlook you?

Revelations of suffering and injustice are often necessary to living an awakened life. In one sense, that is the gift side of suffering, to awaken us to our true nature, to awaken us to our capacity to love. But once we see suffering, feel it, become “inured” to its presence, we must move beyond. Day knew this too,

“One thing I was sure of, and that was that these fellow workers and I were performing an act of worship. I felt that it was necessary for man to worship, that he was truly himself when engaged in that act.” (93)

Action as worship. Community as solace. Self-awareness (self-acceptance) as the path to these.

So what of the Catholic Church’s fixation on suffering, sin, denial of the material body? How does it jive with the open heart advocated by Day and her Catholic contemporaries like Thomas Merton?

I found a possible answer while perusing a book called The Shadow Effect at the library. We must be witness to the whole. We must live whole lives, both experiencing pain and joy. Darkness is ever-present, but it’s the absence of Light we need to be concerned about. At the center of the heart we can witness whatever is present without turning away. Which means we can be truly open to compassion and grace, and truly capable of knowing ourselves, shadow and all, which is to say, knowing God.

I still struggle with Christianity’s exclusive language about the sinner and the evil body and the idea that humanity’s suffering can be explained by a “fall” from grace eating the fruit of knowledge.* I think someone got that story wrong. That story says to me: God and God (duality, i.e., Dark and Light) were tempted by God to taste God and in doing so found God. Self-awareness!

Dorothy Day somehow had the wisdom to integrate the obsessive aspect of her Church and focus on the immanent action of love. Of honoring and knowing the Other as herself. And living in fear of nothing, neither suffering nor joy. She recounts an Indian poem she read in a book about Gandhi:

“I died as a mineral and became a plant.

I died as a plant and became an animal,

I died as an animal and was a man.

What should I fear? When was I less by dying?” (248)

*Please check out this refreshing article by Michael Bindner, which suggests that the “original sin” was blame.

Eat to Live

In his spiritual treatise, The Tao of Wu, RZA addresses food and spirituality from a profoundly simple level. In the chapter, “Man and Animal,” (p. 147) he says:

“I don’t eat meat-- I’ve been vegetarian since 1995. But I didn’t stop because I became a Buddhist or a Hindu. I stopped because I had a revelation I was eating dead animals.

...In fact, Dirty and I didn’t eat meat from ages fourteen to sixteen, but then we started getting into sex and drugs and that led to us being carnivorous.

But this time, my student saw me eating a steak and he pointed to the bone... ‘You eat that?’ And I was like, ‘Hey, I don’t eat pork, but I think it’s everybody’s choice.’ But something about what this kid said made me reassess. And from that day forth I didn’t eat red meat anymore.

...I started thinking about it like, ‘I’m alive, I have a life, my flesh is alive. Why should I eat something that’s dead?’

...I started reading books about it...that at one point everything that we ate was alive-- we’d eat from the tree, from the ground, our droppings would feed the tree. It was all life and therefore man didn’t die. When he put death into his body, he started to die.

From that point on, I ate to live.”

His reference to “death” can be understood best metaphorically. Of course all life dies; the two are inseparable. We need not elude Death so much as we should better care for Life. Illness, disease, pathology; these are the deaths to which RZA speaks: When he put death into his body, he started to [experience dis-ease]. How life-affirming are the foods we put into our bodies? What kind of sounds into our ears? How nourishing is the environment in which we live? Nourishment goes far beyond food. Eat to live. Think to live. Speak to live.

Good Morning, Cranky

This morning I woke cranky. An overwhelmed feeling pervaded my every movement as I skulked from the bed to the bathroom to the kitchen. I kept having thoughts like “Why am I feeling this way? It’s a fresh day. I slept well. What’s my problem?” The accusations weighing even heavier on my drudgery. This feeling stayed with me all morning until emailing with a friend, when through our dialogue I was able to understand how I have been putting a ton of pressure on myself to get this done and that done and this finished by then and that planted before it rains and that part done before this-- constant pressure to get there.

My friend and I wondered together: Where is it we’re so rabid to get to? And what’s the rush?

I read somewhere once that if I'm making myself or the people around me miserable trying to achieve some goal, than the goal is worthless. So it seems wise to learn to recognize that self-pressure feeling, then to say no. Or say yes, rather, to whatever it is in front of us right this minute. To start from right here. We have to be willing to start at A every day. I get so worried about B, C, and sometimes even Z that A becomes a burden instead of a beautiful gift from the Universe to know myself and experience life fully, gratefully.

My friend elaborated, “All we ever gotta do is A, you know? Just A and then A, and then A. Its like in a way, all the other letters are a mirage, an illusion.”

Three reminders today:

1) Surrender to right now. Honor feeling tired or honor feeling energized, but be fully alive whatever the conditions.

2) Remember that everything happens in small increments, so by looking at the increment in front of me today, I will find myself at the next increment tomorrow, and so forth, until my goal is achieved or my project done or my dream realized.

3) Conversations with friends are invaluable opportunities. Relationships are the mirror into which we can look and find answers to our deepest questions about ourselves. Crankiness and all.

Community: The Disability Postcard Project

The more I write about Faith, the more I realize the importance of community as an emanation of the Divine—how relationship is a gift to use in order to truly know and love ourselves, in turn finding limitless compassion and love for everyone (and everything) else. Solitude, introspection, contemplation; these are the healthy forms of aloneness that keep us alive in our communities and fully connected spiritually. Isolation and loneliness, on the other hand, cause suffering, even if they are Modernist principles that have captured the arts and presumptions about creativity for the last couple centuries.

VSA, which is The International Organization on Arts and Disability, has a different idea of artistry and creativity:

“Inclusion teaches us that all means all. Everybody. No exceptions. The arts invite people to leave familiar territory, to explore new answers and seek new questions. The arts offer a means to self-expression, communication, and independence. By learning through the arts, students become lifelong learners, experiencing the joy of discovery and exploration, and the value of each other's ideas.”

Recently VSA did an inspiring project where they invited people with disabilities and their loved ones to create an image representing their individual perceptions of “disability.” A postcard template served as the canvas for the imagery, mailed in to VSA, where eventually every card will be exhibited together.

My family participated in the project in a show of solidarity with my sister, Sara, who has cerebral palsy. Doing this as a family felt amazing and ignited the special tie among us that witnesses loneliness and pain all too often; so that we were able to create seven beautiful and healing images that we will cherish together forever:

(Acrylic paint, Sharpie marker, collage, and photography were some of the media used.)

*Click on an image to see a larger view.

Wisdom Anyplace: RZA and The Tao of Wu

“The RZA” is a celebrated hip-hop artist, and founder of the Wu Tang-Clang, but he is also a deeply spiritual man; someone who’s perspective of the world boarders on the mystical at times. This becomes most evident in the words (and silences) he has written in The Tao of Wu, a series of meditations interweaving stories from RZA’s personal journey, Islam, math, Kung Fu, music, chess, poetry... His audience is a particular one: the youth of our city streets, the ones living in poverty, uncertainty, caught in a schizophrenic economic system. He can speak to these youth (and adults) with honesty and respect, because he knows where they come from, what they endure, what their fears are, in a way that others could never do. But he also knows that wisdom lives in each of us, no matter what our living conditions. That if we look closely enough, wisdom can be found anyplace, even in death and disease, even in a culture of violence, perhaps even in the darkest alleyway in the neighborhood. It is our relationship to our conditions of suffering that offers a window into wisdom. And the quality of our relationship with others:

“…knowledge means knowing, but wisdom means acting—acting on what you know, seeing the person who’s drowning right the fuck in front of you, and stepping in… My mom’s death ripped something from me that isn’t coming back. But it forced my mind and heart to remember, to accept what I can’t change and get the freedom that comes with that…When we neglect others out of superficial wisdom, fake respect, phony knowledge—we tell ourselves it’s their life; we say it’s not our responsibility…Fuck that. Get involved. Or we’ll all feel the pain.” (p.171)

Amid quotes from masters such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jesus, Lao-Tzu, Rumi and Aristotle, RZA breaks down his insights into the ancient seven pillars of wisdom, getting real about the issues that afflict our spiritual maturity, from materialism (especially in rap culture) in the chapter entitled “Bling and Nothingness,” to drugs, to vegetarianism. Though RZA incorporates many wisdom traditions in his work, clearly Islam and mathematics within Islam, has had a profound significance on his own spiritual journey and comes up often in his writing; not in an evangelical way, but just that it is deeply rooted in his perceptions of life and the world, and to share one, he must share all. I admit to knowing almost nothing about this spiritual tradition but found it both intriguing and complementary to the ways I often see hidden connections among the details in life.

The details of RZA’s life have been complex and challenging; he makes no excuses but employs wit and humility to offer guidance from his experience. This combination is powerful. And although I think I missed some of his meaning simply because our backgrounds differ so greatly, I found affirmation of the wisdom I have cultivated in my own life, albeit under different conditions. Reminding me that no matter where we come from (or where we’re going), we are each a spiritual being traveling an individual path—a path that demands the wisdom and love of others.

Community

In Buddhism, one of the first basic teachings instructs the student to take refuge in the Three Jewels or Treasures: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. To take refuge means to find safety, or guidance.

The Buddha indicates the highest spiritual being, which exists in each of us. Buddha literally means, “enlightened one” or more simply, “the one who knows”.

Dharma is the Truth and the ultimate reality.

And Sangha is generally referred to as Community.

For many years I have felt like the first two refuges are perfectly sound ones, but have struggled with that of community; especially in a society like ours, where businesses are run by large corporations from another state, neighborhoods are gated, while people turn to each other less and to the TV or internet more. The internet, though it can act as another isolating media form, has also somehow started reinventing the idea of community with social networks, blogs, etc, where people with similar interests or beliefs can connect over fast geographic spaces. This phenomenon may be testament to the enduring need of humans to seek community, even in new forms.

Recently I have found fresh perspective on my personal relationship to community with a group of people with whom I study holistic nutrition and wellness. Whether it has been getting excited about new greens and grains, or discussing the challenges and rewards of meditation, I finally feel the indisputable benefits of a community of like-focused individuals. Because it’s just easier to find your strength, your Buddha, your Truth— amid the loving (non-judgmental) support of people doing the same in their own lives. And although many of the ways of organizing community may be changing from those utilized in the 19^th and 20^th centuries; community meets the need that each of us has for meaningful relationship that affirms our truest desires and goals.

So I’d like to extend thanks to all the friends, family, and colleagues that presently make up my various sanghas. My journey grows richer every day with your presence and support.

Never Turn Back

This weekend I attended a choral concert of old “negro” spirituals at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. The church, which sits austerely on the corner overlooking a city park, was built in 1858 by members of the Third African Baptist Church. In 1864 the church obtained its first black pastor and in 1866 the first Richmond public school for black children commenced in the church’s basement. It is a landmark location, abundant with history and power.

One Voice Chorus chose the site for its concert entitled, “Never Turn Back”. And on a warm night, the first day of spring, fans a’ fluttering in lady’s hands, they began with the spiritual written by Hall Johnson, I’ll Never Turn Back No Mo’. As they sang those words, each section of the chorus twittering or roaring on cue with the deep melancholic hope of spiritual song, I felt tears rise in my eyes for I knew that it’s true:

Once you start down the path of the journey of faith, you can never turn back.

Because even when we falter; even when the world turns dark and cold again just when we thought we were finally safe; even when uncertainty rears its chimera head, we can’t undo the Seed that grows warm, moist, loved in the sun of our hearts.

The concert's program offered a chance for recognition of shared history. Of slavery. Of Freedom. Of personal salvation. We went down to Deep River and attempted to Wade in the Water. We heard The Old Ship of Zion there. We remembered Daniel being saved from the lion, and that when you have nothing in life at all but faith, offer what you have, So I’ll Sing with My Voice.

One Voice Chorus exists to promote diversity and racial harmony. Their mission is to work “toward healing and racial reconciliation between Americans of African and European descent.” And that night they beamed a beautiful gradation of color and voice in the old church of red velvet curtains, balconies, shining wood pews holding hymnals in pockets. I’m grateful to my brother for finding his way to the bass section up in the back of the choral tiers so that I too have been welcomed and I too have been able to openly praise with hymns sung by my historic ancestors, who are surely as deeply a part of me as anything this country has handed down.

Patience

"Patience is not something to have on principle. It's not a skill we learn just to get what we want later on in life. Patience is a word that we should use to express an intimate, loving, and personal relationship with time. Patience is a word we should use to talk about the inherent trust we have that life is moving (through time) in the right direction, always."

--Adam Elenbaas, author of Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest, forthcoming in July from Penguin.

More Paris: Medieval Revelations

Saint Francis of Assisi endures today as the patron saint of animals and the environment due to a reputation for his ultra-sensitive ability to communicate with animals and birds, and his praise for nature, especially noted in his poem, Song of the Sun.

In the remarkable Musée De Cluny in Paris, a museum of the Middle Ages housed in a 15^th century mini-castle, are many relics such as this bronze engraving of "the stigmata" of St. Francis. He stands with his arms upraised toward the amazing depiction of an angel: a bony skeleton wrapped in rainbow-colored feathers. Four brightly budded trees mimic the four points of the cross as the two figures share the stigmata associated with the Christian-lauded Crucifixion.

St. Francis, or Francesco Bernardone, spent his early years as a troubadour of the French (Provençal) tradition, wandering playfully in bright costumes, singing and reciting poetry. Troubadours apparently originate from the Saracenic tribes from Syria and Arabia. Both the lute and poetry were tools used by the Sufis for spiritual development. Sufis today are associated by many as the esoteric sect of Islam, even as this is not perfectly accurate. (There are many Western Sufi Orders, in particular, whose traditions stem from Arabic origins but are not officially associated with Islam.) The Sufis themselves go by no real name (Sufi is simply a title for convenience) and claim no allegiance to any particular religion. This is part of their enduring tradition, and as Islam stemmed from Judaism and then Christianity, Sufism was also once thought by some to be the esoteric desert tradition of the Christians! Some time after Francesco embraced Christianity, he went to Pope Innocent III requesting permission to start a new monastic order, “The Lesser Bretheren” (Order of Friars Minor). In The Sufis, by Indries Shah, the connection is made between the Lesser Bretheren and an order of Sufis contemporary with St. Francis called “the Greater Brothers,” whose founding teacher, Najmuddin Kubra “The Greater,” had had an “uncanny influence over animals”.

Interestingly, St. Francis set out toward Syria in his early thirties, but returned to Italy for financial reasons. He tried again later, heading to Morocco by way of Spain, but returned home (1214) before reaching his destination due to illness. It should be recalled here that “Moorish Spain” existed until the 1490s, a gateway for Arabic and Muslim (and related) traditions into Europe that is much ignored today.

In 1224, St. Francis wrote the aforementioned Song of the Sun, a praise poem, considered to be the first Italian poem. An excerpt:

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

The beloved Sufi poet, Rumi (1207-1273), also wrote many poems to “the sun”, as excerpted here*:

We are cast like sunlight upon the earth.

And our light, passing through your body

as if it were an open window to our Source,

returns, purified, to you.

Whoever sees that sun says, “He is alive,”

and whoever sees only the window says, “He is dying.”

The Sufis, Shah, Indries. Anchor Books, 1964. Pgs 257-264.

*The Rumi Collection, ed. Heminski, Kabir. Shambhala, 1998.

Renewed Statement of Purpose

The meditations, essays, and reviews in this blog are meant to foster community, contemplation, and vigorous faith; extrapolating inspiration and guidance among the arts, sciences, current affairs, religions,…history, geography, etc. —and to celebrate what unifies us while honoring our differences as testament to the infinite variety of Creative Genius.

(Photo: Taramaso Photo)

Considering Lent

Lent is observed by Christians as a time of preparation during the forty weeks between Ash Wednesday* and Easter**.

"Lent is a time for personal and societal repentance, a time for radical conversion, renewal and transformation,” wrote my friend Art Laffin... recounts Fr. John Dear in the following article, Lent and the Charter for Compassion: click here.

The aforementioned Art Laffin keeps the dream of social justice alive with the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in Washington, DC. Dorothy Day was a writer and bohemian that responded to the poverty and inequity of her era by starting, firstly, a revolutionary journal called The Catholic Worker, which then turned into action caring for the homeless. But the life-style Dorothy Day lived, honored, and proclaimed was one of pacifism, nonviolence, and social justice. She is a stunning historical character in the history of the US and I urge you to learn more about her life and writings.

*Ash Wendesday is a day of repentance (ie. looking back on the suffering one has caused and becoming aware of one's actions in the world) that is marked by smudging ash on the forehead. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... we begin from the earth and we will return to the earth. This is the great equalizer.

**Easter is celebrated by Christians as the time Jesus died and resurrected. Resurrection means renewed life, as in Spring, the earth renewing itself, all manner of creatures (rabbits!) reproducing...life in its greatest fecund daze. Fresh air, sunshine, green grass, ah!

C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Recovering the Soul

Jung’s Red Book is here. Well, actually it has existed since Jung began his “creative imagination” exercises in 1914 or so, then sat in his study for fifty years after he died in 1961. But an exhibition of the cataclysmic text just ended at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, which included the original manuscript in a glass case and three facsimile editions placed around the room for people to examine, marking the first time The Red Book has been available to the public. Also on display were several series of images taken from the text—paintings done by Jung himself—in an attempt to offer some insight into the realm of transcendence created, or better yet, documented, in The Red Book.

The museum articulated the complexity of The Red Book’s purpose well:

“He wished to understand himself and integrate and develop various components of his personality; he wanted to understand the relationship between the individual and present day society as well as in the community of the dead; and he wanted to understand the psychological and historical effects of Christianity and the future religious development of the West… the manuscript serves as record of how Jung rediscovered his soul and overcame the malaise of spiritual alienation. He accomplished this by creating a new image of God and establishing a new psychological and theological cosmology.”

Cosmology means literally the study of the universe, and by extension, human placement in the universe. There have been many varying cosmologies throughout history, geography, and religion. In the Rubin’s complimentary exhibit, Visions of the Cosmos, Hindu, Buddhist, Jainist, Christian, Alchemical, Astrological, and scientific cosmologies are explored side by side, allowing witness of the striking visual similarities across time and culture, while also highlighting the differences of ideology. This context makes Jung’s Red Book images and ideas all the more relevant, all the more powerful.

The book itself is a kind of Medieval illuminated manuscript, with calligraphic German text and brightly painted images that illustrate or elaborate on what is written. The facsimile edition contains English translation in the back, which I sat reading and transcribing bits of into my journal, revealing Jung’s reality in poignant poetry:

“But the way is my own self, my own life founded upon myself. The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present. But I’m ashamed of my God. I don’t want to be divine but reasonable. The divine appears to me as irrational craziness. I hate it as an absurd disturbance of my meaningful human activity. It seems an unbecoming sickness which has stolen into the regular course of my life. Yes, I even find the divine superfluous.”

The honesty and borderline desperation of this excerpt strike me familiarly. I know that place of tension between the rational business of society and the bliss-fire cadence of my own relationship with the Divine. Many of us feel this frustration which sometimes becomes anger; resentment that things cannot just be simple, the way they “should” be, the way money and economy and manners dictate them. Because in the world of self-realization—of soul recovery—things get messy, black becomes white in an instant, art becomes science, love becomes a bird flying through an amber sky. Jung did experience what seems like waves of peace in relation to the God/Universe he explores throughout the remarkable Red Book:

Vocatus atque non vocatus dues aderit. Called or not, the God will be present.

The Fourth Day of Creation: The Creation of the Celestial Spheres from Tractus Mago-Cabalisticum et Theologicum, Gregorius Anglus Sallwigt, aka Gregor von Welling (1652-1727), Germany; 1781, etching, Collection of Mario Diacono, Brookline, MA- from Rubin Museum Visions of the Cosmos Exhibit, 2010

"Wind Tracks", the Kalachakra cosmic model, from Rubin Museum's Vision of the Cosmos exhibit, 2010

cosmology image from Jung's Red Book

mandala from The Red Book

Goddess Worship

La Chapelle Notre-Dame de la Medaille Miraculeuse is a beautiful sanctuary nestled in the center of Paris. The mosaic tiled walls at the altar gleam in fantastic hues of blue, white, and gold to create celestial backdrops, borders of lilies, bursts of light emanating from sacred hearts. A majestic Virgin, crowned and standing with angels, reigns over the entire space. This is the vision of holiness that appeared to St. Catherine in 1830, when she was a young, inexperienced nun just letting go of her place in the world outside the convent. The exhumed and mysteriously preserved body of St. Catherine sits to the left of the altar, and a quieter, more contemplative Madonna flanks on the right. This Virgin is a youthful, innocent woman, standing on the moon, a serpent at her feet, holding another orb, presumably the earth, in her hands. The image, though made overtly Christian with a cross stuck in the “earth”, also brings to mind many goddess images I have seen, from many traditions, over many spans of human history. And so I began to think more broadly about the very specific Virgin Mary inculcated in my mind as a child:

She is the Mother of All; moon, earth, heavens. The goddess divine both present in the world, and holding the world in her hands. She stands tall, confident, infallible. A snake appears at her feet, in this case meaning to symbolize the Christian female reclaiming Paradise from Eve’s error, a mark of triumph as her foot holds down the serpent and all its evil connotations in Christianity. But serpents have long accompanied images of goddesses as a symbol of wisdom and regeneration. Serpents were once known instantly as powerful symbols of knowledge.

Minoan Snake Goddess from Palace of Knossos, Greece, c. 1600 b.c.

Lid of Egyptian sarcophagus, the Louvre

Sekhmet

Athena

Buddhist Goddess

The Goddess is often depicted as a triple deity: Hera was associated with the three ages of woman; the virgin, the mother, and the old wise hag. (It’s worth noting here that the dictionary refers to “hag” as a witch or ugly old woman. The word “hagia” means holy; as in Hagia Sophia [Holy Wisdom] and Hagia Irene [Holy Peace].) Other goddesses with three aspects or forms: Hecate, the Celtic Brigid… and the three Mary’s present in the gospel stories: Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus; Mary Magdalene, the apostle; and Mary, mother of Jesus.

Hecate

Brigid

Regardless of religious context, certain iconography seems to persist in our “collective unconscious” or social psyche. We continually seek to honor the Mystery of womanhood, the Mother, the earth, the moon and its cycles, the cycles of birth and death, and the Wisdom inherent in these. Whether we call Her the Virgin Mother, Devi, Manjushri, Isis, Shari, Athena, Hecate, Sekhmet, or Sofia; She persists in our hearts and minds.

Tanazanian mother at a clinic

[Note: Titles denote image above.]