All posts by amclaughlin2014

Member of Community of Grey Sisters of Pembroke; Masters Degree in Religious Communication, Loyola University, Chicago; Author: Called to Egypt on the Back of the Wind (2013) Planted in the Sky (2006) both published by Borealis Press, Ottawa Canada www.borealispress.com Retreat facilitator: The Wooing of the Soul (2013) The Sophia Salons, beginning in February 2016, offer journeys to one's own inner wisdom for small groups of women. For information: amclaughlin@sympatico.ca
Uncategorized

The Sacred Marriage

1 Comment

My Beloved lifts up his voice,

he says to me,

“Come then, my love,

My lovely one come.

For see, winter is past,

The rains are over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth.”

(The Song of Songs 2:10-12, Jerusalem Bible)

On the theme of the Sacred Marriage, Anne Baring writes: Four thousand years ago in the courtyards of the great temples on the banks of the Nile the Sacred Marriage of goddess and god was celebrated. The theme of the Sacred Marriage has come down to us in myth, in fairy tales like Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty, and in the Biblical Song of Songs. Alchemy sets the supreme quest for the treasure in the context of a marriage between the lunar and solar aspects of the soul, the fiery gold of the masculine element and the volatile silver of the feminine one, a union between our mind and our soul, our head and our heart, between the solar King and the lunar Queen. This marriage also united the invisible dimension of the subtle world of spirit and the material world of our experience, rendering the latter transparent to spirit. The Sacred Marriage is the age-old image of this mysterious double union. (The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul, 2013, 470-472)

Anne Baring tells of the alchemists’ understanding of how this inner marriage would take place: … in order for consciousness to be transformed from base metal into gold, both king and queen have to undergo a process of dissolution and transformation… resulting in the birth of the child of the new consciousness.

To awaken the consciousness personified by the king to the values associated with the wisdom of the soul, he has to undergo a symbolic death, vividly described by the shamanic initiation. He makes a descent into the watery realm of the soul, the realm of the emotions, feelings, instincts, that has never been associated with anything of value and has been both feared and despised and has consequently remained largely dissociated from consciousness…(and) largely undeveloped.

The queen as the personification of the soul is also transformed as the king enters into a conscious relationship with her. She is no longer forced to remain in a dissociated state. She is no longer in thrall to the deficient values and limited perception represented by the Old King; nor is she any longer bound by the powerful unconscious drives of blind instinct to which he also was bound. The values of the heart begin to be heard and strengthened. Feeling begins to function in a more conscious related way as both king and queen are transformed.

Anne Baring notes that in our time this process as described by the alchemists is necessary for both man and woman: … woman has been educated in the same way as man, has absorbed the same values and has been imprinted with the same ideas and may give the highest value to the masculine principle and the rational mind, knowing nothing of the deeper dimension of the soul and the invisible dimension of reality.

There is another kind of Sacred Marriage associated with the king and the land. In her program on Celtic Shamanism, (Shift Network, 2019), Jane Burns speaks of the ancient custom in Ireland: When the rightful king was sworn in, he was said to marry the land, because it was to the earth goddess, the goddess Sovereignty, he was to pay homage, make personal sacrifices and give allegiance. Here we return to this notion of the marriage of the masculine, the king, and the feminine, the goddess, as a necessity if prosperity is to reign. This is a marriage of equals. That marriage… must exist within us if we are to be sovereign and prosperous.

Referring to the teachings of esoteric astrologer William Meade, Jane said: If we are going to achieve mastery of our soul, we all have to bring into balance within us the divine masculine and divine energies and potential that are resident there….Each strength, the masculine and feminine, has its own contribution to the soul’s pathway to mastery. Each has their own wisdom. What (William Meade) says is that the divine feminine knows what to do and the divine masculine knows how to do it. It’s a very necessary marriage. The divine feminine holds the potential. She creates the design, conceives the design, nurtures it. She knows what the purpose is. The divine masculine executes the design or brings it into manifestation. It’s the same agreement as the relationship between the goddess Sovereignty and the king who serves her. The feminine…what are its attributes? It observes. It receives. It nurtures. It embodies. It grows and flourishes. Through that experience comes the wisdom of what to do. The masculine acts. It changes the circumstance. It fixes things, it executes things, it puts things into play because it has this greater connection to the world. That affords it the opportunity to know how to do it.

The Spring Equinox invites us to reflect on our inner marriage, the union of our feminine and masculine qualities needed for wholeness. At this season when darkness and light, night and day are in balance, how might we come to a healthier, more joyous balance between our inner feminine and masculine? Might we consider creating for ourselves a ritual of “Inner Marriage” with music, poetry, flowers, dance?

Anne Baring, Sacred Feminine

Entering the Rose Garden: Four

1 Comment

Reflection for March 9, 2023

Where might we who yearn to find the lost Divine Feminine seek for her? Anne Baring concluded her presentation on the Shekinah with directions for our quest.

Mary, Untier of Knots

Her first suggestion will be familiar to us: The Biblical Books of Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom. These we have encountered in our earlier exploration of Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s writings in The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom Literature.  From this rich source, Anne Baring cites these examples:

In the Book of Proverbs (8: 23-31), Wisdom tells us she is the Beloved of God, with Him from the beginning, before the foundation of the world. She speaks from the deep ground of life as the hidden law which orders it and as the Craftswoman of creation. In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo has painted her tucked into the crook of God’s arm. With their vivid imagery, these passages transform the idea of the Holy Spirit, speaking as Divine Wisdom, from abstract idea into living presence.

In the Book of Wisdom…Wisdom is described as sitting by the throne of the Lord in heaven (9:10) and is spoken of as the Holy Spirit (9:17).

Elsewhere, Wisdom speaks as though, like the Shekinah, she were here, in this dimension, dwelling with us in the midst of her kingdom, accessible to those who seek her out. She is unknown and unrecognized, yet working within the depths of life, striving to open our understanding to the divine reality of her presence, the sacredness of her creation, her justice, wisdom, love and truth. In the Book of Ben Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) Wisdom, perhaps recalling the time when she was honoured and worshipped in the First Temple, proclaims herself to be the soul and intelligence of the cosmos, rooted in tree, vine, earth and water and active in the habitations of humanity. She is the principle of justice that inspires human laws. She appeals to all those who are desirous of her to fill themselves with her fruits, “For my memorial is sweeter than honey, and mine inheritance than the honeycomb.” (24:20)

Anne Baring calls this “the language of the immanence of the Divine Feminine in the world”.  Anne continues: “To those who, like Solomon, prized her more highly than rubies, Wisdom was their wise and luminous guide.”

I prayed and understanding was given me: I called upon God, and the Spirit of Wisdom came to me…I loved her above health and beauty, and chose to have her instead of light, for the light that cometh from her never goeth out…For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty… She is the brightness of the everlasting Light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of His goodness … She is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of stars: being compared with the Light, she is found before it… I loved her, and sought her out from my youth. I desired to make her my spouse, and I was a lover of her beauty. (Wisdom of Solomon 7: 7,10, 25, 26, 29, 8:2).        

Anne Baring’s treasure map leads to another source where knowledge of the Shekinah may be found:

During the last fifty years or so, it has become increasingly clear that there was a great underground stream of human experience which flowed from the thriving city of Alexandria into several different channels—into the writings of the early Christian Gnostics discovered at Nag Hammadi, into the Hermetic Tradition and the later Alchemists, and the transmitters, both Jewish and Christian, of the ancient cosmology of Kabbalism. Hellenistic Egypt in the second and third centuries AD was the ultimate source of all these traditions yet we now know that the roots lie deeper, in the temple teachings of a far older time, whether in Palestine or Egypt. Alexandria was a Greek city, the meeting place of East and West – a vibrant crucible for the exchange of ideas and teachings between Egyptians, Greeks, Syrians and Jews, and also sages from far-away Persia and India….In Alexandria Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit was called Sophia –the Greek word for Wisdom – a name which descended to the time when the emperor Justinian built the great Christian Basilica in Constantinople called Hagia Sophia.  

The Gnostics were a group of early Christians, some descended from the Jews who fled Jerusalem in 70 AD following the destruction of the temple by the Romans. They claimed to have the secret teaching of Jesus, given by him to his closest disciples, including James and Mary Magdalene. There were many Gospels circulated among them in addition to the four we now know. One of these: “The Gospel of the Beloved Companion” attributed to Mary Magdalene, found its way to France from Alexandria in the First Century. This book has recently been translated from the Greek by Jehanne de Quillan.

Anne Baring quotes from Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels) on the fate of these other Gospels by the close of the second century AD: Every one of the secret texts which gnostic groups revered was omitted from the canonical collection, and branded as heretical by those who called themselves orthodox. By the time the process of sorting the various writings ended…virtually all the feminine imagery for God had disappeared from the orthodox Christian tradition.

As Anne Baring tells us, until 1977 with the publication of the texts discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, “no one knew that some groups of early Christians had an image of the Divine Mother whom they had named ‘The Invisible within the All.’”  

In the Christian era, the “further and final loss of the Divine Feminine” was brought about. In AD 325, the Church Council of Nicaea associated Wisdom with Christ as the Logos, the Divine Word. 

From this time the Christian image of the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit became wholly identified with the masculine archetype.  The ancient connection between the Holy Spirit and the Divine Feminine was irrevocably and, for western civilization, tragically lost. The monotheism of the three Patriarchal religions has led to the situation today where the Earth is no longer viewed as sacred and we are confronted with the catastrophic effects of the loss of the Divine Feminine.      

     Anne Baring offers this question for our Reflection:

“What difference would there be in your life if the Shekinah-Sophia was a living presence for you?”

Anne Baring, Shekhinah

Entering the Rose Garden Part Three

Leave a comment

March 3, 2023

Whatever their ways,

they are all in love with you,

Each comes, by a path, to the Rose Garden

Niyazi Misri

(This is the third Reflection based on the opening talk Anne Baring gave to Ubiquity University’s online course: “Madonna Rising” in August 2020. I am grateful to Anne Baring for making her lecture notes available to participants. Direct quotes are designated by quotation marks, or for longer sections, by the use of italics.)

The Feminine Face of the God-Head

In the mystical tradition of Judaism, the Shekinah or feminine face of the god-head is named as Cosmic Womb, Palace, Enclosure, Fountain, Apple Orchard and Mystical Garden of Eden. She is named as the architect of worlds, source or foundation of our world, also as the Radiance, Word or Glory of the unknowable ground or godhead. Text after text uses sexual imagery and the imagery of light to describe how the ray which emanates from the unknowable ground enters into the womb—the Great Sea of Light—of the Celestial Mother and how she brings forth the male and female creative energies which, as two branches of the Tree of Life, are symbolically King and Queen, Son and Daughter. A third branch of the Tree descends directly down the centre, unifying and connecting the energies on either side….The Heart centre of these three branches or pillars…is called Tiphareth.

Spiral Galaxy : Birthing Womb of the Universe

As “the indwelling and active Holy Spirit”, the Shekinah is both “divine guide and immanent presence”. She it is who frees us from beliefs that separate us from our source, restoring the world to “union with the divine ground.” By bringing into being all that is ensouled by the divine source, “she generates the manifest world we know”, remaining here until “the whole creation is enfolded once again into its source.”

Kabbalism sees “the divine Mother-Father image…expressed as the male and female of all species”.

Humanity, female and male, is therefore the expression of the duality-in-unity of the god-head. The Shekinah is forever united with her beloved Spouse in the divine ground or heart of being and it is their union in the god-head that holds life in a constant state of coming into being. Yet she is also present—here with us—in the material reality of our world. The sexual attraction between man and woman and the expression of true love between them is the enactment or reflection at this level of creation of the divine embrace at its heart that is enshrined in the cherished words of the Song of Songs: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”(6:3)  Human sexual relationship, enacted with love, mutual respect and joy, is a sacred ritual that is believed to maintain the ecstatic union of the divine pair.

Sacred Marriage: image by Meinrad Craighead

Dwelling as divine presence in all that is, the Shekinah assures that “nothing is outside spirit.”

In the radiance of that invisible cosmic Sea of Light, everything is connected to everything else as through a luminous circulatory system. Moreover, the Shekinah is deeply devoted to what she has brought into being, as a mother is devoted to the well-being of her child. All life on earth, all levels and degrees of consciousness, all forms of what we  see and name as “matter” are the creation of the primal fountain of Light, and are therefore an expression of divinity.

The colours associated with the Shekinah are blue and gold. She is the ground of the human soul, its “light body”, its “outer garment, the physical body, and its animating spirit or consciousness.” The Shekinah is “the holy presence of the ‘glory of God’ within everyone.”

We, all of us, moving from unconsciousness and ignorance of this radiant ground to awareness of and relationship with it, live in her being and grow under her power of attraction until we are reunited with the source, discovering ourselves to be what in essence we always were but did not know ourselves to be—sons and daughters of God, living expressions of divine spirit.

Like Isis, widowed, mourning, searching for her beloved Osiris, the Shekinah wears a black robe. This signifies “the darkness of the mystery which hides the glory of her Light.” This imagery “was carried forward to the Black Madonna.”

The imagery of Kabbalism may also be discerned in fairy tales. The forgotten image of the Divine Feminine, the veiled Shekinah appears as the Fairy God-mother who “presides over her daughter’s transformation from soot-blackened drudge to royal bride”.

Might Cinderella represent, as Harold Bayley suggests in The Lost Language of Symbolism, “the human soul as it moves from ’rags to riches’.”

Cinderella’s three splendid dresses, which could be equated with the “robe of glory” of certain kabbalist and gnostic texts, represent the soul’s luminous sheaths or subtle bodies, as dazzling as the light of moon, sun and stars.

Just as the soot-blackened girl in the fairy tale puts on her three glorious dresses to reveal herself as she truly is, so does the human soul don these “robes of glory” as she moves from the darkness of ignorance into the revelation of her true nature and parentage.

Anne Baring

Entering the Rose Garden: Two

1 Comment

Sophia Posting for February 25, 2023

Whatever their ways,

they are all in love with you,

Each comes, by a path, to the Rose Garden

Niyazi Misri

 Anne Baring finds in the richness of Kabbalistic teachings and traditions traces of the luminous period of the First Temple in Israel. Thanks to her generosity in making her lecture notes available to those who participated in Ubiquity University’s online program “Madonna Rises”, I have Anne Baring’s own words to rely on. Short quotes are in quotation marks, longer ones designated by the use of italics. 

Last week, we reflected on The Tree of Life as an image of the soul of the cosmos. “Every aspect of creation, both visible and invisible, is interconnected and interwoven with every other aspect.” In the Tree of Life there exists “one cosmic symphony”.

The Tree of Life is no hierarchical descent from invisible to visible. Rather it is “an image of worlds nesting within worlds, dimensions within dimensions emanating…from within outwards…the tapestry of relationships which connect invisible spirit with the visible fabric of this world…. At the innermost level is the unknowable source or god-head, at the outermost the physical forms of matter.”

And who or where are we in this “one unified web of life: one energy, one spirit, one single cosmic entity”?   

Anne Baring responds: “According to this Tradition, we are, each one of us, that life, that energy, that spirit.”

There is something still more wonderful: an intermediary between “the unknowable source” and “the physical forms of matter”: the Shekinah:

The Shekinah is the image of the Divine Feminine or the Feminine Face of God as it was conceived in this mystical tradition of Judaism. In the image and cosmology of the Shekinah, we encounter the most complete description of Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit as the indissoluble relationship between the two primary aspects of the god-head that have been lost or hidden for centuries.

The Shekinah- the feminine co-creator- is the Voice or Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Glory of God, the Compassion of God, the Active Presence of God: intermediary between the mystery of the unknowable source or ground and this world of its ultimate manifestation.

The concept of the Shekinah as Divine Wisdom and Holy Spirit ….transmutes all creation, including the apparent insignificance and ordinariness of everyday life, into something to be loved, embraced, honoured and celebrated because it is the epiphany or shining forth of the divine intelligence and love that has brought it into being and dwells hidden within it.

The elimination of the image of the Great Mother took away from us the concept that “the whole of nature was ensouled with spirit and therefore sacred”. People living through the millennia of Patriarchal religions lost “their age-old sense of participation in a Sacred Order.”

The Shekinah, named as Divine Wisdom and Holy Spirit- divinity present and active in the world- supplies the missing imagery of divine immanence which is absent from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And this mystical tradition brings together heaven and earth, the divine and the human, in a coherent and seamless vision of their essential relationship.

How would the recovery of the Shekinah as the feminine aspect of the god-head, as Mother, Beloved, Sister and Bride transform our image of God? of Nature? of ourselves?

Anne Baring states that “the Shekinah gives woman what she has lacked throughout the last two thousand years in western civilization—a sacred image of the Divine Feminine that is reflected at the human level in herself.”

Yet prior to this in the ancient world Wisdom was always associated with the image of a Goddess: Inanna in Sumeria, Isis and Ma’at in Egypt, Athena in Greece… Anne Baring celebrates the recovery of these ancient images with the even greater richness of the Shekinah’s role in the web of Life:

The Bronze Age imagery of the Great Goddesses returns to life in the extraordinary beauty and power of the descriptions of the Shekinah, and in the gender endings of nouns which describe the feminine dimension of the divine. But the Divine Feminine is now defined as a limitless connecting web of life, as the invisible Soul of the Cosmos, as the intermediary between the unknowable god-head and life in this dimension. The Shekinah brings together heaven and earth, the invisible and visible dimensions of reality in a resplendent vision of their essential relationship and union.

Another aspect of this tradition preserves the image from the Bronze Age of the Sacred Marriage. Rather than a Father God there is a Mother-Father who are “one in their eternal embrace, one in their ground, one in their emanation, one in their ecstatic and continual act of creation through all the dimensions they bring into being and sustain.”

Ann Baring comments:

From the perspective of divine immanence, there is no essential separation between spirit and nature or spirit and matter.  

In a burst of poetic praise, Anne Baring adds:

No other cosmology offers the same breath-taking vision in such exquisite poetic imagery of the union of male and female energies in the One that is both.

Not surprisingly, the kabbalists, in contemplating the mystery of this divine union, turned for inspiration to “The Song of Songs”.

Uncategorized

Returning to the Rose Garden

1 Comment

In these times of unprecedented crises across our planet, we need the Wisdom, Support and Guidance of the Sacred Feminine, I shall repost here a series of writings based on “Madonna Rising” a program offered on ZOOM in 2020 by Ubiquity University, Anne Kathleen

Statue of Our Lady of Combermere Madonna House, Ontario

Sophia Blog for February 16, 2023

Entering the Rose Garden

Whatever their ways,

they are all in love with you,

Each comes, by a path, to the Rose Garden

Niyazi Misri

For seven days in mid-August, 2020, I spent time in an ancient Rose Garden, an imaginal space engineered by ZOOM, offered by Ubiquity University. The garden was peopled by scholars, archaeologists of the soul, dancers, storytellers, musicians, poets and mystics. Their great task is recovering, and offering to those who hunger for it, the knowledge and awareness of the Divine Feminine.

When COVID made Ubiquity’s fourteen-year tradition of a summer program in the Chartres Cathedral of France impossible, Madonna Rising took its place. More than one hundred participants joined in from countries across the planet. The central image for the program was the Mystical Rose, a title honouring the Sacred Feminine in ancient cultures, such as Egypt and Sumeria. Later, that title was given to Mary, Mother of Jesus.  

On Day One we were greeted by Banafsheh Sayyad from her home in Southern California. Over the following days, Banafsheh would lead us in sacred dance, inviting us to open our lives to the Divine Feminine Presence. Banafsheh introduced the theme of Madonna Rising by offering a Prophecy from the Cherokee Nation:

The bird of humanity has two great wings – a masculine wing and a feminine wing. The masculine wing has been fully extended for centuries, fully expressed, while the feminine wing in all of us has been truncated, not yet fully expressed – half extended. 
So the masculine wing in all of us has become over-muscular and over-developed and in fact violent. The bird of humanity has been flying in circles for hundreds and hundreds of years, held up only fully by the masculine wing…

In the 21st century, however, something remarkable will happen. The feminine wing in all of us will fully extend and find its way to express and the masculine wing will relax in all of us and the bird of humanity will soar.

From her desk, Banafsheh lifted a rose. It appeared to move off- screen to be received by Anne Baring, seated in her home in England. In the first of her trilogy of presentations, Anne would begin to tell the tale of how the bird of humanity lost the power of gracious flight in its feminine wing.

Author of Dream of the Cosmos (Archive Publishing, Dorset, England, 2013) as well as The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, (1992) Anne delves for light in history, following paths not yet made, seeking the story that came before the story in pursuit of clarity about so much that has been lost to us.

Was there a story that preceded the 6th c. BCE Creation Story in the Book of Genesis of the Hebrew Bible? And if so, how was it lost? Here is what Anne’s research found:

I loved her more than health or beauty,

preferred her to the light,

since her radiance never sleeps.

(The Book of Wisdom, 7:10 Jerusalem Bible)

 Solomon, to whom the Book of Wisdom is ascribed, built the First Temple in Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE. In the time of the First Temple, Israel had an ancient, shamanic, visionary tradition. Divine Wisdom was worshipped in this First Temple as the Goddess Asherah, the consort of Yahweh and the co-creator of the world with him. In this tradition the Tree of life was associated with Wisdom, Queen of Heaven.

Anne then told us how all this changed:

In 621 BC, in the reign of King Josiah, a powerful group of priests called Deuteronomists took control of the Temple….  The Deuteronomists had the statue of the Goddess Asherah and the great Serpent, image of her power to regenerate life, removed from the Temple and destroyed. Her Sacred Groves were cut down. All images of her were broken. The ancient shamanic rituals of the High Priest which had honoured and communed with the Queen of Heaven as Divine Wisdom and Holy Spirit were banished and replaced by new rituals based on obedience to Yahweh’s Law. The vital communion with the inner dimensions of reality was lost; the making of images was forbidden.

As I listened to this, I felt something inside me twist in pain. More even than the destruction of her images, the cutting down of the trees sacred to the Goddess wrenched my heart.

Anne spoke of the long-lasting effects of this rupture:

This is the crucially important time when I think it is possible to say that the whole foundation of Jewish and later Christian civilization became unbalanced. The Deuteronomists ensured that Yahweh was the sole Creator God. The Feminine co-creator, the Goddess Asherah, was eliminated. The Divine Feminine aspect of the god-head was banished from Orthodox Judaism. The Deuteronomists went further: they demoted the Queen of Heaven – Mother of All Living – into the human figure of Eve, bestowing this title upon her. They created the Myth of the Fall in the Book of Genesis (2 & 3), with its message of sin, guilt and banishment from the Garden of Eden, severing the Tree of Life from its ancient association with the Queen of Heaven.

Anne Baring suggests that the “heritage seeds’’ of the First Temple’s teaching were somehow preserved in the Jewish traditions of Kabbalism:

It seems highly significant that one of the most important images of Kabbalism is the Tree of Life, which is a clear and wonderful concept describing the web of relationships which connect invisible spirit with the fabric of life in this world. At the innermost level or dimension of reality is the unmanifest, unknowable Divine Ground; at the outermost the physical forms we call nature, body and matter.  Linking the two is the archetypal template of the Tree of Life— an inverted tree— whose branches grow from its roots in the divine ground and extend through many invisible worlds or dimensions until they reach this one.

Anne describes this cosmology as one where

Every aspect of creation, both visible and invisible, is interconnected and interwoven with every other aspect. All is one life, one cosmic symphony, one integrated whole. We participate, at this material level of creation, in the divine life which informs all these myriad levels of reality. Our human lives are therefore inseparable from the inner life of the Cosmos.

The Kabbalistic tradition is “vitally important” Anne says, because it celebrates…the indissoluble relationship and union between the feminine and masculine aspects of the god-head—a sacred union which the three Patriarchal religions have ignored or deliberately rejected.

I will end this excerpt from Anne Baring’s first talk with a statement she makes that is both stark and striking in its clarity:

If we want to understand the deep roots of our present environmental and spiritual crisis, we can find them in the loss of three important elements: the feminine image of spirit, the direct shamanic path of communion with spirit through visionary and shamanic experience, and the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine aspect of the God-head and the Divine Ground. Each of these was an intrinsic aspect of the lost traditions and practices of the First Temple.

(to be continued)  

Jean Houston

A Visit to Sophia

Leave a comment

January covers my deck with layers of snow, tripling the height of table, chairs, barbecue. Thick icicles descend over my windows, threatening like the sword of Damocles to plunge into any creature who dares to walk underneath. The colour scheme is drab, lifeless. Grey skies hover over white snow-covered lake and earth.

And yet, on rare January mornings I waken early, drawn to my window overlooking Lake Calabogie. The palette of dawn allures me, stills me. I sit to watch as colours deepen, soften, a living dancing painting in the sky….

One morning I stay while the earth plunges eastwards until the sun appears between snow-covered trees, startling in its star-shaped magnificence.

 January’s treacherous beauty begins a new calendar year, inviting us to look at our lives with fresh eyes, to focus our energies, dust off our dreams, perhaps to choose new pathways for our days on this beloved planet. To assist with this discernment, I offer you a meditation by Jean Houston from her book, Godseed.

You may wish to record this on your phone so you may listen to your own voice as you make this “Visit to Sophia.”

After a long spiralling journey upwards, you find yourself at the very top of a high mountain. You go inside the mountain to a path that travels downward in a spiral. Moving along the path down and around within the inner mountain spiral, you pass scenes of your own life, from your earliest infancy. You see or sense yourself being born. Continuing on the path down and around, to your earliest childhood, you see yourself taking your first steps, forming words, reaching out and grasping things, learning to feed yourself. Further down you see yourself learning to tie your own shoes and attending your first days at school. Continuing down, you see yourself learning games and reaching out to other children. As you continue, you see yourself growing up fast and learning many things. You see your adolescence. Further along you observe stages of your life until today………..

Suddenly you find yourself at the very bottom of the inside of the mountain. There you discover a door of baked mud. Going through it, you find that it leads to a hallway and to a door of water. You pass through the door of water, and it leads to a door of fire. You pass through the door of fire, and it leads to a door of winds. You lean against the winds and pass through. This door leads to a door of bronze, and you pass through. This door leads to a door of silver. You pass through the door of silver and find a door of gold.

At the door of gold there is a shining figure who says to you: “Through this door is the Sophia. Through this door is the Wise One herself, the incarnation of Wisdom. When you pass through this door, you will be in the presence of the Sophia. There you must ask your question. You may see her or you may sense her. But know that she is there. She who is Wisdom itself. When you are in her ambience, whether you see her or hear her or sense her or feel her, ask your question. Her answers may come in words or in images or even in feelings.”

You now have four minutes of clock time, equal to all the time you need, to be in the presence of the Sophia and ask your question and receive her answers.

   Thanking the Sophia for her wisdom and kindness, and knowing that you can always return to visit her again, begin now to go back through the door of gold, the door of silver, the door of bronze, beyond the doors of winds, of fire, of water, of earth, beyond the spiral of the stages of your own life, reaching the top of the mountain. Now take the spiral path back down from the mountain.

Find yourself here in this moment. Open your eyes, sit up and stretch, and if you wish, write your experiences in a journal.

Epiphany

Epiphany for Sophia

4 Comments

“A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter. “

(T.S. Eliot “The Journey of the Magi”)

“Home by Another Way” artwork by Jan Richardson

The Christmas Story holds an allurement for the human heart that never seems to fade. It is deceptively simple in its plot and characters: a young couple, exhausted, make a long journey by decree of a far-off Emperor. Unable to find lodgings in an inn, they take shelter in a stable, warmed by the breath of animals. And there the young woman gives birth to a son. They are visited by shepherds who have been minding their flocks in the fields nearby. Suddenly the story takes on mystery: these shepherds tell a tale of wonder: angels have appeared in the fields singing to them of the child’s birth, urging them to go to find him….

And then, sometime afterwards, a trio of guests arrives. These are men of royal bearing from the Far East, and they tell a stranger tale: “We have seen his star in the East and have come to pay him homage.” Opening their bundles, they lay gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh before the Child. The story adds this line: “As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19)

As with so many ancient powerful tales, the truth of this story is within, and our hearts recognize its truth without having to seek proof of external elements. Great myths, like the dreams that sometimes appear in our sleep, carry treasures that we can unpack for ourselves, as we ponder them in our hearts. To do this, we must enter into the tale, find ourselves within the story, experience it as though it were happening now, and we are part of the tale.

In “The Journey of the Magi”, the poet T.S. Eliot offers us an intimate look within the hearts of these three mythical Eastern Kings, describing their journey in “(t)he very dead of winter.”

Where might we find ourselves today within their part of the Christmas Story? For those of us now in the icy grip of a North American winter, the weather is familiar, as are the hazards of travel at “the worst time of the year.” If our December journeys were made to celebrate the Feast of Christmas with family and friends, we might say even our purpose is aligned with theirs….

Let’s go deeper. Before the Feast of Epiphany, I happened to wake in the deep heart of the night. Some sound drew me to my window. Looking out, I saw a starlit sky shimmering with such brilliance in the absence of moonlight or city glare that my breath stopped in pure wonder. Though I could recognize Orion’s belt and the Big Dipper, the uncountable number of bright stars made me ask HOW those ancient travellers identified the one they were meant to follow….

Now that question has become my own question: the one so many of us are asking at this crucial time in our planet’s history when there are so many paths opening, so many possible routes…

Somewhere in the Universe my question was heard. Since then, stars have been separating out from the overall pattern, placing themselves in my path. By chance, I came across these words of Joseph Campbell:

If you are going to act on the basis of what you know, you cannot just hold onto your knowledge. You have to translate it into a movement.

That same evening, on CBC radio, I heard an interview with a researcher and teacher of English Literature at an Independent University in Barcelona. She has just received a two million euro grant to study forgotten writings of women from past centuries. Asked about emerging themes, she said the writings “demonstrate a very keen understanding and search for spiritual meaning in life”: Why are we here? What is our relationship to divinity? The women writers were convinced of the connection between their life and spirituality. “They have an understanding of spirituality which is very intimate.”

Joseph Campbell’s words stayed with me sparking ideas, raising questions: “What is the knowing I act on?” The answer came that we each carry within us a guiding star, as does all that exists in the Universe (guided, as Dante says, by the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars). Our task is to learn to recognize and follow this inner star. This requires time, intention, deep listening and grace. I knew with greater clarity that this is the purpose of my work: assisting people to find and follow that inner star within them.

For my own journey, guidance has come through a deepened relationship with a Sacred Presence, a true co-creative partner in all that I do. This mysterious Friend is an aspect of the Sacred Feminine, the Sophia Presence of the Hebrew Scriptures. In dialogue with her, I have been shown the pathways to choose. This story is still unfolding for me, and it is my deep desire to invite others to find their own Star within and to follow it into joy and wisdom.

We must follow it with courage as well for Eliot’s poem has a less-often quoted ending:

“The Wise Ones” artwork by Jan Richardson

But set down This set down

This: were we lead all that way for Birth or Death?

There was Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt.

I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different: this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people, clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Yes, we must be prepared for radical change on our journey, for loss of comfort “in the old dispensation”. From the glimpse I have had so far of the journey to new life, I promise you it is worth the cost

Kate Fitzpatrick

Winter Solstice 2022

2 Comments

Winter Solstice Dawn over Lake Calabogie 2020

This hope-filled reflection for Winter Solstice 2022, written by Kate Fitzpatrick of County Kerry, Ireland, is shared with us here through her gracious permission.

There are few words to say

At this Solstice time.

A deep silence pervades.

The Journey through Samhain is almost complete,

As the December days brighten

And we await the Sun’s stillness before it turns.

Go outwards to the Land.

Soul aligned with the new energy

In the brightening sun.

Pure white now.

There is a beautiful joy awakening in the Earth

She is radiating love out to us.

Go and meet that energy,

Rose pink at dawn and dusk 

Pure crystalline light.

Can you hear the singing of Mother Earth?

The uplift in her colours?

Everything is coming into a new harmony

Go outside and listen for this song.

And sing with it,

Celebrate.

For the land is free,

Aligned and ready to uplift.

Go out and speak with the Earth

For this time the changeover to New Earth is forever.

( Kate Fitzpatrick & Mythic Voice – December 2022)

Uncategorized

Awaiting New Birth

2 Comments

Pillars of Creation : image from Webb Telescope

“It is the demand of the universe for the birth of the ultra-human. It is the rising of a new form of psychic energy in which the very depth of love within you is combined with what is most essential in the flowing of the cosmic stream. It is Love.” Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955)

When there is a new beginning in a story older than time, everything that follows is seen in a new light. As we look with awe and amazement at the photos being sent back to Earth from the Webb Telescope, we’re being given a fresh vision of the beginnings of our Universe.

Now we may understand words, premonitions, foreshadowings, intuitions, offered by the mystics and poets of the ages.

We might find ourselves saying, “Oh, so that’s what was meant….”

Paul wrote in his first century Letter to the Romans: “From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth…” (8:22)  

Meister Eckhart, medieval mystic, wrote: “What does God do all day long? God lies on a maternity bed, giving birth all day long.”

Reflecting on the words of Meister Eckhart, Diarmuid O’Murchu writes:

“The infancy narratives… need to be approached afresh….as an archetypal statement of the God of prodigious birthing….we  are called to become co-birthers with our birthing God of the ongoing evolutionary re-creation of God’s world in justice, love, compassion and liberation. Incarnation becomes an empowering and liberating dynamic, and Christians, instead of fleeing the world, are now challenged to embrace it in its full embodied existence.” (Jesus in the Power of Poetry,  2009)

As we look to the approaching Feast of Christmas, as we prepare to celebrate the Birth of the Christ, what if we were to celebrate as well the Birth of our Universe, rejoicing in the Love that gave birth and continues to give birth to everything?

And what if we finally understood that we too are called to give birth?  

If we, both women and men, accept this invitation to be co-birthers with God,  one shining figure arises to show us the way forward: Mary of Nazareth, the woman called to give birth to the Christ.

In his poems on “the Joyful Mysteries,” John O’Donohue invites us into the heart of Mary as she receives and lives her calling. In these poems we glimpse the wonder, the magnificence, of our own calling to give birth. We are offered hints about how to ready our hearts for what awaits us… 

1. Annunciation

Cast from afar before the stones were born

And rain had rinsed the darkness for colour,

The words have waited for the hunger in her

To become the silence where they could form.                                                                                 

The day’s last light frames her by the window,

A young woman with distance in her gaze,

She could never imagine the surprise

That is hovering over her life now.

The sentence awakens like a raven,

Fluttering and dark, opening her heart

To nest the voice that first whispered the earth

From dream into wind, stone, sky and ocean.

She offers to mother the shadow’s child;

Her untouched life becoming wild inside.

                                                                                                                                                                  2. Visitation

In the morning it takes the mind a while

To find the world again, lost after dream

Has taken the heart to the underworld

To play with the shades of lives not chosen.

She awakens a stranger in her own life,

Her breath loud in the room full of listening.

Taken without touch, her flesh feels the grief

Of belonging to what cannot be seen.

Soon she can no longer bear to be alone.

At dusk she takes the road into the hills.

An anxious moon doubles her among the stone,

A door opens, the older one’s eyes fill.

Two women locked in a story of birth.

Each mirrors the secret the other heard.

3. The Nativity

No man reaches where the moon touches a woman.

Even the moon leaves her when she opens

Deeper into the ripple in her womb

That encircles dark to become flesh and bone.

Someone is coming ashore inside her.

A face deciphers itself from water

And she curves around the gathering wave,

Opening to offer the life it craves.

In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers,

She falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.

A red wire of pain feeds though every vein

Until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.

Outside each other now, she sees him first.

Flesh of her flesh, her dreamt son safe on earth.

(John O’Donohue in Connemara Blues)

May we live the wonder of this season as we await our time of birthing.

Sylvia Senensky, Thomas Berry

Living the Season of the Dark Goddess

3 Comments

Image: Sekhmet, Lion Headed Goddess of Ancient Egypt

In this season of barrenness, darkness, emptiness, we trust the Wisdom of the Dark Feminine.

Through her loving presence, through the truest, deepest desires of our hearts, we shall be led into newness and rebirth.

The Three-Day Festival of Samhain has ended. We are immersed in the Womb of the Sacred Feminine where deep soul work awaits us.

Sylvia Shaindel Senensky writes of our calling in these words:

“We have come to a time when we can no longer remain silent.  We are being called upon by the sorrowing and powerful Dark Feminine to know our own darkness and the profound richness of all dark places, even when they are laden with pain.  Through her we know the mystery of existence and the sacredness of the cycles of life.  We learn how important the destruction of the old ways is to the rebirth of the new.  When she steps into our lives and awakens us, we can be shattered to our core, and we know, as we see the tears streaming down her face, that she too is holding us in her compassionate and loving embrace.

“We need to know her as the source of life in the material realm, and to know her sorrow at how we have so unconsciously set out to destroy her…our Mother Earth.  She is calling upon us, each in our way to do our inner work, to become her allies, to become the best human beings we know how to be; to allow our creativity, our compassion and our love to flow to ourselves and to all life forms on this planet.  This is the lesson of the Feminine we all need to remember.  We need to honour our earth and all creatures, human and other, that she supports.  We need to nourish ourselves, each other, all children, and the unbelievable creative potential within each human being….As we come to a place of love and compassion for ourselves, our struggles, and our own vulnerable humanity, we will at the same time begin to kindle a similar compassion for others.  Love attracts love.  If we flood our planet with loving and transformative energy, our actions will begin to mirror our feelings.  We will come home to ourselves.” Healing and Empowering the Feminine 

Senensky’s words speak to our present reality. Today, on our planet, leaders, advocates for a healing of earth are gathered in Egypt to consider how we might intervene in what the UN Secretary General, Antonio Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, described to the assembly as humanity’s drive to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.

In December of 2020 Mr. Guterres had declared that “making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st Century.” Since then an ever-increasing bombardment of climate-related catastrophes across the planet has amplified his message. The ongoing war in Ukraine along with its other horrors, has hijacked plans to wean ourselves off the fossil fuels that are at the root of global warming.

This is our present reality. If it feels overwhelming that’s because it is. 

And yet, though it seems counter-intuitive, voices of wisdom repeat that the way ahead calls for a deepening of our spiritual practices, a commitment of our lives, our energies, our love, to the Sacred.

Thomas Berry saw that what was needed was “not simply adaptation to a reduced supply of fuels or to some modification in our system of social of economic controls….What is happening is something of a far greater magnitude. It is a radical change in our mode of consciousness.”

Berry went on to say that “(W) e are just emerging from a technological entrancement. During this period the human mind has been placed within the narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase.”

To emphasize this, Berry noted, “Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our own world of technological confinement.”

This is what we must recover. This is the change in consciousness that will direct our efforts even at this late hour. As former civilizations once did, we must establish “our exalted place within the seasonal sequence of the earth’s natural rhythms” and create “spiritual centers where the meeting of the divine, the natural and the human” may take place. This is the source of the hope Berry saw in the current global crisis: ”the universe is revealing itself to us in a special manner just now. Also the planet Earth and the life communities of the earth are speaking to us through the deepest elements of our nature.”

(Quotations from and references to Thomas Berry: Ervin Laszlo, Foreword to Thomas Berry Dreamer of the Earth, Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2011)

Where better for us to be now than within the womb of the Sacred Feminine, allowing ourselves to be transformed in consciousness, prepared to be the humans we must become in this crucial time.

As the wise ones teach us, we will only save what we love, and we will only love what we recognize as sacred.