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
The Divine Feminine

SOPHIA, WISDOM OF THE AGES

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A most unlikely place to hide a promise. But here it lies. Within the writings of a little-known first century Roman, Lucius Apuleius, whose character, a hapless magician, turns himself into an ass. He cries to the Goddess for help. Suddenly, shining like the sun, she is there. She rescues him, refers to her many names, then makes this promise: I am come with solace and aid. Away then with tears. Cease to moan. Send sorrow packing. Soon…shall the sun of your salvation rise…. Eternal religion has dedicated to me the day which will be born from the womb of this present darkness. 

That darkness would envelop the sacred feminine presence, forgetting her many names, abandoning her temples, sending her into two millennia of hiddenness…

Well, almost, but not quite. The light of the feminine holy, like the dawn that follows the darkest night, would find a way to break through. The Sheepskin of the Jewish Kabbalah, the Sophia of the Book of Wisdom and the Gnostic Gospels, Mary with her wonderful names drawn from the beauty of the planet: Mystical Rose, Star of the Sea, Our Lady of the Pines, of the Lakes, of the Mountains, Madonna of the Rocks… would find her way into hearts ready to receive her light.

We have been born into the time of the great recovery of ancient wisdom from story, myth, legend, from sacred writings, poetry, and ritual, from the peoples of earth-honouring religions: American and Australian Aboriginals; the Ancient Egyptians; the Celts.

Within these rediscovered traditions, we find the presence of a Sacred Mother, a womb of life who calls us to honour the earth and all her living systems, to honour ourselves, to honour our bodies which are part of the earth. She calls us to accept the wisdom of the circle of life: its rhythms of dawn to day to dark to day; of spring to summer to autumn to winter to spring; of birth to life to death to rebirth.  She calls us by our true name as she invites into the adventure of life in a time when each of us is needed to live fully.

She calls us into joy, through allurement to the hope, to the stunning beauty of a promise born in light. She reminds us that the universe herself is drawn, not through duty, despair, grim determination, but through allurement: the earth is allured to the sun, caught up into a dance of spinning wonder; the moon is allured to earth, circling her in ecstasy; the tides of the seas are allured to the moon, as are the cycles of women’s bodies. Each planet in our galaxy, like each of the galaxies of the universe, of the multiverse, twirls in a passionate dance of awe and delight.

Sophia calls us to awaken on this day which is being born from the womb of this present darkness. Her time is now.

artwork by David Neave

A Ritual for Epiphany

The following chant and prayer are from a , created by Kathleen Glennon in her book Heartbeat of the Seasons, (The Columba Press, Dublin, 2005)

Chant: The wisdom you desire will be given unto you. (Eccl. 6:30)

Dance of Wisdom

Wisdom of the Universe, come to me/us/all

raise hands over your head and bring down to your head

Wisdom of the Earth, come to me/us/all

bring hands upwards from the earth and bring to heart

Wisdom of the Ancestors, come to me/us/all

bow reverently

For the following verse, extend arms upwards,

palms facing upwards and sway to the music

Wisdom of the maiden, come to me/us/all. 

Wisdom of the mother, come to me/us/all. 

Wisdom of the crone, come to me/us/all.

Blessing

May Sophia, the Wisdom of the Ages,

the Wisdom of the Universe,

continue to journey with us

May she meet us at our gates in the morning.

May she lie down with us at night.

May all who seek her find her.

May she bring the spirit of discernment into the lives of all.

May her company bring joy and happiness to all.  Amen. 

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Wisdom for Longest Night, Solstice

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The external darkness of winter is mirrored by internal darkness this year. The fragility of our planet, the depletion of uncounted life-forms, the pollution of lakes, rivers, oceans, soil, even the air we breathe can no longer be ignored. The warnings of scientists about a coming time of disaster have shifted to confirmation that the dark future is already here. We see the effects of the destruction of our home planet with our own eyes and hearts.

In a time of great darkness, we may look for light; we may seek it in denial of the reality, in distractions, in seeking whatever comfort we may find to help us “make it through the night”… and yet there is another way: the way of the Cailleach, the way of Wisdom: we may choose to enter the darkness, to explore it for its hidden gifts, for what it has to teach us. We may learn to know the darkness.

Jan Richardson offers a Blessing for this:

Bless those

Who know the darkness

and do not fear it,

Who carry the light

And are not consumed,

Who prepare the way

and will not abandon it,

Who bless with grace

That does not leave us.

Ancient people came to “know the darkness” with such accuracy that they could predict the time of the longer nights, the earlier dawns of winter solstice when the return of light became visible. We, in our time, have come to understand the darkness has come from an excessive love of light, from a worship of bright intellect over the nurturing of nature, the extremes of using the planet’s resources without the needed balance of wisdom….

The 20th century Jungian writer Helen Luke explains it clearly in her book The Way of Woman:

“…the instinct of the feminine is precisely to use nothing, but simply to give and to receive. This is the nature of the earth – to receive the seed and to nourish the roots– to foster growth in the dark so that it may reach up to the light.

“How are women to recover their reverence for and their joy in this great archetype of which the symbols have always been the earth, the moon, the dark, and the ocean, mother of us all? For thousands of years the necessity of freeing consciousness from the grip of the destructive inertia and from the devouring quality, which are the negative side of the life-giving mother, rightly gave to the emerging spirit of activity and exploration an enormous predominance; but the extremes of this worship of the bright light of the sun have produced in our time an estrangement even in women themselves from the patient nurturing and enduring qualities of the earth, from the reflected beauty of the silver light of the moon in the darkness, from the unknown in the deep sea of the unconscious and from the springs of the water of life. The way back and down to those springs and to the roots of the tree is likewise the way on and up to the spirit of air and fire in the vaults of heaven.” (pp. 15-16)

It is time for humanity to shift from “the extremes of this worship of the bright light of the sun”. Women, as well as men who are not afraid to explore their own feminine side, are called now urgently to do this work, essential for our time, to befriend once more the qualities of earth, moon, sea and springs, to make our way “back and down to those springs and to the roots of the tree.”

Here is a Blessing of Hope from Jan Richardson for Longest Night before the dawn of Winter Solstice December 21st::

All throughout these months
as the shadows
have lengthened,
this blessing has been
gathering itself,
making ready,
preparing for
this night.

It has practiced
walking in the dark,
traveling with
its eyes closed,
feeling its way
by memory
by touch
by the pull of the moon
even as it wanes.

So believe me
when I tell you
this blessing will
reach you
even if you
have not light enough
to read it;
it will find you
even though you cannot
see it coming.

You will know
the moment of its
arriving
by your release
of the breath
you have held
so long;
a loosening
of the clenching
in your hands,
of the clutch
around your heart;
a thinning
of the darkness
that had drawn itself
around you.

This blessing
does not mean
to take the night away
but it knows
its hidden roads,
knows the resting spots
along the path,
knows what it means
to travel
in the company
of a friend.

So when
this blessing comes,
take its hand.
Get up.
Set out on the road
you cannot see.

This is the night
when you can trust
that any direction
you go,
you will be walking
toward the dawn.

Brian Swimme

Awaiting the Light

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Darkness deepens in these early December days, throughout our planet, our Mother Earth. In the Northern Hemisphere we await the return of light at the Winter Solstice. Longing for light, for joy, for love is at the heart of the music and stories we hear as we await the Feast of Christmas.

Yet, the love and light, the joy we hunger for, will not pierce this present darkness until we come to a deeper understanding of the mystery of the Presence of Love in the Universe, the Presence of Love within all of life, within the lives of each of us.

What is needed is a new story, already being pieced together by today’s physicists and cosmologists, now recognized as among the mystics of our time.

This story begins in the absence of light, in the absence of time, in the absence of everything. Nothing is suddenly illumined by something. Time and story begin in that instant, nearly fourteen billion years ago…

Some scientists call that first something, the “big bang”, an explosion that sent matter hurtling out across space in an ecstasy of movement that continues to this day, still to be seen in the deep heart of the Universe in photos taken by the James Webb Telescope. The cosmologist Brian Swimme calls it a “flaring forth”, a flame that penetrates the darkness.

In the beginning was FIRE. Within that fire was forged the essence of everything that would be birthed in our Universe. Was the Universe alive in that first moment? Perhaps not, yet scientists see that from that beginning the focus was to engender life…

The fire burned for a million years, the elements released by it spreading outwards in an expansion of stars and galaxies, black holes and planets, all engaged in a process we know intimately in our own lives, a dance of life/death/ life.

The flaring forth sent matter hurtling outward in a movement as precisely timed as a choreographed ballet. Had it been slower, even by the smallest measure, matter would have collapsed back into nothing. Had it been faster, the movement would have utterly destroyed it. Exquisite timing allowed it to expand and expand over the billions of years even until today.

Our own galaxy was birthed in this way, forming our sun, with its encircling planets in a spiral dance. Four billion years ago, our earth, with her enchanted moon encircling her, emerged, carrying within her body the seeds of every facet of life that would evolve over billions of years. Every aspect of life ever known on Earth was born of a star, from porpoises to pearls, from elephants to mosquitoes, from cows to sheep and goats, from apple and pear trees to us humans who eat their fruit, from dinosaurs to the tiny chambered nautilus…

What is more, each of these aspects of life has intelligence that guides it to seek out what it needs for its existence. You and I have seen how a wild flower knows to turn her face towards the sun, to draw in water from rain, nutrients from the soil that holds her secure. She knows how to allure the honeybees that will assist her by making her seeds fertile, sending them forth to produce her offspring who will live on even if her own life is cut short by a drought or a freeze…

The Earth herself is a sentient being, capable of the kind of intelligence that has kept her alive through the age of the predatory dinosaurs, through ice ages, through the huge fluctuations in the sun’s heat, learning to adjust to all of these changes. She has survived collisions with meteors from space, one of which, as scientists now say, caused such great changes that the dinosaurs were destroyed. The crater left by that meteor sixty-six million years ago is buried underneath the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

Now Earth faces the challenges created by us humans who in our greed for her fossil fuels are willing to blow the tops off mountains, poison the waters, destroy the rain forests, the lungs of our Mother Earth, and dig deep into her body to unearth minerals, precious metals and jewels. Climate change is predominantly due to human activity. The Earth may need to protect herself from these depredations by raising her temperature in order to survive. An average temperature in the 40’s Celsius may be what she needs, even though human life cannot survive that heat.

What we are learning from the advances of science about our planet was, in essence, known and honoured by our early ancestors. Even today there are indigenous cultures who still hold the ancient beliefs, who still cry out against our matricide. For this Earth is Mother to us. All that is within us, body, mind and spirit, has come from her womb. The fruits and vegetables that nurture us as well as the animals who feed from her before giving their bodies to become our food, derive from our Mother Earth. Her oceans nourish the fish and sea creatures who in turn nourish us. Our planet continues to give us all she has even as we attempt in our ignorance to destroy her.

There is something more in this story, a gift from the labours and love, the brilliant mind and insight of the 20th century Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard understood that every aspect of life is afire with Love, penetrated with the Divine.

Today we are coming to know a Feminine Presence of Divine Love, honoured by Ancient Cultures, rising among us. We hear her calling to us: “Look for Me in the sea, in the lake, in the night sky when its stars paint patterns of silver on blackness. Seek me in the good earth, in all that grows from her soil and in all that is nourished by her: trees, flowers, plants, insects, birds, the small creatures that dwell in the woods. Seek me in the fire that destroys what no longer thrives. Know that these gifts of air, water, earth and fire also dwell in you. Above all, seek me in your own heart.”

This is our joy, our hope, our experience of Love, rooted in the birth of our Universe:

To fall asleep under a sky whose stars pierce us with mystery

To waken in a state of inexplicable longing,

To fall in love, again and again, with the beauty of a lake, a sunset, a willow, a lark

To seek all our lives long for meaning, for belonging, for home…

This is the human experience, its blessing, its wounding.

Poets intuited an interconnection, mystics experienced a unity.

Now, today,

We live into the wonder of seeing,

Of knowing with the precision of science,

Our place in the universe.

The Story of the Universe

Is a story about everything.

It tells us why and how we are here,

Why loss and longing and death intermingle

With joy and love and life,

Leading always to deeper life.

Because of this story, no one can ever again dare to say

That we are less than sacred,

That we are less than whole,

That we do not belong.

And in knowing our lives to be inextricably woven into

As well as out of the very stuff of which the Universe is made,

In knowing ourselves to be the Universe, conscious of itself,

We glimpse the true nature of the Beloved

For whom we yearn without ceasing,

Even as we live within Her.

*(adapted from Singing the Dawn, Anne Kathleen McLaughlin, Borealis Press, Ottawa, Canada, 2022 (http://borealispress.com)

Cosmological References: Brian Thomas Swimme: The Universe is a Green Dragon, 2001, and The Journey of the Universe, 2011, with Mary Evelyn Tucker

Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard, Samhain, in an Unfinished Universe

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We’ve come to the Stillpoint House of Prayer to honour the early November Feast of Samhain: the Celtic New Year. Eight women friends who’ve been gathering since the Summer Solstice of 2023 to celebrate the Earth Festivals, our gatherings follow a pattern, weaving poetry, music, dance, and ancient story. We share experiences of joy, growing edges, challenges leading to a ritual which allows us to ground the focus of each festival in our bodies, our hearts, our souls.

On the second day of our gathering, November 6th, we waken to a pall of darkness as news of US Election results creeps into our awareness. We continue with our plans for the day, reflecting on inner light, on the wisdom of our crone years, on our preparations for the ritual when we shall place in the Cauldron of the Cailleach whatever in our lives is raw and unpalatable, requiring transformation through water and fire.

As we await the coming of darkness, our mood is shifting. Perhaps the day’s late autumn warmth, the way the river shines silver in the waning light, or maybe the glowing crescent of the rising moon…. Reminders of the beauty on the planet restore calmness. One of the women offers to read something called “Storm on the Lake” from the writings of Teilhard de Chardin:

At every moment the vast and horrible Thing breaks in upon us through the crevices and invades our precarious dwelling-place, that Thing we try so hard to forget but which is always there, separated from us only by thin dividing walls: fire, pestilence, earthquake, storm, the unleashing of dark moral forces, all these sweep away ruthlessly, in an instant, what we had laboured with mind and heart to build up and make beautiful..…

Lord God… lest I succumb to the temptation to curse the universe, and the Maker of the universe, teach me to adore it by seeing you hidden within it….If only we will it to be so, the immense and sombre Thing, the spectre, the tempest—is you.

“It is I, fear not.”(Mark 6:50; Luke 24:36). All things in life that fill us with dread, all that filled your own heart with dismay in the garden of agony: all, in the last resort, are… appearances, the matter, of one and the same sacrament.

Returning home from our Samhain Retreat, I search among Teilhard’s teachings for further light. In my library, I find the book I seek: Teilhard to Omega Ilia Delio, ed. (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2014) In an essay by John Haught, “Teilhard de Chardin: Theology for an Unfinished Universe”, words leap out at me: “For Teilhard, autumn rather than spring was the happiest time of year.” Intrigued, I read on: “It is almost as though the shedding of leaves opened his soul to the limitless space of the up-ahead and the not-yet, liberating him from the siren charms of terrestrial spring and summer.”

A scientist, a mystic, rather than a theologian, Teilhard deplored the way that theology continued to reflect on God as though the scientific fact of a still –emerging universe was either unknown or irrelevant. Almost seventy years after Teilhard’s death, theologians are still engaged in the work of re-imagining a God who calls us forward into an as-yet-unknown reality. And yet, even a limited grasp, a glimpse, of what Teilhard saw of the “up- ahead and the not-yet” is enough to inspire hope.

Neither scientist nor theologian, I am a storyteller. I know how a change in the story has power to alter and illuminate our lives. Changing the story that once shaped our lives changes everything. If we live in a story of a completed universe where once upon a perfect time our first parents, ecstatically happy in a garden of unimaginable beauty, destroyed everything by sin, what have we to hope for? The best is already irretrievably lost. Under sentence of their guilt we can only struggle through our lives, seeking forgiveness, trusting in redemption, saved only at a terrible cost to the One who came to suffer and die for us. The suffering around us still speaks to us of punishment for that first sin, burdening us with the effort of continuing to pay for it with our lives. Despair and guilt are constant companions. Hope in that story rests in release from the suffering through death.

Yet, if we live the story as Teilhard saw it, seeing ourselves in an unfinished universe that is still coming into being, everything changes. In a cosmos that is still a work in progress, we are called to be co-creators, moving with the universe into a future filled with hope. Our human hearts long for joy. The possibility that there could be peace, reconciliation, compassion, mercy and justice to an increasing degree on our planet is a profound incentive for us to work with all our energy for the growth of these values. The call to co-create in an unfinished universe broadens and deepens our responsibility:

The Love that rules the stars will now have to be seen as embracing two hundred billion galaxies, a cosmic epic of fourteen billion years’ duration, and perhaps even a multiverse. Our thoughts about Christ and redemption will have to extend over the full breadth of cosmic time and space. (Haught, 13)

Haught believes that “if hope is to have wings and life to have zest,” we need a new theological vision that “opens up a new future for the world.” For Teilhard that future was convergence into God. His hope was founded in the future for he grasped the evolutionary truth that the past has been an increasing complexity of life endowed with “spirit”.

Teilhard saw God as creating the world by drawing it from up ahead, so that the really real is to be sought in the not yet. And this means that:

The question of suffering, while still intractable, opens up a new horizon of hope when viewed in terms of an unfinished and hence still unperfected universe. (19)

Haught believes that the concept of an unfinished universe can strengthen hope and love:

…the fullest release of human love is realistically possible only if the created world still has possibilities that have never before been realized….Only if the beloved still has a future can there be an unreserved commitment to the practice of charity, justice and compassion. (19)

We live today on the edge of planet-wide climate disaster. In the midst of recent ravages by hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and droughts, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that Earth is crying out to us, “but we are not listening.”

Working together communally, nationally, and internationally we can face this moment with courage. The path has been set before us by scientists, by leaders in the ecological movement, by writers and thinkers who have known what is coming. If we are appalled by the failures of international organizations and governments, we can still do our part, creating sanity within our own circles.

The sacred season that follows Samhain, the feminine womb-time of darkness, is the time of the Cailleach, the Ancient Crone, the dark mother who calls on us to change our ways, to turn away from destructive behaviours that harm our planet and all that lives within and upon her. It is the season of the great cauldron of the Cailleach where the unpalatable attitudes and activities that are endangering life are to be transformed. Teilhard teaches us to see with clarity that even in this crisis we are being drawn forward by the Love that is up ahead in a future that awaits us. Partnered and empowered for this work, we place in the Cauldron of the Cailleach our despair, embracing the hope we need to do what we must.

Thomas Berry

Seeking Wisdom in the Natural World

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After a time of travel, attending summer gatherings, festivals and meetings, celebrating a wedding anniversary, a family birthday, and Thanksgiving, I return to the solitude of my life by the lake. My closest companions are the trees surrounding my home. Their welcome holds a silence that is ecstatic, leaves of autumn gold and vermilion quivering with the slightest breeze.

Surrounded by beauty that is too much to take in, I feel disoriented by the absence of verbal expression. In my mailbox, I find what I’m longing for: a gift of words in a book edited by Gail Worcelo, Shamanic Journey into Earth’s Wisdom (NewPerennials Publishing, Vermont, 2024)

Without taking time to unpack, I dive into the cosmovision of Thomas Berry.

Reflecting on Berry’s words in Dream of the Earth (1988), Worcelo writes, “a return must be made to our deeper knowing, to the very genetic coding found within our deepest spontaneities arising from our roots in a 13.7- billion-year story of the universe.”(4) Berry teaches that these spontaneities come to us through visionary experiences, not only in dreams, “but also through those intuitive, transrational processes that occur when we awaken to those numinous powers ever present in the world about us.”(6)

While the afternoon warmth lasts, I visit the lake. I sit on a log at the edge of the shore, gazing at the water. As though a hundred gentle breaths were blowing across the surface, small hills of water are lifting and falling, lifting and falling. In silent communion, I invite a word to come from this living beauty at my feet, expecting the message will be some version of the advice I often hear, to be self-giving, to pour myself out for others….

Yet that is not what rises in me. Instead, I hear one clear word. If it were not so gentle, I’d call it a command. “Receive”.

Startled, I look again at the surface. Are those ripples laughter at my surprise? This watery being of loveliness only asks me to receive her gift…. I gaze in wonder.

I begin walking back to my home, past trees still radiant in October sunlight. From each I hear the same message: “Receive, receive, receive….”

It will take another day before I make the connection. The advice offered to me when I asked Andrew Harvey how I was to share with others the hope I hold for the planet. “No words! Love them. Burnish your light.”

Now the lake and trees are showing me how to do this.

Reading further into the book, I begin to grasp that a shamanic journey is a process of deep listening to the wisdom of life around us. Who can teach me how to listen more deeply? I look to a poet who has shared the wisdom of her own shamanic journeys.

Beside the Lake, A Note to Self by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer

If you watch the heron as it stalks
amongst the tall green reeds, then pauses,
and in its pausing disappears, then you understand
something of the power of stillness.

And if you sit still long enough
to see the head of the snapping turtle
rise between the lily pads,
then you glean something of the rewards
that come with sitting still.

but if you sit expecting such rewards,
then perhaps sit longer and watch the cattails
as they waver and still, sway and still and still,
and feel how the urge in you to say something rises
and softens and softens until there is nothing to say

until that kind of stillness becomes
the greatest reward, until you feel
stillness hold you the way the lake
holds the lily pad, the way silence holds a song,
the way gratitude holds everything.

Thomas Merton knew how to listen to trees. I delve through my library, withdraw the book I seek: Writings on Nature: Thomas Merton:When the Trees Say Nothing, edited by Kathleen Deignan (Sorin Books, Notre Dame, IN 2002)

Deignan writes that Merton “sat in stillness and loved the wind in the forest and listened for a good long while to God”. There in the woods, he experienced himself at the center of the universe where at any moment the gate of heaven would open wide and he would perceive the undying heavenliness in the real nature of things. “Paradise is all around,” he heard the dawn deacon say: all we need do is enter in. (Deignan, 38)

And there was more for Merton in this paradise, as Deignan writes:

On each threshold of the encircling paradise awaited Sophia, “the mother of all,” the diffuse shining of God in creation. Merton understood her to be the personification of divinity, at once hidden and manifest in all things. She was the eros that throbbed through countless creatures that mated, bore, and nurtured the infinity of cells in the body of God in their shape-shifting dynamics of praise. Her beauty and magnetism drew all beings into life as communion, as thanksgiving, as festival, as glory. As the very love that unites the cosmos, Merton proclaimed Sophia “the Bride, the Feast, and the Wedding.” It was she whom he espoused in her forest pavilion. In her embrace he experienced overpowering peace and delight, and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world became his great love. Thus he learned the secret of intimate communion “sent from the depths of the divine fecundity.” (39)

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Communing with Trees

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Sophiawakens July 30, 2024

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A little over a year ago, I had a dream. As dreams sometimes do, it wove forgotten memories, old losses, present realities into one seamless narrative. In the dream, my younger self plans an escape from an intolerable situation. She knows exactly where she must go: to the place where pine trees, lake, the call of the whippoorwill in the evening air will embrace her…Yet, in the dream, she remembers with fresh grief that this place no longer exists for her.

Immediately the scene shifts. A magical woodland appears, trees whose lush green leaves, holding silvery drops of rain or dew, dance before her eyes. The trees speak to her as only a dream tree can; she hears their voices, not inside her, but out loud, clearly, in the breeze: “We are here with you now.”

I waken, still bemused, walk into the kitchen. There, just beyond my window stands the woodland of my dream, just as it has appeared every June since I moved to this house by the lake. Only, until this moment, I did not understand that this woodland holds the beauty, the wonder, the presence that I thought lost to me forever.

What that dream wakened in me has not left me. Rather it has opened in me a new depth of understanding for the words of the poets of our time who have laboured to birth in us an awareness of the presence of spirit in all that we love on this planet. Slowly, I am coming to know how to listen, how to speak, in this communion with life.

Among contemporary poets who have sought to awaken us to the conscious presence of life around us, Mary Oliver is foremost. For decades, her life consisted of waking each morning to walk out into the world and be present to life in whatever form she encountered it. She described her work as “loving the world.”

I have selected two of her poems to share with you today. Each illustrates her gift, honed to a skill in communing with nature that is unparalleled in my estimation. In the first, she is with trees, in the second, with a river.

When I Am Among The Trees

by Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, “Stay awhile.”

The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,

“and you too have come

into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine.”

Bonnechere River Ontario, Canada

At the River Clarion

by Mary Oliver

1. I don’t know who God is exactly.
But I’ll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking.
Whenever the water struck a stone it had something to say,
and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing under the water.
And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying.
Said the river: I am part of holiness.
And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss

beneath the water.

I’d been to the river before, a few times.
Don’t blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway,

through all the traffic, the ambition.

2. If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck.
He’s also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

Imagine how the lily (who may also be a part of God) would sing to you if it could sing,
if you would pause to hear it.
And how are you so certain anyway that it doesn’t sing?

If God exists he isn’t just churches and mathematics.
He’s the forest, He’s the desert.
He’s the ice caps, that are dying.
He’s the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.

He’s van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Motherwell.
He’s the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing their weapons.
He’s every one of us, potentially.
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politician, the poet.
And if this is true, isn’t it something very important?

Yes, it could be that I am a tiny piece of God, and each of you too, or at least
of his intention and his hope.
Which is a delight beyond measure.
I don’t know how you get to suspect such an idea.
I only know that the river kept singing.
It wasn’t a persuasion, it was all the river’s own constant joy
which was better by far than a lecture, which was comfortable, exciting, unforgettable.

3. Of course for each of us, there is the daily life.
Let us live it, gesture by gesture.
When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks?

And should we not thank the knife also?
We do not live in a simple world.

4. There was someone I loved who grew old and ill
One by one I watched the fires go out.
There was nothing I could do

except to remember
that we receive
then we give back.

5. My dog Luke lies in a grave in the forest, she is given back.
But the river Clarion still flows from wherever it comes from
to where it has been told to go.
I pray for the desperate earth.
I pray for the desperate world.
I do the little each person can do, it isn’t much.
Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves.

6. Along its shores were, may I say, very intense cardinal flowers.
And trees, and birds that have wings to uphold them, for heaven’s sakes–
the lucky ones: they have such deep natures,
they are so happily obedient.
While I sit here in a house filled with books,
ideas, doubts, hesitations.

7. And still, pressed deep into my mind, the river
keeps coming, touching me, passing by on its
long journey, its pale, infallible voice
singing.

Andrew Harvey

The Fire and the Rose Are One

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(TS Eliot Four Quartets)

The two friends are walking slowly along the road from Jerusalem, dragging their feet, not really sure why they’re going this way, not caring whether they ever arrive. The hopes they’d shared have collapsed. The dream has died. The one who gave them hope, who shaped the dream, is dead. Best to let the fellowship of three years die with him, along with the dream, with its deceptive promise.

Too weary to lift their eyes from the dusty track, they don’t notice that a stranger has been for some time keeping pace with them. Until he speaks. Asks them why they walk along, looking so sad…

The question startles them into stillness. They look at him in wonder. “Where have you been these past days? How could you not know? What are you, deaf, dumb and blind, or perhaps an idiot?”

The stranger is none of these things. He resumes his walk. Without knowing they are doing so, they begin to accompany him, listening to his words with disbelief, then with wonder, finally with astonishment stirring embers of hope.

This stranger reminds them of the writings of the prophets, of the stories they have known all their lives, without understanding what they meant. “Don’t you see that the suffering of the Christ was the very path to the new life he promised?”

When they finally turn from the road towards Emmaus. the stranger makes as though to go further. They beg him to stay with them for a meal. In the breaking of the bread, their eyes are opened and they know him, even as he vanishes from their sight…

They look at one another, each seeing a light of reborn joy in the face of his friend.

“Were not our hearts burning within us as he spoke to us, showing us what the scriptures meant?”

And even though it’s late, they set out at once to return to their friends in Jerusalem.

This story is two thousand years old, yet as relevant as today’s news: the latest landfall of Hurricane Beryl, the latest political intrigues, election results, economic downturns, the latest failed peace talks, the deaths from wars, from sinking ships filled with refugees, from weather-related scorching heat and flooding rains, from suicides, from drug overdoses…The dawning awareness that our planet is dying.

Today, should someone dare to express surprise at our sadness, we reply in words very like those of the walkers on the road to Emmaus: “Where have you been these past days? How could you not know? What are you, deaf, dumb, blind, or perhaps an idiot?”

A few days ago, I listened as someone dared to risk hearing that very response, dared to suggest something even more radical: that JOY is what’s needed in this present reality…someone I see as prophet and mystic in our time: Andrew Harvey.

In the past ten years on this blog, Sophiawakens, I’ve offered teachings of the prophets of our time: Teilhard de Chardin, visionary scientist in love with the Universe; Mary Oliver, magnificent poet in love with the earth and the life it nurtures; Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme following Teilhard’s lead to reveal the wonders of the Universe within and around us. The mystics of our time are often the physicists and cosmologists. As well, for the first time in human history, we have access to the sacred writings of all ages, all spiritualities, along with the writings and poetry of their mystics. Words of guidance are as close to us as the small screens on our phones.

Yet, like the two walking to Emmaus, we deserve the stranger’s words of chastisement:

“You foolish ones! So slow to believe the full message of the prophets!”

On July 3, in the first of seven weekly presentations on the Shift Network entitled “The Ultimate Rebellion Against Darkness and Despair”, Andrew Harvey spoke of joy:

We have this opportunity right now to share from the deepest part of ourselves at a crucial moment in our evolution about the real force of evolution that is joy….

All of the constructions we’ve ever had about life, about God, about society, about stability, about the lasting nature of life and of… the Earth, all of these structures are now being destroyed….

The intensity of what we’re living is opening us up to ever deeper divine resources within ourselves. As the illusions burn down, we discover that not only do they not destroy our identity, they reveal aspects of our identity far braver, far more beautiful, far wilder, far more loving, far more passionate, far more compassionate, far, far more joyful than we ever imagined we had. That’s the nature of this stupendous stretching of the entire psyche and spirit of the human race, this great birthing process that is happening.

Do you hear in Andrew’s words a distant echo of the writings of the great 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich? Julian’s hope-filled words, scarcely known before the twentieth century, were woven by TS Eliot into his Four Quartets:

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

As we pass through the fire, let us hold the image of the rose in our hearts, trusting Julian’s words, trusting in the promise that, ultimately, in mystery beyond our power to imagine, All manner of thing shall be well.

Teilhard de Chardin

One Dreamer, One Lifelong Desire

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I managed to climb up to the point

where the Universe became apparent to me

as a great rising surge,

in which all the work that goes into serious inquiry,

all the will to create, all the acceptance of suffering,

converge ahead into a single dazzling spear-head –

now, at the end of my life,

I can stand on the peak I have scaled and continue

to look ever more closely into the future,

and there, with ever more assurance,

see the ascent of God.

(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter)

A child, born in France in 1881, too early acquainted with death and loss. begins a lifelong search for something that will last. With the soul of a poet, with eyes drawing in the beauty of nature as he walks with his father through the hills surrounding their home in Auvergne, the young Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is drawn to rocks as things that would endure…. This early allurement leads him into a scientific career that takes him to China where he is today honoured as its founder of paleontology, part of the group that unearthed the earliest human remains in China, known as “Peking Man”.

Drawn to the Jesuit Order, Pierre is sent for his early theological training to Hastings in England. Here, he is enchanted by the natural beauty of the green land around him. Here by the sea, he discovers ancient cliffs bearing fossils that carry the story of evolution. Following his ordination to the priesthood in 1911, Pierre returns to the Jesuit community in Paris. His assignment is to study geology and to apply for acceptance as a student in paleontology under Marcellin Boule at the Paris Museum of Natural History. Boule, probably the greatest scholar in the field, recognizes Teilhard’s talents. As a scientist, Pierre is on his way to great achievements.

If Science were his only love, Pierre’s story would perhaps have been one of intense work accompanied by a steady rise in fame. Yet Pierre’s heart holds another deep desire, a love for the Risen Christ whom he glimpses at the heart of the earth’s beauty, as the living spirit in all that exists. Vowed as a Jesuit within a Church that still, in the early twentieth century, refuses to accept the reality of Evolution, that sees the path to God as an upward climb away from the material to the spiritual, seeking a God who must be found by rising above the Earth and Nature, Pierre is like to child torn between separating parents both of whom he loves. He is to spend his life seeking to draw Matter and Spirit together.

His studies in Science at the Institut Catholique in Paris prepare him to return there as a professor following the First World War, where he serves as a stretcher bearer. His writings increase, sharing his vision of a planet permeated by the Spirit of God. He writes of a Universe filled with the love of the Risen Christ. Yet he is forbidden by his Jesuit Superiors and by leaders of the Church in Rome to publish the book length manuscript that holds the heart of his vision: “The Human Phenomenon”. He is forbidden to teach. He is exiled from his beloved France to live in the Jesuit Community in New York City where he dies on Easter Sunday, 1955.

Not long before his death, Pierre writes: “How is it possible that descending from the mountain and despite the glory that I carry in my eyes, I am so little changed for the better, so lacking in peace, so incapable of passing on to others through my conduct, the marvelous unity in which I feel immersed?….

“As I look about me, how is it I find myself entirely alone of my kind?…

“Why am I the only one who sees?” (“Recherche, travail, et adoration,” New York, March 1955; cited in Teilhard: A Biography by Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1977, 1981)

Had that been his ending, Pierre’s story would have been a tragedy. It was not the end.

Pierre’s circle of loving friends, several of whom were women: intelligent, capable, gifted, understood his vision. When his health began to fail, on the advice of a Jesuit friend, Teilhard entrusted his writings to a woman friend, a skilled editor…. Shortly after his death, Teilhard’s books began to appear like an explosion of shooting stars.

Just weeks ago, the film Teilhard: Visionary and Scientist, was released on PBS and is now available world wide with this link: https://www.pbs.org/video/teilhard-visionary-scientist-pt9dc1/

Filmmakers Frank Frost and his wife Mary Link spent thirteen years in massive fundraising efforts, allowing them to travel to China, to France and across the US for interviews, research and filming. The result is a work of art: a visually splendid achievement in storytelling and film-making. It is a gift from the Universe, from Teilhard himself, who spent his life shaping and writing of the vision that we, in our time, so desperately need:

Throughout my whole life, during every moment I have lived, the world has gradually been taking on light and fire for me, until it has come to envelop me in one mass of luminosity, glowing from within…The purple flash of matter fading imperceptibly into the gold of spirit, to be lost finally in the incandescence of a personal universe….

This is what I have learnt from my contact with the earth –

the diaphany of the divine at the heart of a glowing universe,

the divine radiating from the depths of matter a-flame.

(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

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Richard and Julian

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“Faith is the comfort of not needing to know” ( Richard Rohr)

Somewhat unsteadily, using a cane for support, Richard Rohr walked across the stage at the University of Notre Dame, settled into the armchair across from the interviewer. He gazed into the darkness where the packed auditorium of listeners awaited his words in silence. It was Rohr’s first public talk since Covid created a cocoon around our lives.

(Note; The talk referred to here ,“Christianity and the Re-emergence of the Non-dual Mind” is available for viewing on YOUTUBE)

Gentle, smiling, often self-deprecating, this elderly, grandfather-like figure cut to the heart of our 21st century reality. Holding it in the light of the Gospel, particularly the Beatitudes, Rohr showed us that in our eagerness for clarity, our fear of uncertainty, we’re caught in dualities.

“If you don’t understand non-dual thinking, everything slips into liberal of conservative”. Instead of clinging to our own way of thinking as the only right way, Rohr advises “let the whole horizon of reality all come towards you.”

We still haven’t grasped the message of Jesus, haven’t accepted that wisdom lies in that hazy place where we are at peace with not knowing, “Faith is the comfort of not needing to know.” The mystics of the early centuries of Christianity accepted, embraced this unknowing in contemplative presence.

Rohr’s own presence, that smile, that shake of the head at absurdity, was puzzled, a little sad….

He drew a paper from his pocket, unfolded it, began to read a poem to us, translated from Symeon, a tenth century theologian.

We awaken in Christ’s body

As Christ awakens our bodies,

and my poor hand is Christ, He enters

my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully

my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him

(for God is indivisibly

whole, seamless in His Godhead).

I move my foot, and at once

He appears like a flash of lightning.

Do my words seem blasphemous?–Then

open your heart to Him

and let your heart receive the one

who is opening to you so deeply.

For if we genuinely love Him,

we wake up inside Christ’s body

where all our body, all over

every most hidden part of it,

is realized in joy as Him,

and He makes, utterly, real,

and everything that is hurt, everything

that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,

maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in Him transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely,

and radiant in His light

we awaken as the Beloved

in every last part of our body.

(I found the full poem in The Enlightened Heart, an anthology of poetry edited by Stephen Mitchell, Harper Perennial, 1993)

As the interview was drawing to a close, Rohr was asked, “How would you want to be remembered?”

“I’m about life.” Rohr replied. “It’s not about me. God allowed me to do everything wrong so God could do everything right…through me…in spite of me….it’s all mercy, within mercy, within mercy.”

What words would Rohr send in a text message to the world? “In the end it will be good.”

Painting of Julian of Norwich by Jane Joyner

I write this on the Feast Day of Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century mystic who lived through three outbreaks of Black Plague, which reduced the population of England by one-half, the violence of the Peasant’s Revolt and the Western Schism which brought chaos to all of Christendom. Yet her writings are a distant echo of Rohr’s words about mercy, about all being well in the end. In her book, Revelations of Divine Love, Julian records her conversations with the risen Jesus which took place in a night of visions following her near-death experience at the age of thirty.

Acknowledging to Julian that, indeed, sin is everywhere, Christ assures her that “All shall be well, and all will be well, and you shall see for yourself that all manner of thing shall be well.” In the two decades of reflection that followed these visions, Julian came to trust that the meaning of this message was that everyone would be saved.

Julian too was texting to the world: “In the end it will be good.”

Today, on Julian’s Feast Day in the Anglican Calendar, I wondered what Julian herself would most want us to remember from her many teachings. Asking for her guidance, I combed through her Revelations of Divine Love seeking passages that seem most important to our lives, to our calling in these times when hope seems out of reach…

(All of the selections are from the Long Text of Julian’s Revelations in Showings, Colledge & Walsh translation, Paulist Press, New York, Toronto, 1978.)

The first passage is stunning in its intimacy and tenderness:

I saw that (Jesus) is to us everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us. And so in this sight I saw that he is everything which is good, as I understand. (Fifth Chapter)

The second continues the theme of intimate nearness, inviting us to respond in like manner:

For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the trunk, so are we, soul and body, clad and enclosed in the goodness of God. Yes, and more closely, for all these vanish and waste away; the goodness of God is always complete, and closer to us beyond any comparison. (Sixth Chapter)

And the third choice: He did not say: “You will not be troubled, you will not be belaboured, you will not be disquieted”; but he said: “You will not be overcome.” God wants us to pay attention to these words, and always to be strong in faithful trust, in well-being and in woe, for he loves us and delights in us, and so he wishes us to love him and delight in him, and trust greatly in him, and all will be well. (Sixty-Eighth Chapter)

(Reflections on Julian of Norwich to be continued…..)

Dark Mother

The Easter Mystery Heart of the Universe

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In the darkness before dawn on March 25th, the full Paschal Moon rose to announce the approach of Holy Week and Passover.

For years, decades, I entered Holy Week with a kind of dread, knowing I must engage once more in the agony of Jesus, his sufferings, his death, followed by the long tomb-time of his absence , before I could even remember the truth of Resurrection…. I would get up during the night after the Holy Thursday Eucharist to spend an hour remembering Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, his friends asleep around him, as he faced the certitude of his coming death.

It was a Mystery Play, perhaps not unlike the ancient Greek and Roman Mystery Rituals, but the emotions were manufactured. The darkness I experienced through these intense feelings of grief and loss was real, as was the physical discomfort of fasting. Yet some part of me knew it was play-acting: both the terrible loss of Good Friday and the exploding joy of Easter. Jesus IS risen and will never die again; the Christ is with us always. Then ten years ago, something shifted. I wakened in the deep heart of Holy Thursday night, drawn in prayer, not to the Garden of Gethsemane, but to the earth herself, in agony, dying. I sat through that hour with her suffering.

Later I came upon this lovely meditation by Susan Griffin which spoke to my heart:

As I go into the Earth, she pierces my heart. As I penetrate further, she unveils me. When I have reached her center, I am weeping openly. I have known her all my life, yet she reveals stories to me, and these stories are revelations and I am transformed. Each time I go to her, I am born like this. Her renewal washes over me endlessly, her wounds caress me. I become aware of all that has come between us, the blindness, of something sleeping between us. Now my body reaches out to her. They speak effortlessly, and I learn that at no instant does she fail me in her presence. She is as delicate as I am, I know her sentience, I feel her pain and my own pain comes into me, and my own pain grows large and I grasp this pain with my hands, and I open my mouth to this pain, I taste, I know and I know why she goes on, under great weight, with this great thirst, in drought, in starvation, with intelligence in every act does she survive disaster. This earth is my sister, I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am, how we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: we are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget what she is to me, what I am to her. (Susan Griffin in The Body of Earth)

Since that time of awakening, I experience these Sacred Days of the Paschal Mystery, the Mystery of life/death/life that is at the Holy Heart of the Universe, in a new and deeper way. The suffering is not a remembrance of events in the life of Jesus, but rather a reawakening to the raw suffering, the unaccountable losses, the seeking for light and hope in darkness that is the Mystery Play of our lives, especially now in this year of 2024 on Planet Earth.

In a Sacred Dance Class a few years ago, we were invited to meditate on the Black Madonna. For the first time I really understood why we need a Sacred Feminine Presence that is more than sweetness and light, One who is also fierce, strong, capable of holding us in the darkness in which our lives are shrouded. The Dark Mother, Who was present in the very chaos in which our Universe was birthed, is strong enough to remain through eons of destruction and rebirth.

In the poetry of John O’Donohue we find words powerful enough to hold the agony as well as the ecstasy of the Paschal Mystery. In this poem I grasp the gift we’ve been given by Jesus in his suffering and death: the courage to endure the suffering within and around us.

The Ag

The Agony in the Garden

Whatever veil of mercy shrouds the dark

Wound that stops weeping in no one, cannot

Stop the torrent of night when it buries thought

And heart beneath the black tears of the earth.

Through scragged bush the moon discovers his face,

Dazed inside the sound of Gethsemane.

Subsiding under the weight of silence

That entombs the cry of his terrified prayer.

What light could endure the dark he entered?

The void that turns the mind into a ruin

Haunted by the tattered screeching of birds

Who nest deep in hunger that mocks all care.

Still he somehow stands in that nothingness;

Raising the chalice of kindness to bless.

(John O’Donohue in Conamara Blues)

May the Dark Mother hold each of us as we too stand in that nothingness, raising the chalice of kindness to bless.