Category Archives: Rainer Maria Rilke

Christmas Rebirth, Jean Houston, Mary Mother of Jesus, Rainer Maria Rilke

Sophia for Christmas

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What does it profit me if Gabriel hails the Virgin

Unless he brings to me the very selfsame tidings.

(Angelus Silesius)

“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.” (Diarmuid O’Murchu)

Jean Houston writes: Christmas is about yearning for something to come into the world. It’s the story of the birth of love, of hope, of a Holy Child in huge danger of being destroyed, bringing a new order of possibility into the world, needing to be protected and nurtured so it may grow into a free and luminous, numinous being.  

“Just think of the promise, the potential, the divinity in you, which you have probably disowned over and over again because it wasn’t logical, because it didn’t jibe, because it was terribly inconvenient (it always is),because it didn’t fit conventional reality, because… because… because….

“What could be more embarrassing than finding yourself pregnant with the Holy Spirit?  It’s a very eccentric, inconvenient thing to have happen.” (Jean Houston in Godseed p. 38)

The Poet Christine Lore Weber imagines our calling in these words:

Some of you I will hollow out.

I will make you a cave.

I will carve you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness.

You will be a bowl.

You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain…

I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you.

I will do this for the space that you will be.

I will do this because you must be large.

A passage.

People will find their way through you.

A bowl.

People will eat from you

And their hunger will not weaken them to death.

A cup to catch the sacred rain…

Light will flow in your hollowing.

You will be filled with light.

Your bones will shine.

The round open centre of you will be radiant.

I will call you Brilliant One.

I will call you Daughter Who is Wide.

What is the newness I long for in my life?

What newness is needed throughout our planet?

Where within me/us is the Holy Child awaiting birth?

How do we prepare our hearts for this new dawning of possibility?

How may we nurture that luminous numinous being as our lives unfold?

        Reflective Process based on Jean Houston’s Godseed :

Sit comfortably. Close your eyes. Imagine that you are dreaming. In your dreams you see light, and into this light comes a Being of Light, a Bearer of Good News. This angel says to you, “O Woman,  fear not to take unto yourself the spiritual partnership of the One who is Holy, for that which is conceived in you is of the Holy, and this Holy seed, if nurtured, shall be born of you and shall help you to go beyond your fears, your limits, your inability to trust in your own goodness, so that you may bring forth the Light, the Godseed, into the world.” 

Now see what the angel sees – the fulfillment and the unfolding of this Child of Promise within you. In the next few minutes, see and feel and know the possibilities, indeed the future of this Child in you,this Godseed, should you allow it to be nurtured and to grow and to be born into the world.

Watch your Godseed self now. Let it grow, love it, observe its unfolding, Its future.

Let it come into the world. Begin now.

Acknowledge that Godseed and its future. Know its future as Mary must have known the future. Stretch and sit up, ready for whatever the next part of your life will bring you.

Receive these words of Rainer Maria Rilke as a Blessing for new life:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

Go to the limits of your longing.

Embody Me.

Flare up like flame

And make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose Me.

Nearby is the country they call life

You will know it by its seriousness

Give me your hand.

Anne Baring, Christin Lore Weber, Peg Rubin, Rainer Maria Rilke

Before We Leave the Rose Garden

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For the past four weeks, we have been sitting at the feet of scholar and wise woman, Anne Baring, as she unfolded for us her research, her intuitions, her reflections on the Divine Feminine, especially as She is known in Judaism as the Shekinah.

These teachings have been so rich and profound that they merit more than a brief reading.

In preparing the four reflections, I spent many hours seeking to understand Anne Baring’s work, seeking a way to present her teachings so that you might also enter them with joy.

This week, I invite you to spend time re-reading the four Rose Garden pieces and fashioning a response either in your own words or in words from another writer or poet.

What do you hear the Sacred Feminine say to you?

What do you wish to say to her?

You may be blessed to receive a poem in which this Presence of Love speaks to you directly.

Or you may be inspired to simply write your own words to this Sacred Presence.

I offer you three examples:

“Here’s the Dark Mother” by Peg Rubin

I am the Voice in the whirlwind,
in the place others call, and experience as,
Chaos.
I am above, below, within the Chaos.
I am the darkness.

And I am the One to seek when you need to source yourself in joy,
in peace, in turbulence.

But beyond, beyond, way beyond
the normal experience of darkness,
I invite you into the Darkness—beyond and before and after Time.

This is your Source, your Origin.
If things fall apart,
if you fall apart,
come into my all-holding embrace.

I am the energy that shapes and holds universes together.
Can I do any less for you?

There is pressure in my holding
and incalculable power—so after a time of rest you may begin to feel the pressure
of new birth—persistent, insistent.

I who shape galaxies
do not hesitate to shape you—fiercely, perhaps—but truly to your most
elegant and beautiful design.
Your design—like the galaxy— 
is glorious to behold.

And in my vast darkness
I hold that pattern, and desire
you to recognize it, to become it.
You will not fly apart,
though it may feel like it.
I am holding you and
I am holding your becoming.

Black Madonna of Montserrat

Mother Wisdom Speaks

Christin Lore Weber

“I am the maiden of joy.

I am song in the wind and rain upon the rocks.

I am fair love and holy hope and the flight of the dove.

 I am earth, betrothed. I am mystical rose.

I am the mother of mystery.

I hold opposites together.

“I birth children and sever the cord with my teeth.

Those I love I send away to their lives.

 I am the cauldron of fire and the cup of milk.

I am the two edged knife.

“I am the old woman: I am the queen.

If you seek me you will find me everywhere.

I am the womb of wise blood.

I am the world’s crown. I am diamond. I am pearl.

 I shine with the wisdom of God.

“I am the circle of being.

I am glory — splendor of infinite life.

I am the spiral, the fullness of being, fully becoming,

 forever, world without end.”

~

Some of you I will hollow out.

 I will make you a cave.

 I will carve you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness.

 You will be a bowl.

You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain…

I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you.

 I will do this for the space that you will be.

 I will do this because you must be large.

A passage.

 People will find their way through you.

 A bowl.

People will eat from you

and their hunger will not weaken them to death.

A cup to catch the sacred rain….

Light will flow in your hollowing.

 You will be filled with light.

 Your bones will shine.

The round open center of you will be radiant.

I will call you Brilliant One.

 I will call you Daughter Who is Wide.

 I will call you transformed.

~

 (Originally published in “Circle of Mysteries: The Woman’s Rosary Book”, and “Woman Prayers” edited by Mary Ford-Gabowsky)

“In My Glad Hours” by Rainer Maria Rilke (words that express what I wish to say to this Presence of Love)

In my glad hours, I will make a city of your smile, a distant city that shines and lives. I will take one word of yours to be an island on which birches stand, or fir trees, quite still and ceremonial. I will receive your glance as a fountain in which things can disappear and above which the sky trembles, both eager and afraid to fall in.

I will know that all of this exists, that one can enter this city, that I have glimpsed this island and know exactly when there is no one else beside that fountain. But if I appear to hesitate, it is because I am not sure whether it is the forest through which we are walking or my own mood that is shaded and dark. (Rilke: Early Journals)  

With what words will you respond to the Sacred Feminine or in what words will this Presence of Love address you?

If you wish to send your words to me, please do so: amclaughlin@sympatico.ca 

Brian Swimme, Caryll Houselander, Jean Houston, POWERS OF THE UNIVERSE, Rainer Maria Rilke

Powers of the Universe: Transformation

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Transformation is among the most stunning of the powers of the universe.

Unlike the power of transmutation which creates small changes over time, transformation is sudden, dramatic.

One day in July, a few years ago at our community’s summer place, Mary noticed a nymph crawl out of the lake to attach itself to a plant. Mary, who has spent some twenty summers tending our lake, observing the life it contains, clearing deadwood, decay and weeds from its floor, knew what was about to happen. She carefully carried the plant with the nymph still attached up to the lodge. Then she invited everyone to come and watch the miracle. Within an hour the adult nymph had shed its tight skin, expanded its new body.

Before our wondering eyes, this pale, fragile, newly-emerged creature, its transparent wings delicate, took flight as a dragonfly.

Transformation.

In his DVD series “Powers of the Universe”, Brian Swimme notes that while transmutation is the power of change at the individual level, transformation is change that is worked into the whole universe by the individual.

Scientists believe that the universe was aiming towards life from the beginning, yet the universe had to transform itself over and over through almost 10 billion years to get to LIFE.  Early events in the universe are present in the early structures to which they gave birth.

Within stars, the birth of the universe is re-evoked, returning to its earlier stages.

Galaxies come to birth holding different eras in their structures. Galaxies enable planets which enable life.

These are transformative events leading to a time when more of the universe is present in one place.

Life is a way of holding a memory of an event. For example, in photosynthesis cells learn how to interact with the sun.

That learning process is remembered in the genes so it can be folded back out. Now that whole event of photosynthesis is here. It’s not a “one-off”. More of the universe is folded into it.  The memory is passed on by cells.

With the invention of sexuality, two beings fuse, the memories they carry shuffled together in new ways.

The ancestral tree remembers, folds itself into a new being, shuffling events, shuffling genes so new combinations can arise.

The energy that permeates the solar system has been there for all time. Elements of the earth came from the stars. Life holds together all these ancient events.

A colossal interweaving enables this moment to exist. We can’t say the universe is simply here “by luck”. Swimme says that the universe is aiming to participate in the creation of community, attempting to become involved in a four-dimensional way in every place to activate community.

We have to orient ourselves to the reality that the universe is aiming towards this.

We are invited into a huge responsibility as part of this unfolding. An individual’s experience can become the source for the recoding of the planet. All of cultural DNA can be recoded. The way in which we organize ourselves is recoding the genetics of other species.

With the appearance of the human we have the possibility of the transformation of the planet.

Swimme asks what laws we are proud of : ending slavery? votes for women? laws to protect animals? Where else do we see possibilities for transformation?

Today, as I write this, transformation is happening here in Canada, in the US, and spreading to countries around the planet that will affect the whole concept of policing, restoring a call to “serve and protect”. Practices such as racial profiling leading to harsh treatment, even to serious injury and death will no longer be tolerated either by political leaders or by the people of our countries.

As Canada‘s CBC News reported: Thousands of people took part in an anti-racism protest in downtown Toronto Friday (June 12, 2020). Protesters have called for greater accountability from Canada’s police agencies, cuts to policing budgets and acknowledgement of systemic racism in law enforcement. 

From small transmutations in our personal lives, we can consciously seek the larger changes that will alter the planet, testing them for their coherence within the powers of the universe, asking whether these changes will contribute to the enhancement of life, becoming transformative.

We are part of the unfolding of the four dimensions of the universe. The universe is present now, enfolded in the work we do.

The mystics and poets intuited this before the scientists sought proof. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a century ago that, “We are the transformers of Earth.  Our whole being, and the flights and falls of our love, enable us to undertake this task.”

One of the clearest descriptions of the experience of transformation at the personal level comes to us from the 20th century mystic, Caryll Houselander. After a long illness, a bout of scrupulosity, Caryll had an experience of God that removed her obsessive fears and gave her a profound peace.

She writes: It was in the evening, I think. The room was dark, and the flames of firelight dancing on the wall seemed almost to cause me pain when I opened my eyes…. I no longer attempted to translate my torment as particular sins; I had realized in a dim, intuitive way that it was not something I had done that required forgiveness, but everything I was that required to be miraculously transformed.

Jean Houston advises that when we are moving into an experience of transformation we should go looking for guidance from the mystics, writers and poets who have experienced this.  Welcome beauty into our lives. Know that we have within us a visionary process which is a source for the recoding of the planet. All the codings for the life of the unborn future are available in us. We are the recoding, the reset button

Brigid as Face of Sacred feminine, Dolores Whelan, Imbolc, Kate Fitzpatrick, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sharon Blackie

Women Rising Rooted

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Brigid of Faughart 2018 Festival, Ireland

Part Two

If we surrendered to Earth’s intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees.

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

At the end of a frigid Canadian January in 2018, I have come to Ireland for Brigid’s Festival of Imbolc, the day that welcomes Spring.

Brigid is the one who “breathes life into the mouth of dead winter”. In the front garden of my friend, Dolores Whelan, the first thing I see are snowdrops….then one purple crocus, two golden ones.

From a window on the upper floor, Dolores shows me where the Hill of Faughart can be seen, aligned with her home. Birthplace of Saint Brigid, 5th c. Abbess of the Monastery in Kildare, Faughart is ancient in memory, a place where the goddess Brigid was honoured in pre-Christian Ireland.  Snow drop and crocus, saint and goddess, growing from this earth.

The Oratory Dedicated to Brigid in Faughart

Brigid’s Festival honours both, and in the days that follow they merge in my awareness, become intertwined, embodied in the fiery women whom I meet: the volunteers who planned the events of the festival as well as the presenters, attendees, poets, artists, dancers, singers, writers… each aflame.

It is especially Dolores who embodies for me the spirit-energy of Brigid, who has taught me the rhythm of the seasons, their spiritual meaning, and shown me in her life what it means to live the qualities of Brigid: her focus, her alignment with earth and heaven.

In my days here I listen to the stories of women’s lives, told either as a formal part of the festival’s program or casually in conversation over coffee or a meal, or in a pause between sessions.

I listen as Sharon Blackie tells the story recounted in her book If Women Rose Rooted (September Publishing 2016).

With a PhD in Neuro-science, Sharon found herself in a corporate job where her inner self was dying. Through a labyrinthine journey, one she describes as the feminine form of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”, Sharon followed the lure to the west of Scotland and Ireland, living on land near the sea where her soul finds a home.

I walk through Una Curley’s art installation of her own “Camino Walk”, her story of walking away from a life of successfully functioning in a corporate position that left her empty inside. Una chose instead the uncertainty and bliss of life as an artist. Una says the way to begin is to tie a piece of thread to a rusty nail and let the life you have designed, the life that no longer serves your soul, unravel…

Part of her work traces the early flax industry of Ireland, rooted in the land, uniting the communities  around the flax fields in a common endeavour.
Una the artist (centre), Barbara the Beguine from Germany (right)  with me

Kate Fitzpatrick picks up her violin to express more profoundly than words her journey with women who sought in the land and soul of Ireland the Healed Feminine. Kate’s quest was to bring peace and forgiveness to her people in Northern Ireland. The story of her spiritual journey with the Celtic Horse Goddess Macha is told in her book Macha’s Twins (Immram Publishing, Donegal, Ireland 2017)

Ann McDonald leads us in sacred movement, in breathing exercises, finding the power in our solar plexus. Deeply grounded, we release a voice that is resonant. Ann creates songs, receiving those that come to her while walking in pilgrimage or while holding sacred space. Her songs at the Ritual for Brigid’s Feast at Faughart come from deep within, inviting grace to embrace those present in the Oratory.

Dolores, Una, Kate, Ann and Sharon are women whose lives differ on the outside. Yet I saw in each a life that is rooted in an inner passion, a deeply feminine connection with the land and a quiet walking away from cultural values that are out of harmony with and therefore destructive of the feminine soul.

I understand now that life can be found by returning to the ancient stories, and to the ancient spirituality that grew out of the land itself, a spirituality that honours women, that cares for the things of earth, that recognizes, as Rilke says, that we are of the same substance …here is his full poem:

 How surely gravity’s law

 strong as an ocean current

 takes hold of even

 the smallest thing

 and pulls it toward

 the heart of the world.

Each thing –

 each stone, blossom, child –

 is held in place

Only we in our arrogance

push out beyond what

 we each belong to –

 for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered

 to Earth’s intelligence

 we could rise up rooted,

 like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves

 in knots of our own making

 and struggle, lonely

  and confused.

So, like children

 we begin again

 to learn from the things

 because they are in

 God’s heart,

 they have never left him.

Tara_3_Hill[1]

trees on the crest of the Hill of Tara, Ireland

 

 

Christmas Rebirth, Jan Richardson, Jean Houston, Rainer Maria Rilke

Post-Christmas

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December 31, 2019

 

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

 

Christina Rossetti’s poem rises in me as I sit here at my computer, facing the window where “snow (has) fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow”. On this bleak mid-winter, post-Christmas day, I am wondering what words to send out to you, words that might bring hope, awaken joy, remind us all of the work that awaits us now that Christmas has come.

One Christmas morning a few years ago, my family’s pastor and friend Father Michael recalled words of Pope Francis. Speaking of Christmas celebrations, Francis called them a “sham” when we live in the midst of a world so riddled with wars. “Grinch” was Michael’s first response to the Pope’s words, he admitted…but he went on to accept the challenge that Francis issued. Michael ended his Christmas homily with a poem by American theologian Howard Thurman:

When the star in the sky is gone,
When the Kings and Princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost
To heal the broken
To feed the hungry
To release the prisoner
To teach the nations
To bring Christ to all
To make music in the heart.

 

Now the work of Christmas begins…that awareness sends me to seek guidance from other writers whose words illumine our lives. I turn first to Jean Houston, to a Christmas message posted a few years back on her Facebook page:

Throughout history and all over the world, people have felt a yearning to be more, a longing to push the membrane of the possible. Never so much more as those living today. People feel called to a life of new being. Much of the urgency that you may have felt these last years moving between stress and distress, the sense of living in an outmoded condition, the exhilaration before what is not yet, the dread of leaving the womb of the old era – comes from the birth pangs of a human and social evolution that is upon us.

 

Birth is a journey. Second birth is as great a journey. In the womb of new becoming it means laying down new pathways in the body and in the senses to take in the news of this remarkable world. It means extending the field of your psychology so that there is more of you to do so much of this. It demands that you choose a richer, juicier story, even a new myth, by which to comprehend your life and that you begin to live out of it. And, most important of all, it asks that you be sourced and re-sourced in God, spirit, the cosmic mind, the quantum field, – the love that moves the sun and all of the stars.

 

In the same spirit the poet Rilke urges:

 

Please celebrate this Christmas with the earnest faith that (God) may need this very anguish of yours in order to begin….Be patient and without resentment, and know that the least we can do is to make His Becoming no more difficult than Earth makes it for spring when it wants to arrive. Be comforted and glad. (Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke)

 

You and I hold within us such immense promise, such impossible possibility, in the “womb of new becoming” that Jean describes. Already we have experienced moments of knowing the “richer juicier story”, the “new myth” that we are invited to choose, to live. Already we have experienced moments of knowing ourselves sourced in “the love that moves the sun and all of the stars”. So let us “be comforted and glad” as we open to the newness descending into our heart’s womb, falling like “snow on snow” until all the space is filled with new life.

 

I offer to you a blessing for your new life, in these words

that poet Jan L. Richardson imagines Elizabeth speaking to Mary:

In blood

be thou blessed.

In flesh

be thou blessed.

In all you choose

in all you hold

in all you gather to you

be thou blessed.

In all you release

in all you return

in all you cast from you

be thou blessed.

In all that takes form in you

be blessed

in all that comes forth from you

be blessed;

in all thy paths

be thou forever blessed.

Ancient Irish Myths, Brigid as Face of Sacred feminine, Celtic Christianity, Dolores Whelan, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sacred Feminine, The Divine Feminine

Women Rising Rooted: Brigid’s Festival

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If we surrendered
to Earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted,
like trees.
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

At the end of a frigid Canadian January, I have come to Ireland for Brigid’s Festival of Imbolc, the day that welcomes Spring. Brigid is the one who “breathes life into the mouth of dead winter”. In the front garden of my friend, Dolores Whelan, the first thing I see are snowdrops….then one purple crocus, two golden ones.

20180126snow drops in Ireland

snowdrops in Dolores Whelan’s garden

From a window on the upper floor, Dolores shows me that the Hill of Faughart can be seen, aligned with her home. Birthplace of Saint Brigid, 5th c. Abbess of Kildare, Faughart is ancient in memory, a place where the goddess Brigid was honoured in pre-Christian Ireland. Snow drop and crocus, saint and goddess, growing from this earth.

Brigid’s Festival honours both, and in the days that follow the two merge in my awareness, become intertwined, embodied in the fiery women whom I meet: Dolores and the volunteers who planned the events of the festival as well as the presenters, attendees, poets, artists, dancers, singers, writers… each woman aflame.

I listen as they tell their stories, either as a formal part of the festival’s program or casually in conversation over coffee or a meal, or in a pause between sessions.

I listen as Sharon Blackie tells the story recounted in her book If Women Rose Rooted (September Publishing 2016). With a PhD in Neuro-science Sharon found herself in a corporate job where her inner self was dying. Through a labyrinthine journey, one she describes as the feminine form of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”, Sharon followed the lure of her heart to the northwest of Scotland and on to Ireland, living on land near the sea where her soul finds a home.

I walk through Una Curley’s art installation of her own “Camino Walk”, her story of walking away from a life of successfully functioning in a corporate position that left her empty inside. Una chose instead the uncertainty and bliss of life as an artist. Una says the way to begin is to tie a piece of thread to a rusty nail and let the life you have designed, the life that no longer serves your soul, unravel… Part of her work traces the early flax industry of Ireland, rooted in the land, uniting the communities around the flax fields in a common endeavor.

Kate Fitzpatrick picks up her violin to express more profoundly than words her journey with women as they sought in the land and soul of Ireland the Healed Feminine. Kate’s quest was to bring peace and forgiveness to her people. The story of her spiritual journey with the Celtic Horse Goddess Macha is told in her book Macha’s Twins (Immram Publishing, Donegal, Ireland 2017)

Ann McDonald leads us in sacred movement, in breathing exercises, finding the power in our solar plexus. Deeply grounded, we release a voice that is resonant. Ann creates songs, receives songs that come to her while walking in pilgrimage or while holding sacred space. Her songs at the Ritual for Brigid’s Feast at Faughart come from deep within, inviting grace to embrace those present in the Oratory.

 

20180201Faughart Oratory

The Oratory on Faughart Hill on Brigid’s Day, February 1, 2018

 

Dolores, Una, Kate, Ann and Sharon are women whose lives differ on the outside. Yet I saw in each a life rooted in an inner passion, a deeply feminine connection with the land and a quiet walking away from cultural values that are out of harmony with and therefore destructive of the feminine soul.

I understand now that life can be found by returning to the ancient stories, the ancient spirituality that grew out of the land itself, a spirituality that honours women, that cares for the things of earth, that recognizes, as Rilke says, that we are of the same substance …here is his full poem:

How surely gravity’s law
strong as an ocean current
takes hold of even
the smallest thing
and pulls it toward
the heart of the world.

Each thing –
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place

Only we in our arrogance
push out beyond what
we each belong to –
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to Earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted,
like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely
and confused.

So, like children
we begin again
to learn from the things
because they are in
God’s heart,
they have never left him.

(Rainer Maria Rilke)