We wake in the same small room from the deep sleep of good children, to the soft sound of wind through the casuarinas trees and gentle sleep-breathing rhythm of waves on the shore. We run bare-legged to the beach, which lies smooth, flat and glistening with fresh wet shells after the night’s tides. The morning swim has the nature of a blessing to me, a baptism, a rebirth to the beauty and wonder of the world. We run back tingling to hot coffee on our small back porch. Two kitchen chairs and a child’s table between us fill the stoop on which we sit. With legs in the sun we laugh and plan our day.
We wash the dishes lightly to no system, fo there are not enough to matter. We work easilty and instinctively together, not bumping into each other as we go back and forth about our tasks. We talk as we sweep, as we dry, as we put away, discussing a person or a poem or a memory. And since our communication seems more important to us than our chores, the chores are done without thinking.
And then to work, behind closed doors neither of us would want to invade. What release to write so that one forgets oneself, foregets one’s companion, forgets where one is what one is going to do next—to be drenched in work as one is drenched in sleep or in the sea. Pencils and pads and curling blue sheets alive with letters heap up on the desk. And then, prikced by hunger, we rise at last in a daze, for a late lunch. Reeling a little from our intense absorption, we come back with relief to the small chores of getting lunch, as if they were lifelines to reality—as if we had indeed almost drowned in the sea of interllectual work and welcomed the fimr ground of physical action under our feet.
After an hour or so of practical jobs and errands we are ready to leave them again. Out onto the beach for the afternoon where we are swept clean of duties, of the particular, of the practical. We walk up the beach in silence, but in harmony, as the sandpipers ahead of us move like a corps of ballet dancers keeping time to some interior rhythm inaudible ot us. Intimacy is blown away. Emotions are carried out to sea. We are even free of thoughts, at least of their articulation; clean and bare as whitened driftwood; empty as shells, ready to be filled up again with the impersonal sea and sky a nd wind. A long afternoon soaking up the outer world.
And when we are heavy and relaxed as the seaweek under our feet , we return at dusk to the warmth and intimacy of our cottage. We sip sherry at leisure in front of a fire. We start supper and we talk. Evening is the time for conversation. Morning is the time for mental work, I feel, the habit of school-days persisting in me. Afternoon is for physical tasks, the out-of-door jobs. But the evening is for sharing, for communication (and for me for creative outpouring). Is it he uninterrupted dark expanse of the night after the bright semented day, that frees us to each other? Or does the infinite space and infinite darkness dwarf and chill us, turning us to seek small human sparks?
Communication—but not for too long. Because good communication is stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after. Before we sleep we go out again into the night. We walk up the beach under the stars. And when we are tired of walking, we life flat on the snad under a bolw of stars. We feel stretched, expanded to take in their compass. They pour into us until we are filled with stars, up to the brim.
This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy—even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.
And then at last from the immensity of interstellar space, we swing down to a particular beach. We walk back to the lights of the cottage glowing from the dark mists of trees. Small, safe, warm and welcoming, we recognize our pinpoint human match-light against the mammoth chaos of the dark. Back again to our good child’s sleep.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Gift from the Sea
Only when one is connected to one’s own core is one connected to others.
The stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.
This is an end toward which we could strive—to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations, and activities.
Nothing feeds the center so much as creative work, even humble kinds like cooking and sewing. Baking bread, weaving cloth, putting up preserves, teaching and singing to children, must have been far more nourishing than being the family chauffeur or shopping out super markets, or doing housework with mechanical aids.
The stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.
This is an end toward which we could strive—to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations, and activities.
Nothing feeds the center so much as creative work, even humble kinds like cooking and sewing. Baking bread, weaving cloth, putting up preserves, teaching and singing to children, must have been far more nourishing than being the family chauffeur or shopping out super markets, or doing housework with mechanical aids.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
DDD encore
The question then occurred to me: Well, if that’s so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what’s the big deal? Why all this bother?
The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It’s the language the soul understands.
And yet—and here was the crux—the images that have pervaded our speech, thought, and feeling about the Divine have told us the Divine is exclusively male. They have told us there is only one form and that form is masculine. Indeed, the image, language, and metaphor of God as male has been used so exclusively, for so long (about Five thousand years) that most people seem to believe God really is male.
My friend and mentor Dr. Beatrice Bruteau once described it to me like this: The Absolute Reality, the I Am, can be likened to a dancer. And the forms that the absolute takes can be likened to the dances. The Absolute, she said, dances many dances, in a variety of movements that are constantly giving way into others. When we see the dance, the dancer takes on expression, shape, immediacy, presence, and meaning for us. We can observe the relationship of the dance to the dancer, and we understand that the choreography is infinite. We cannot look at just one movement or one dance and say, that is the dancer.
139
As I pondered other reasons for recovering female images of the Divine, I remembered the biblical claim that humans were made in the image of God. Now since human meant both male and female, didn’t that mean both male and female should be used when referring to the Divine? It seemed so logical, so simple, so obvious, that it made one wonder, as McFague put it, “what all the fuss is about.”
She suggests that the fuss is because Western theology has been infected by a fear of female sexuality. She points out that while sexuality is cloaked in the male metaphor for God, it seems blatent in a female metaphor. We are so familiar with male metaphors and their sexuality has been so masked that when female metaphors appear, they seem overtly sexual by comparison. They register in us as taboo.
The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It’s the language the soul understands.
And yet—and here was the crux—the images that have pervaded our speech, thought, and feeling about the Divine have told us the Divine is exclusively male. They have told us there is only one form and that form is masculine. Indeed, the image, language, and metaphor of God as male has been used so exclusively, for so long (about Five thousand years) that most people seem to believe God really is male.
My friend and mentor Dr. Beatrice Bruteau once described it to me like this: The Absolute Reality, the I Am, can be likened to a dancer. And the forms that the absolute takes can be likened to the dances. The Absolute, she said, dances many dances, in a variety of movements that are constantly giving way into others. When we see the dance, the dancer takes on expression, shape, immediacy, presence, and meaning for us. We can observe the relationship of the dance to the dancer, and we understand that the choreography is infinite. We cannot look at just one movement or one dance and say, that is the dancer.
139
As I pondered other reasons for recovering female images of the Divine, I remembered the biblical claim that humans were made in the image of God. Now since human meant both male and female, didn’t that mean both male and female should be used when referring to the Divine? It seemed so logical, so simple, so obvious, that it made one wonder, as McFague put it, “what all the fuss is about.”
She suggests that the fuss is because Western theology has been infected by a fear of female sexuality. She points out that while sexuality is cloaked in the male metaphor for God, it seems blatent in a female metaphor. We are so familiar with male metaphors and their sexuality has been so masked that when female metaphors appear, they seem overtly sexual by comparison. They register in us as taboo.
traveling back to my ponderings in August....From the Dance of the Dissident Daughter--Sue Monk Kidd
The following Sunday, home again, I returned to my own church. The deacons sat together on the front pews. All of them, I noticed, were men. The ministers—three more men—sat in huge chairs up front. I looked from one stained glass window to another. Most of the figures were men.
As the service began, I became acutely aware that every hymn and biblical passage used only masculine pronouns, as if that was all there was. Until then I had accepted that when it said men and brotherhood, that somehow meant me, too. But now, in a place much deeper than my head, I didn’t feel included at all.
I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.
Until that moment I’d had no idea just how important language is in forming our lives. What happens to a female when all her life she hears sacred language indirectly, filtered through male terms? What goes on deep inside her when decade after decade she must translate from male experience into female experience and then apply the message to herself? What does that experience imprint inside her? Does it keep exclusive maleness functioning insider her, at least at the level of experience and symbol?
“Women have not only been educationally deprived throughout historical time in every known society, they have been excluded from theory formation,” Lerner writes in The Creation of Patriarchy. That is we’ve been excluded from creating symbol and myth, from the meaning-making process that explains and interprets reality.
This has been particularly true within the church. There women have reigned in the nurseries and the social halls but have been mostly absent from pulpits and places where theology, policy, and spiritual meanings are forged. Within the church, women have been more apt to polish the brass, arrange the flowers, put cookies on a plate, clean up, keep the nursery, be led, pass the credit, look pretty, and be supportive. In other words, women have frequently functioned more as church handmaids than religious meaning makers or symbol creators.
The Church Handmaid is a woman who tries to be a Good Daughter to the Church, trying to be everything it wants and expects her to be. Throughout my life I’d done this without question.
Now, sitting in church, I was full of questions. Why was God always the God of Abraham, never the God of Sarah? Why was it often impossible, rare or difficult for a woman to hold real power in the church? Women had been the largest consumers of church, yet we’d held a vastly disproportionate amount of power compared to our numbers and commitment there. Why had my father always chaired the finance committee and my mother the social committee, even though my mother could manage household budgets and figures with the acumen of an accountant?
Some of these differences may be due to biology, but much of it has come through historical conditioning. My personal belief is that while differences exist, women and men both have an innate and equal ability to engage in the full range of human experiences. (Men can nurture and women can quest for autonomy.) Neither men nor women should be limited to a narrow category of what’s considered feminine if your female or masculine if you’re male. I also believe that men and women contain both “masculine” and “feminine” qualities and that the goal is to balance, blend, and honor both within the individual and culture.
It seemed clear that patriarchy has valued rationality, independence, competitiveness, efficiency, stoicism, mechanical forms, and militarism-things traditionally associated with the “masculine.” Less valued are beingness, feeling, art, listening, intuition, nurturing, and attachment—things traditionally associated with the “feminine.”
As a patriarchal institution, Christianity has tended to value “masculine attributes more than those connected with the feminine.” Author Margaret Starbird put it succinctly: “Institutional Christianity, which has nurtured Western civilization for nearly two thousand years, may have been built over a gigantic flaw in doctrine—a theological ‘San Andreas Fault’: the denial of the feminine.”
Often competitiveness, logic, objectivity, and matters of the head have found preeminence over concerns with inclusiveness, relatedness, or matters of the heart. I recognized the imbalance in the way dogma, theological rightness, triumph of the “Christian Way,” oratorical sermons, church business, nationalism, individual pursuit, conversion figures, and breaking scripture down into its various hermeneutics have frequently been valued over feelings, tears, peace gentleness, group consciousness, and gathering humanity together as a family.
I tried to picture a culture where the valuing was equal. In my wilder moments I imagined a society that paid child care workers, teachers homeless advocates, poets, and bird-watchers as much as it paid professional football players, generals, and corporate CEOs. I tried to imagine a church where it mattered less what your beliefs and practices were and more how relationships were nurtured and healed. I tried to imagine a church that did not support its country’s wars as a matter of patriotic course and instead stood against the devastation and suffering they caused in people’s lives.
As the service began, I became acutely aware that every hymn and biblical passage used only masculine pronouns, as if that was all there was. Until then I had accepted that when it said men and brotherhood, that somehow meant me, too. But now, in a place much deeper than my head, I didn’t feel included at all.
I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.
Until that moment I’d had no idea just how important language is in forming our lives. What happens to a female when all her life she hears sacred language indirectly, filtered through male terms? What goes on deep inside her when decade after decade she must translate from male experience into female experience and then apply the message to herself? What does that experience imprint inside her? Does it keep exclusive maleness functioning insider her, at least at the level of experience and symbol?
“Women have not only been educationally deprived throughout historical time in every known society, they have been excluded from theory formation,” Lerner writes in The Creation of Patriarchy. That is we’ve been excluded from creating symbol and myth, from the meaning-making process that explains and interprets reality.
This has been particularly true within the church. There women have reigned in the nurseries and the social halls but have been mostly absent from pulpits and places where theology, policy, and spiritual meanings are forged. Within the church, women have been more apt to polish the brass, arrange the flowers, put cookies on a plate, clean up, keep the nursery, be led, pass the credit, look pretty, and be supportive. In other words, women have frequently functioned more as church handmaids than religious meaning makers or symbol creators.
The Church Handmaid is a woman who tries to be a Good Daughter to the Church, trying to be everything it wants and expects her to be. Throughout my life I’d done this without question.
Now, sitting in church, I was full of questions. Why was God always the God of Abraham, never the God of Sarah? Why was it often impossible, rare or difficult for a woman to hold real power in the church? Women had been the largest consumers of church, yet we’d held a vastly disproportionate amount of power compared to our numbers and commitment there. Why had my father always chaired the finance committee and my mother the social committee, even though my mother could manage household budgets and figures with the acumen of an accountant?
Some of these differences may be due to biology, but much of it has come through historical conditioning. My personal belief is that while differences exist, women and men both have an innate and equal ability to engage in the full range of human experiences. (Men can nurture and women can quest for autonomy.) Neither men nor women should be limited to a narrow category of what’s considered feminine if your female or masculine if you’re male. I also believe that men and women contain both “masculine” and “feminine” qualities and that the goal is to balance, blend, and honor both within the individual and culture.
It seemed clear that patriarchy has valued rationality, independence, competitiveness, efficiency, stoicism, mechanical forms, and militarism-things traditionally associated with the “masculine.” Less valued are beingness, feeling, art, listening, intuition, nurturing, and attachment—things traditionally associated with the “feminine.”
As a patriarchal institution, Christianity has tended to value “masculine attributes more than those connected with the feminine.” Author Margaret Starbird put it succinctly: “Institutional Christianity, which has nurtured Western civilization for nearly two thousand years, may have been built over a gigantic flaw in doctrine—a theological ‘San Andreas Fault’: the denial of the feminine.”
Often competitiveness, logic, objectivity, and matters of the head have found preeminence over concerns with inclusiveness, relatedness, or matters of the heart. I recognized the imbalance in the way dogma, theological rightness, triumph of the “Christian Way,” oratorical sermons, church business, nationalism, individual pursuit, conversion figures, and breaking scripture down into its various hermeneutics have frequently been valued over feelings, tears, peace gentleness, group consciousness, and gathering humanity together as a family.
I tried to picture a culture where the valuing was equal. In my wilder moments I imagined a society that paid child care workers, teachers homeless advocates, poets, and bird-watchers as much as it paid professional football players, generals, and corporate CEOs. I tried to imagine a church where it mattered less what your beliefs and practices were and more how relationships were nurtured and healed. I tried to imagine a church that did not support its country’s wars as a matter of patriotic course and instead stood against the devastation and suffering they caused in people’s lives.
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