 The Goddess of Willendorf (found in Austria and dating from 30,000 to 25,000 B.C.)
When you make the two, one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the above as the below, and when you make the male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male, and the female not be female, then you shall enter the Kingdom. (Logion 22 from the Gospel of Thomas) What we are really doing here is reconstructing a vanished part of ourselves. We are attempting to bring back into conscious light that vanished part in order to unite with it and to learn from it the new modes of loving and action that are crucial to our survival. (Andrew Harvey from The Return of the Mother) Humanity is being taken to the point where it will have to choose between suicide or adoration. (Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) In the beginning, as the Scriptures attest (there was a beginning), the Universe is born from the inter-play between What if? Why not? and What next? (from star to the tiniest particle of possibility, the Blessed Trinity dwells in "divine complexity, subtlety, passion, and ecstatic humor" (Andrew Harvey)... The Goddess of Willendorf is a representation of the primordial tao-gospel and the matriarchal stage of human history. The Old Lady was the mystic-portal of all life, for all of life... from the within of primordial human community, the Goddess was experienced as nature, known, cherished, and adored as the Mother, and listened to for Her mystical guidance and astonishing ways... The creation myths of ancient "pre-civilizations" attest to the mystic-insight of a "cosmic copulation", or "divine marriage", originating existence... In the destruction of the beginning and matriarchal Way, came the patriarchal stage and "the shattering of the harmony of the old goddess archetypes" (Andrew Harvey). Separation and division became both "theological" and operational principles and practices: creator became separate from creation, the sacred feminine became separate from the divine masculine (and ultimately divorced), the human psyche became separate from its prior experience of unity, and the near-universal oppression of women became the one essential building-block of the newly empowered world civilizations... (we are still in this stage!)... Admittedly, these are very broad brush-strokes! But, it is important to understand this much in order to contemplate your personal choices! and the cultivation of your own mystical insights (which is, after all, the reason why you are here, alive, right now, on Planet Earth)... Patriarchy, or as Riane Eisler identifies it, "the dominator paradigm" is in the clear process of destroying this precious blue Planet -- so this is, in fact, much more than "just" your personal choice! Now, I have meandered through these thoughts and words to get to this point: while it is, practically speaking, impossible to return to "the beginning" and a renewed matriarchal society, it is nevertheless now of vital importance that the unity of the Sacred Feminine and the Divine Masculine be restored! Only you can do that! Oneness must be intentionally cultivated: understand yourself as being intimate with all of creation: you are not separate from any life or anything (read the mystics and the quantum physicists like St. Hildegard and Amit Goswami, Ph.D.)... Get into Rhythm: yes, everything is alive, everything moves (stars, atoms, oceans, trees: everything is part of a Universal Dance)... cultivate your contemplative view, return your awareness to the vibrations that hold every "single" thing together... (read St. Hildegard, Meister Eckhart, Hafiz, Andrew Harvery, Matthew Fox, Starhawk, and Ram Dass)... Practice adoration as a Way of Life: miracle is the ordinary way of being and seeing: seed, sex, and surrender are the primordial ingredients of life in "ordinary awareness of the Sacred Feminine": all life comes with an ecstatic surge of energy, a will to orgasm, and a hunger for more: not the "more" of a undisciplined run-amok, but the "more" of the "shifty mystic" who understands that she is shifting from separation into oneness, and from scarcity into a wholly-holy-abundance... Now, here is one final example and teaching: you know (if you are the least bit attentive to the news, and specifically to the murder of George Floyd and the world-wide call to end racism and support for Black Lives Matter) that millions of people are calling for justice for all... Yes! we need justice! There are no if's or but's, about it... There is, though, an important however, or addition, that must come into play: we need justice, but the deepest realms of justice can only be found in mercy... I give you the end of a golden string / Only wind it into a ball / It will lead you in at Heaven's gate / Built in Jerusalem's wall... (William Blake) In other words, we have "progressed" from innocence to power (some would identify this as a "fall"). How do we, then, "return" to innocence, or come to know "our original face" before we were born? To quote Blake again, And we are put on earth a little space / That we may learn to bear the beams of love... Social change still rooted in division or separation will never get us to where it is that we need to go. Yes, we need justice: but we also need a new justice, one that can no longer be undone! Here! is Heaven's gate: we are most alive in our mystic-dreams, when we, even for the briefest of moments, jump from our "here" into the possibility of a new "there" in our dream, it's then that we carry with us all life, all existence, higher and higher on the divine ladder of evolution: we need justice, but we hunger for mercy: the surety of Mama's loving arms, our lasting "Welcome Home"... In our dream-life, we can facilitate the unleashing of the "Strong Woman", the Mother of Mercy: a little bit of sacred imagination can lesson despair, a little bit more erases the edges of violence, oppression, and separation, still more sacred imagination can reconcile opposites, and still more can uncreate it! (Holy Moly, did you get that?!) (see Harold C. Goddard, William Blake's Fourfold Vision, in Sources by Theodore Roszak) The temporary respite provided by justice is the best that the Dominator Paradigm can offer. Power, privilege, greed, violence, eco-destruction, oppression, and exploitation cannot be overcome by reason... (sadly, of course)... But there is hope: hope in our bold mystic-encounter with What if? Why not? and What next? in our Sacred Imaginations: which is precisely what They did! It is in our dreams, our gardens, our art, our music, our laughter, our love-making, our delight, our ecstasy, our mercy, and our surety of a gentle harmony as the Way of the Old Lady of the Tao-Gospel that rEvolution happens: "automatic", if you will... Holy Moly, but I have to bring this thing to its conclusion! Okay, so here it is, from Dostoevsky's Dream of a Ridiculous Man: "I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth -- it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul forever... It was a dream, they say, delirium, hallucination... And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the great thing, and that's everything..." And just one more step: every 'other' whom you see, is in fact, yourself... this "no difference" is the essence of the Sacred Feminine... to the Primordial Tao-Gospel... In everything that exists, there is at work an imaginative force, which is determined by ideals. -- Plato
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 Perhaps the only real bug-a-boo in the spiritual life is our normal human tendency of attachment to desired outcomes -- of course, this is also true for relationships, business, sports, school, etc. We work for profit or for wage. We explore relationships for intimacy. We submit to better or worse educators for the grade... on and on and on... We always attach in order to get...
And what of the person who has no attachment to a desired outcome remaining? There is a story of St. Francis... This particular one occurs well after he was only marginally considered a fool and more often as a saint... As for what he thought of himself, no doubt it was as a fool, a rather exalted vocation when he came to think of it... So, here we have a saintly fool who begs in the streets, sings to the moon, and washes the wounds of lepers: and is confoundedly always happy. What might he say to us? thought a Bishop, or maybe it was just some local Big-Shot, anyway, Francis receives a message inviting him to a Big Dinner (everyone-who-is-anyone will be sure to show up): would the saint be so kind as to come and say a few words of blessing? Perplexed as to the why of this strange invite, Francis asks Brother Bernard what he should do? Bernard, being a former businessman, quickly sees the advantages of attending... Clare, whom Francis next consulted, said otherwise, "You know brother, you will not be happy there." And, as Francis turned away and scratched his beard, Clare added, "but perhaps you could make them happy." And so it was decided... What should I wear? was not a consideration. He had only the patched robe that he was wearing. Maybe he should wash up? He took a bath in the same stream as he washed his lepers... Ready now for his walk into town, a new thought plagued him: what should he take with him? Well, of course, he would take his empty cup... On the road now, Francis started praying and before long he was just walking with his mind completely enveloped by his love for the Divine Beloved: he took no notice of the rocks, of the path, of the trees, even of the sky: he was simply loving his Love... He didn't notice the farmer family dropping a biscuit into his cup, or the strange old lady who lived alone in her shack adding a few slices of vegetables from her garden... He didn't even recognize mean old Father Sylvester laughing as he added bitter herbs growing on the edge of the path... Arriving at the Palace of the Mayor, Francis horrifies the tidy butler and is ushered through the back door and into the kitchen where he is told to stand and wait for further instructions... Still being far away in a condition of spiritual inebriation he didn't notice the cook adding a rich broth to his now overflowing cup... The butler returns, and with an expectedly cruel flourish presents "the saint" to the waiting crowd of dignitaries... An ovation returns Francis to a surprised awareness of his having arrived at the Palace, "Wow!" he thought, "here I am! And they already filled my cup with food!" It was precisely at this moment that Francis realized that he had been the first and only one served (which horrified him), so he did what any fool, or saint, would do: he offered his cup to everyone. He blessed the food and passed the cup to the person on his right (the Bishop, of course). The Bishop, realizing full well his predicament, opted to consider Francis a saint after all, and well, why not play his game? He reached into the cup and took a smidgen of food and put it into his mouth... everyone watched in a group horrification... the Bishop smiled and said, "Pudding! Just like my mother used to make!" And he passed the cup to his right: into the hands of the Banker's wife... She, too, decided to play along with the saint: she reached into the cup and took a smidgen of food and put it into her mouth... another gasp of horrification engulfed the room... the Lady smiled and said, "Fried cabbage! Just like my father used to fix!" Without going into every detail of the passing cup, the general horrification, became the most wondrous thing ever! Everyone tasted the very favorite food of their childhood, and by the time the cup got back to Francis it was, once again, completely empty! He was so incredibly happy to have brought the cup with him! It was at this exact moment that the cook, with her twelve assistants entered the dining hall with the lavish meal they had prepared, fully expecting a normal dinner party, but of course, there was already nothing normal going on! It was, in fact, the banker's wife who whispered into the ear of the Bishop that she thought the Saint would be most happy if they were to carry all of this wonderful food down to the leper colony of the Saint... Torches led the way down the hill... it seemed that half the town had tagged along to see the Big-Shots giving food to the very, very, Little-Shots... And so they did! And Bernard and Clare in sort-of-scolding voices to Francis, said "What took you so long?!" All Francis could say was, "I dunno, guess I got lost." What was that stuff about attachment to desired outcomes and the spiritual life? Well, here it is: "I got lost". Huh? The spiritual life both begins and ends when the "I" gets out of the way: gets lost: gone. When our identity is finally only loving we are home free. There is "no self" to realize: no enlightenment: no salvation: no Big Deal... There is, though, the smile of the Buddha. There is the holy tear of the Christ. And there is the secure embrace of the Mother. As there are the empty cups of the Saints... and the only thing that matters. You can read it for yourself in the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel. It can be summarized as I was hungry and you did not feed me. Or better, I was hungry and you did feed me... The spiritual life is becoming an empty cup, for others... And loving means compassionate action: loving is creative: loving is creating the conditions (justice and peace) in which everyone and everything (like the entire Planet) will flourish... If you want it in a nutshell, here it is: We have been created by Love, for Love, to become Love. (Simone Weil) That is it and that is everything!  St. Francis of the rEvolution
According to the Gospel of St. John, Jesus said: "I came that you might have life, and have it abundantly." More often than not, those words have been preached and assumed to mean a spiritual gift or an unfolding-into-essence... But looking into the news of the day, that is simply not good enough. And it definitely is not about Jesus blessing acquisition and greed -- as the foundation of racism and racist / classist economics! It is all about rEvolution. Think about it. Jesus quite clearly, with a powerful emphasis, condemns greed with his "Woe to you rich!" And blesses Justice with his "Blessed are you poor". Any economic system with an organizing principle of unlimited privilege, profit, and power for a few over and above their legitimate needs, is contrary to the Wisdom of Jesus... Seriously. Why else would St. Basil have said, in the early days of the Church, "The rich take what belongs to everyone, and claim they have a right to own it, to monopolize it"? So, an abundant life is something other than wealth, just as it is different from only spiritual gift. Rather, abundance is the foundational principle of partnership economics and community of faith: as the mundane so to the spiritual (in Jesus' mind). Partnership economics is simply community love-in-action, lived out, intentionally, day-by-day. Again, looking at the news of the day, there is a hell-of-a-lot of "looting" going on. Seeing that news, some folks summon up their self-righteous anger: shouting "Criminals"! And yet, they are silent at the legal looting that allows for fewer than 1% of the population to own better than 50% of the national personal wealth: of course, all without paying a living wage to their employees: and the disparity between that 1% and the rest grows by leaps and bounds everyday! (Note: that "disparity" is trillions of dollars.) It is all about rEvolution. Towards an "abundant life" is the call of the Master to rEvolution! Certainly not a "call to arms" in the violent sense: but a reaching for the dream of St. Francis... Famously known and revered as the little poor man, he lived a radical poverty to provide a sample of rEvolution: we can organize intentional communities of 'abundant life' wherein everyone will have sufficient food, shelter, loving-care, purpose, with a pursuit of justice and peace, and the holy joy of intentional community -- which was exactly what the first Christian communities did and how they lived... instead of being co-opted by the greed of either priests or empires (this co-option eventually, and obviously, did occur). Sadly, the rEvolution of both Jesus and St. Francis floundered and flounder still, though of course, with the example of saints and heroes to keep alive the dream... Modern-day saints and heroes like: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, Thomas Merton, Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai, Mahatma Gandhi, Danilo Dolci, Lanza del Vasto, Martin Luther King, Jr., Oscar Romero, Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, Cesar Chavez, Vandana Shiva, Amma, Arundhati Roy, Fr. Louis Vitale, OFM, Angela Davis, and Dolores Huerta, have, or are, continuing the rEvolution: it is our single most important task in life to join in... to help in the bending of the arc of time towards an increase of justice and the Beloved Community for All! So, it is all about you! How you might ask? Take a gander through Matthew 25 for a viable plan of action... a blueprint, if you will... for it's on these wings that the rEvolution cometh! |
AuthorRobert Daniel Smith was privileged to serve the homeless and marginalized for 30 years in California. He is living now almost within shouting distance of the Twin Cities. He is a poet, artist, writer, and long-time Companion of the Way still dreaming... Archives
May 2022
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