Category: Main blog

In this beautiful meditation practice from Fr. Richard Rohr’s blog we invoke the power and presence of Mary Magdalene to integrate the feminine and masculine within.

Practice: Bride and Beloved

Today’s contemplative practice is inspired by the life of Mary Magdalene and her role as an icon and archetype for the full partnership of women in the divine. Psychotherapist Joan Norton offers a meditation in which we can all participate.

I’m grateful for the stories of Mary Magdalene because she fully lived a woman’s life of love and relationship, while also being a source of special spiritual knowledge. In her we find guidance for both the inner life of the spirit and the outer life of love. That has always been the role of the feminine face of God. I’m grateful for the pathways to self-knowledge that Mary Magdalene’s stories provide. . . .

Forever we have been told to seek the Kingdom within. Now . . . we seek to understand the feminine energy of God, which we can call the “Queendom within.” Together they are a whole known as the Divine. . . .

She Brings Goodness upon the Land

Close your eyes and feel your feet on the floor. Breathe a simple breath . . . and another breath even slower than the first one . . . and now another breath . . . still so slowly.

        You are safe here in this room, with your feet on the floor and the floor upon Mother Earth . . . your feet are feeling the warmth of the earth, so secure and so safe . . .

        Breathe again deeply and slowly . . . your feet are heavy now and comfortable on the floor . . .

        Once upon a time it was foretold that the Bridegroom would have a Bride and that goodness would be upon the land and healing would come from their union . . .

        Breathe . . .

        It was foretold that the two halves of God would be together as One . . .

        Wholeness is our birthright . . . Breathe deeply and remember your whole and sacred self . . .

        There was a time when we women knew ourselves to be in sacred partnership, knew ourselves to be the Sacred Complement to the Bridegroom . . . knew that masculine and feminine God meet within each human being . . .

        Breathe again slowly . . .

        Breathe into a place within your heart, a place of knowing yourself as Sacred Partner . . . as soul partner . . . as Bride and Beloved . . .

        It was foretold . . . and let that time be now . . . and let that sacred vessel be me . . .

        Sit in silence for a while and let images or feelings surface within you.

        (Allow 5 or 10 minutes.)

        Open your eyes and come back into the room, as you are ready.

What were your experiences during this meditation?

Joan Norton also offers this journal question, which is an important one for both women and men to reflect on.

In the Song of Songs (5:7) the bride says, “They beat me and wounded me and stripped my mantle from me.” In what ways do you feel women have been treated disrespectfully by your religion?

Joan Norton and Margaret Starbird, 14 Steps to Awaken the Sacred Feminine: Women in the Circle of Mary Magdalene (Bear & Company: 2009), 17–18.

Practice: Putting Flesh in the Game

Like the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the Black Lives Matter movement is working today to end the systemic injustices caused by white supremacy in the United States. At the same time, as scholar Walter Earl Fluker points out, there are real differences between the two movements and eras. Fluker writes:

The Black Lives Matter movement that began in 2013 is a hopeful sign of this new moment to which we are called. As a grassroots movement it bears similarities with the prophetic cadence of an earlier era when young black activists, many of them college and university students, were able to produce a critical tension among the black leadership of the civil rights movement and the larger society. In doing so, they elevated the struggle for freedom and jobs to a cultural revolution of black consciousness and political awareness. This new movement . . . incorporates some of the same logic but within a very different historical context and therefore agenda—particularly evidenced in the leadership of youth, women, and LGBTQIA activists.

It struggles not so much with the ghostly apparition of Jim Crow . . . but with the ghost of contested post-racialism that has reconfigured the radical egalitarian hypothesis into an assertion that since all lives matter, slogans like “black lives matter” dismiss the many others in our society who also have legitimate claims to identity, difference, and equal justice. In doing so, the ghost disguises itself yet again by minimizing the particularity and the disproportionate vulnerability of black youth in American society over and against the majority of other youth. . . .

Most importantly, the youth of this movement have placed their bodies on the line—they have put some flesh in the game; “This is flesh we’re talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.” Every church leader and scholar who is involved in the work of social and political transformation should follow the lead of these youth in being committed to placing his or her body on the line and putting some flesh in the game in new ways. In doing so, we will continue the legacies of those sainted martyrs whose broken bodies and dangerous memories rest just above our heads.

I resonate with Fluker’s call to those of us in leadership roles in the church and other organizations to join these young people in their mission. God put “flesh in the game” through the incarnation of Christ; we, too, are called to incarnate love with our own bodies in solidarity with those marginalized by unjust systems. Like Dorothy Day’s anti-Vietnam protests and Pedro Arrupe’s decision to allow his Jesuits to remain in El Salvador, our contemplation may very well lead us to action with unpopular and painful consequences. And yet, this too seems to be where the living flow of the Holy Spirit invites many of us.

Walter Earl Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted: The Future of the Black Church in Post-Racial America (New York University Press: 2016), 231‒232.

I found this message from my friend Mirabai Starr to be a very inspiring reminder that we have a long way to go and we can’t stop now. #dontgobacktosleep.

Beloved Friends & Family,

As the weeks roll by and Covid-19 continues to surge across America, many of us who activated around Black Lives Matter in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and way too many other unarmed Black folks, have drifted back into our worlds and away from the fire of racial justice.  This reminds me of how friends lovingly rally around those who have lost loved ones and then return to concerns of our own, leaving the mourner to the task of bearing the unbearable alone.  It’s understandable, but it’s not necessary.  We can do better.

Especially those of us who practice, teach and worship in predominantly white spiritual spaces.  It is more urgent than ever that we stay with the necessary work of disrupting white supremacy in our communities, starting with ourselves.

There are a couple of beautiful possibilities for ongoing activism and embodying solidarity with Black communities I would like to share with you.

My friend Rev. angel Kyodo Williams invites you to participate in the first-ever Great Radical Race Read (GR3), a five-week, transnational collective practice to transform race one circle, one conversation, one radical read at a time.

NOTE: The first of these events happened on the 5th of July but if you follow that link you can find out more about the ongoing work and subscribe to participate.

Planned prior to the twin pandemics of coronavirus and the scourge of white supremacy expressed through both police brutality and vigilante violence, the potential impact of GR3’s national education & conversation practice is ever more poignant, timely and necessary right now.

In the words of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, igniter of the so-called “untouchables” Dalit Movement for liberation — we will “educate, agitate and organize” people forward into love and justice.

Love is always, love is all. Enjoy this beautiful Stevie Wonder song with the poetic lyrics posted on this YouTube. Remember that you are held in love by the Divine, “Always.”

Very timely message in these times. This is a collaboration between our Seattle Peace Chorus Action Ensemble and the Seattle Iranian Choir. Enjoy.

This Practice comes from Fr Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation Blog.

Enjoy!

Practice: Go Where the Big Bang Leads You

Dr. Barbara Holmes offers us a reminder that while cosmology might be a new area of exploration for some of us, scientific questions and cosmological views of the world have always been valued by ancient and contemporary indigenous communities:

“Indigenous societies include science and theology and all other aspects of their culture as a part of their ordinary discourse, for the sciences have never been alienated from daily life. Ancient cosmologies assure us that reality is relational and will not be discovered through a microscope or an intricate mathematical formula; instead, it may be encoded in each event of creation.” [1]

The following practice by Walter Truett Anderson invites us to have a taste of such an integrated perspective. I hope you will take this playful thought experiment seriously the next time you are reading a book, washing the dishes, or brushing your teeth!

Let us assume, for the purposes of this thought experiment, that you are in general agreement with the big bang theory of the origins of the universe and contemporary thinking about its evolution—the explosion out of nothing; the conversion of gases to matter; the formation of stars and planets; the appearance of life on earth, and then of consciousness, and then of symbol-using, self-reflective human consciousness. If you do see things this way, and if you don’t believe yourself to be somehow separate from this series of events, you might try sometime—say, when you are brushing your teeth in the morning—contemplating the eminently rational proposition that what you are doing and seeing is an integral part of those processes: The universe is not only going about its mysterious business with quarks and black holes and supernovae; it is also brushing its (your) teeth.

Try it and see where it leads you. Where it leads me is into a sense of wonder, a new discovery of being akin to some of the fresh experiences so commonly recorded in the various enlightenment texts.

“What miracle is this!” goes a Zen saying. “I draw water and I carry wood.”

What miracle is this: Something emerges out of nothing and, fourteen billion years later, takes the form of words being written on a computer screen. Molecules spinning about the galaxy settle into the more or less stable forms of pine trees outside my window, an expanse of blue water, the Golden Gate Bridge. Others take the form of a woman in a gray pith helmet delivering the mail. What miracle is this: The debris settled out of long-dead stars takes the form of you reading a book.

[1] Barbara A. Holmes, Race and the Cosmos: An Invitation to View the World Differently, 2nd ed. (CAC Publishing: 2020), 120.

Walter Truett Anderson, The Next Enlightenment: Integrating East and West in a New Vision of Human Evolution (St. Martin’s Press: 2003), 219–220.

Image Credit: Una “rete” di rami all’Arte Sella (Wood and Art in the Forest of Italy) (detail), 2008, Arte Sella, Trento, Italy.

‘Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry’

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown writes for the Book Review about life during the pandemic.

I don’t know whose side you’re on,
but I am here for the people who work in grocery stores that glow in the morning
and close down for deep cleaning at night
right up the street and in cities I mispronounce,
in towns too tiny for my big black
car to quit, and in every wide corner
of Kansas where going to school means
at least one field trip to a slaughterhouse.

I want so little: another leather bound
book, a gimlet with a lavender gin, bread
so good when I taste it I can tell you
how it’s made.

I’d like us to rethink what it is to be a nation.
I’m in a mood about America today.
I have PTSD about the Lord.
God save the people who work in grocery stores.
They know a bit of glamour is a lot of glamour.
They know how much it costs for the eldest of us to eat.

Save my loves and not my sentences.
Before I see them, I draw a mole near my left dimple,
add flair to the smile they can’t see behind my mask.
I grin or lie or maybe I wear the mouth of a beast.
I eat wild animals while some of us grow up knowing what gnocchi is.
The people who work at the grocery don’t care.
They say, Thank you.
They say, Sorry,
We don’t sell motor oil anymore with a grief so thick
You could touch it.
Go on.
Touch it.
It is early.
It is late.
They have washed their hands.
They have washed their hands for you.
And they take the bus home.

As any of us who treasure “forest bathing” as the Japanese call it and feel most at home in among the trees can relate – there is a deep sense of community and cooperation. This short video illustrates the newest science around how and why the forest is in constant dialogue, and reminds us – there is only one forest. The only being…

FATHER EARTH  

Clarissa Pinkola Estes


There is a two-million year old man
No one knows.
They cut into his rivers
Peeled wide pieces of hide
From his legs
Left scorch marks
On his buttocks.
He did not cry out.
No matter what they did, he held firm.
Now he raises his stabbed hands
and whispers that we can heal him yet.
We begin the bandages,
The rolls of gauze,
The unguents, the gut,
The needle, the grafts.
We slowly, carefully turn his body
Face up,
And under him,
His lifelong lover, the old woman,
Is perfect and unmarked
He has laid upon
His two-million year old woman
All this time, protecting her
With his old back, his old scarred back.
And the soil beneath her
Is black with her tears.

Hello dear friends,
The last poem I posted from myself was at the end of my silent meditation retreat in a space where I knew I was connected to the forest and to everything deep in my heart.

But then I opened up the news again…

During my time in silence and isolation from the world, everything had changed… again. Another unarmed black man had been murdered by police and it seemed to have finally cracked open a deep wound in our society. The world had changed, my culture was changing (I hoped), I changed.

The poem changed.

Here is the new version:

What? I Am!
© Wakil David Matthews – May, 2020

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I am

I am singing a robin song.

A nuthatch song

A raven song

I am singing the dirge

Of the dying bees wasting in chemical soup
Of the suffering salmon dying in churning blades
Of the mourning Orca mother holding her dead baby.

I am reaching my roots deep into the Earth.

Intertwining

Connecting
Feeling
Hearing
The critters
the mycelium
the dirt

I am pulling the sap up through my bark.

I am reaching toward the golden sun.

I am feeling the pain

Of forests raging in black fire
Of the decimated rotting stumps remembering the rain forest
Of hemlocks and pine and elm consumed by disease

I am reflecting green light in a million different hues.

From Leaf
from Moss
From fern
From needle
From salal

I am swallowing poisonous pesticides
I am soil depleted and dead from mono-culture greed.

I am feeling the breeze on my bare skin.

I’m feeling the cold in my toes.

I am feeling the fear
the clenching of my bowels
the closing of my throat
the stiffening lungs and spiking fever.

I am the young black boy looking into the death eye
Of the white policeman’s revolver

I am the white policeman trembling inside
With a fear he cannot name.

We can’t breathe
but still we breathe.

I am singing a creek song.

I am singing a breeze song.

I am emerging from the sweat lodge
Remembering indigenous ancestors
Mourning for all that has been destroyed.

I am singing a song of protest
Of outrage
Of disgust
Of sorrow
Of hope
Of change.

I am the breeze.

I am the song.

I am afraid

I am delight.

I am despair.

I am hopeful.

I am heartbroken.

I am heart.

Only heart.

I am.

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