In Memoriam: Rosemary Radford Ruether

Yet another of my great feminist and spiritual teachers has died.  Rosemary Radford Ruether, ecofeminist Catholic theologian, died on May 21st.  Her work challenged my thinking and gave me new understandings and perspectives. She was a prolific writer, authoring hundreds of articles and 36 books, and was the quintessential scholar and historian of world religions and ecofeminist theologies. A scholar of the scholastics, she examined three strains of Western thought: 1) the Hebraic tradition; 2) Platonic-Greek; and 3) Pauline-Augustinian in all their complexities to develop an understanding of the nature of Western thought and its implications for the domination of women, nature, and colonized others. As she described her own approach, she drew out the contradictions and complexities in these theologies, careful “to see both negative and positive aspects . . . and to be skeptical of exclusivist views on either side” (Women and Redemption, 222).  Her thought and writing were ever-expanding, and always striving “to see the dominant system of patriarchy, including its racism, classism, and colonialism, in critical perspective,” and to put herself “in places where in solidarity with its victims, I can see it from its underside” (Women and Redemption, 222). To this end, she brought together the ecofeminist theologies of women from around the globe, particularly the global south.[i] Her thought also grew to include critiques of militarism and corporate globalization.  Needless to say, I cannot begin to encompass all of her contributions here.  So, I will focus on the ways her thought has most deeply influenced and inspired my own.

I first encountered Ruether’s thought in the piece excerpted from her Sexism and God-Talk in Plaskow and Christ’s Weaving the Visions, in which she not only challenged the assumption of the male divine, but also argued that “male monotheism reinforces the social hierarchy of patriarchal rule, . . . [and] “begins to split reality into a dualism of transcendent Spirit (mind, ego) and inferior and dependent physical nature . . . whereas the male is seen essentially as the image of the male transcendent ego of God, woman is seen as the image of the lower material nature. . . .Gender becomes a primary symbol for the dualism of transcendence and immanence, spirit and matter” ( 251-252).  In a few sentences, she laid out the basic premise of the ecofeminist theological critique of Western thought.

In this piece, Ruether provided evidence of the many ways that the Bible itself challenges male monotheism, showing how Yahwism appropriates the goddess Asherah of its conquered peoples, incorporating female images of God -- God as mother and as woman in travail, particularly when describing the compassionate and loving aspects of the divine, as in the Hebrew word of compassion and mercy, rechem, meaning womb.  She also explored the wisdom tradition of the logos of Sophia, the paired images for God as male and female in the parables, and notions of Yahweh as the god of liberation from bondage.

Two points Ruether made in this piece had a particularly profound impact on my understanding.  The first is her discussion of the proscription of idolatry.  This proscription precludes any representation of the divine – pictorial or verbal – no images of God as the old man with the white beard and no verbal depictions of God as male or as Father.  What a profound and liberating recognition that was for me.

The other was Ruether’s critique of Christianity’s reliance on the divine as parental.  This model, she claimed, depicts God as a “neurotic parent who doesn’t want us to grow up,” in which the gravest sin against God is to become morally autonomous and responsible, creating “spiritual infantilism as a virtue” (160).  Her discussion of God as parent would always facilitate discussions with students about their issues with imaging God as a parent, when their experiences with their own parents were negative, dominating, or abusive.

Finally, in this piece she laid out the foundation of the ecofeminist theology that would underscore all of her subsequent work: “Feminist theology must fundamentally reject this dualism of nature and spirit” (161).  In the original work, Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether developed her ecofeminist theology, questioning the hierarchy of human over nonhuman nature as well as other structures of social domination, declaring the God/ess as the “primal Matrix, the ground of being . . . Spirit and matter are not dichotomized but are the inside and outside of the same thing” (Sexism, 85).

In the postscript to Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether offered a powerful analysis of the ways this dualism, in which “woman/body/nature” are regarded as inferior to “man/spirit/culture,” contributes to the subjugation of women.  The first of the three levels of subjugation of women  -- “the subjugation of her womb, of access to her body” -- seems particularly pertinent given the increasing curtailing of women’s reproductive freedom in this country.  Inscribed in ancient laws that continue to influence Western consciousness and law is the idea that women’s bodies and their offspring belong first to their fathers and then their husbands.  She cited Catholic church doctrine that birth is shameful, and that only through a second birth of baptism, administered by male priests, is “the filth of mother’s birth remedied” (260). But the following in particular still seems the perspective of many of the new anti-choice legislation arising in state after state: “Woman is taught that the worst of sins, the worst of crimes, is to deflect the male seed from its intended course in her womb. This is more sinful than rape, (emphasis mine), for the rape of a woman does not interfere with the purposes of the seed, while contraception wastes the precious seed and defeats its high purposes. . . . She must obediently accept the effects of these holy male acts upon her body, must not seek to control their effects, must not become a conscious decision maker about the destiny of her own body” (261).  It is this deep-seated, long-held belief that I believe is the true intention, even if subconscious, of those who would seek to restrict women’s reproductive autonomy.

The second level of women’s subjugation, exploited labor, has modified a bit since Ruether first wrote this forty years ago, but it is still the case that “black women, brown women, immigrant women toil silently in the background” (262), and for most women, the double day of paid employment and unpaid labor of tending children and households continues.

The third level, the rape of the earth and its peoples, has if anything increased. As she wrote, “The labor of dominated bodies, dominated peoples. . . provides the tools through which the earth is despoiled and left desolate. Through the raped bodies the earth is raped. Those who enjoy the goods distance themselves from the destruction” (263). The destruction of the Amazon rainforest to supply beef to distant consumers; the mining of the earth of African nations to supply gold, diamonds, and platinum to bejewel the bodies of the wealthy and leisured; the routing of oil pipelines through Native American reservations and ceded territories and the drilling of tar sands oil causing death and destruction to the indigenous populations and the earth so that the developed world can continue to burn fossil fuels to drive and fly and live in heated comfort – these are just some of the ways this subjugation plays out every day.

Yet, forty years ago, Ruether was hopeful for a metanoia – a true change of heart and consciousness – in which we would reject this dualism and instead live in right relation with each other and the earth.  Nevertheless, writing just a few years later, she would forewarn of the reality we are living today, urging that “we must effect this metanoia quickly . . . By 2030 CE it may be too late, or at least too late to save much of the life-capacity of the biosphere that could be saved now. Instead, we will find ourselves operating on the other side of global catastrophes, with much narrower options” (Gaia, 86).

In Ruether’s later work, she would incorporate her understandings of the new physics into her rejection of dualism, describing the matrix as “the dancing energy. . . .of the interconnections of the whole universe” (Gaia, 248).  She also proposed her key concept of “biophilic mutuality” – that all life energies have a desire to be in relationship with each other, and that the deep ontological structures that underlie this propensity are what she considered to be God. “God is not a ‘being’ removed from creation; . . . God is the source of being that underlies creation and grounds its nature and future potential for continual transformative renewal in biophilic mutuality” (Women and Redemption, 223.)

She believed in the deep interdependency and kinship of all beings, envisioning the good society of “communities of celebration and resistance,” in which true metanoia is practiced, replacing “the death system” with a “joy in the goodness of life” where we become good listeners of each other’s stories, and “take the time to sit under trees, look at water, and at the sky . . . and get back in touch with the living earth” (Gaia, 268-270).

Ruether’s thoughts on our ephemeral existence seem an appropriate benediction on her extraordinary life and work: “Then, like bread tossed on the water, we can be confident that our creative work will be nourishing to the community of life, even as we relinquish our small self back into the great Self. Our final gesture, as we surrender ourself in the Matrix of life, then can become a prayer of ultimate trust: ‘Mother, into your hands I commend my spirit. Use me as you will in your infinite creativity’” (Gaia, 253).

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Notes

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing.  San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.

  ______. Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., Inc., 2005.

______. “Sexism and God-Language,” in Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ, eds. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989: 151-162.

 ______. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. 10th Anniversary ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983, 1993.    

______, ed. Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996.

______. Women and Redemption: A Theological History. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1998. 

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[i] See particularly Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion; Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions; and Women and Redemption: A Theological History.  

Interbeing

“Every life bears in some way on every other.”

                                                   - Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones

This line from Susan Griffin’s profound investigation into the ways our lives are interwoven through war has been echoing in my mind frequently in recent days.  Perhaps this has been prompted by the upcoming anniversary of my heart transplant – that day on which another’s life, and death, bore so intimately on mine, and continues to.  Living with my life so intertwined with another’s has brought an expanded awareness of how my life, my choices, my actions bear on the lives of others.

This truth echoes throughout ancient wisdom traditions -- in the indigenous recognition that all our relations -- animals, plants, water, earth, stone -- are kin; in the African concept of Ubuntu -- “I am because we are;” in the Buddhist precept of interdependent co-arising. We know this in our every breath through the reciprocal exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between all plant and animal life on this planet. It is in the very nature of the universe – in the immediate effect of one particle upon another; in the way that being observed changes an electron wave into a particle; and in the way the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can create a cyclone to arise on the other side of the earth.[i]  It is in the symbiotic relation of trees and mycorrhizal fungi, and of trees to each other – in the ways fir and birch grow together, reliant on the fungi to facilitate the mutual exchange of nutrients, of carbon and water through the network of roots, and of how the mother tree nurtures the young saplings at her feet.[ii] These truths of the interrelatedness of everything on earth, in the universe, in the cosmos, I know in a very embodied way.

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (affectionately known as “Thay,” meaning “teacher”) beautifully described this Buddhist principle of interdependent co-arising, which he called simply “interbeing”:

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. . . .

We cannot point out one thing that is not here—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper.  . . . ‘To be’ is to inter-be. We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing” (Peace, 95-96) .

What a wondrous world this is, that we dwell in everything and all things dwell in us.  Our lives, our thoughts, our actions manifest in the lives of all beings. This comes with great blessings, and great responsibilities.  As Thay went on to observe, the affluence of some is made of the poverty of others, the foods grown for Western markets are made of the malnutrition of those whose gardens were plowed under for cash crops, the power and security of First World Nations is made of the death and displacement of thousands. His is a reminder that, “we are responsible for everything that happens around us” (Peace, 98).

Every time I drive my car, I am responsible for the burning of more fossil fuels, contributing to climate change, polluting the air and the soil. It weighs on me. Even as I testified and wrote letters and marched and contributed to stopping the Line 3 pipeline that would bring tar sands oil through pristine wild rice lakes, in my driving my car I am also the one profiting in corporate offices, siting the pipeline, violating treaty rights, fracking the earth, destroying the boreal forests and all the beings who dwell within it.  We inter-are. 

By the same token, every time I plant a tree, I help to take more carbon out of the atmosphere and increase oxygenation; every time I pick up litter on the beach, I reduce a bit of microplastic pollution, perhaps save the life of a bird or a fish. I’d like to think that when I treat another with kindness, it ripples onto others. In the years I was teaching, I would take the students in my Women and Spirituality class to visit our local Benedictine retreat center, where the director, Sister Lois, would engage us all in the Buddhist practice of lovingkindness.  Each time she would introduce this practice by saying, “We are sending out energy with our thoughts all of the time, so let it be positive, loving energy.”  At the very least, practicing metta meditations may go a ways towards creating a kinder, more loving world. Even our thoughts bear in some way on every other.

Anyone who has ever carried a child within her body knows intimately the nature of interbeing, as everything we eat and drink becomes the body and blood of our growing child. The air we breathe, the music we listen to, our anxieties and our calm all affect them. These choices are not ours alone. The quality of that air and water and the very ground beneath our feet are impacted by decisions of governments and corporate executives of decades ago and today -- such as choices to allow or prohibit lead in paint and water pipelines or the dispersion of mercury from coal-burning smokestacks, or deciding the locations of toxic waste dumps.[iii] Would that we all acted with keen awareness that we inter-are.

Those who work the land in small scale ways, in intimate touch with the land itself, know well the way soil, water, sun, animals, seeds, plants, microbes, labor, and food inter-be. As bell hooks wrote when reflecting growing up in rural Kentucky, “Living in the agrarian South, working on the land, growing food . . . I was ever mindful of an alternative to the capitalist system that destroyed nature’s abundance. In that world I learned experientially the concept of interbeing” (Belonging, 118-119). On a visit to a local organic farm, I was moved by the reverence with which the farmer held the sacred soil in his hands as he recounted the years of love and labor that had gone into creating the ideal soil structure in which to grow his crops. The first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in this region, this farm exemplifies the ways the community of people and land and crops together co-create and inter-are.

The pandemic has heightened our awareness of our interbeing, of how quickly the air I exhale becomes the air you inhale, perhaps carrying with it the minute organism that may steal that very breath from us.  It may only take a few seconds of air exchange to change our lives forever. Yet, the very thing that has made us so acutely aware of the intertwining of our very breath has also isolated us from each other – keeping families apart; precluding weddings, funerals, and graduation ceremonies; closing schools, churches, concert halls, theatres, restaurants, workplaces, community centers – places where we once gathered together.

The keen awareness of interbeing that is one of the many gifts of my transplant increased the importance for me to show up – to be there for others – whether to comfort or console; to celebrate or mourn; to be with others in their birthing and their dying, their struggles and their triumphs; to dance, to march, to be in ceremony, to support, listen, learn, testify, witness, accompany, create community. Yet because of the immunosuppressant medications I must take to prevent my body from rejecting this precious organ, the very heart that is a daily reminder to me of the interweaving of all of our lives now requires me to sequester myself.  It is too dangerous to be much out in the world. Another transplant recipient recently posted that one of the most difficult parts of the pandemic for her has been the way it has curtailed the many ways she was of service to her community. This has filled me with angst as well – not being able to show up for Line 3 protests to offer the ways of healing for which I trained, for friends in the hospital or who have lost loved ones, for my son’s concerts, for funerals and weddings, for family, for friends, and to welcome new babies born into this world.

We are eager, longing to be together again. Yet, as the rest of the world is coming out of isolation, the millions of us who are immunocompromised must of necessity withdraw even farther as the world now becomes even more dangerous for us.[iv] To be able to rejoin the world, we need the world to join us. Just as twenty-eight years ago my life was made possible by the generosity of a stranger, so now do the lives of those of us who have few defenses against the viruses and plagues of the world depend on the generosity and good will of strangers -- others with whom we share the very air we breathe, with whom our lives inter-are.

In the words of poet Marge Piercy:

 “ it starts when you care
to act, . .
it starts when you say We
and know you who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.”   - The Low Road

I am grateful beyond measure for all that the generosity of a stranger’s bereaved family has given me – the blessings of this life, the years with family and friends, the beauty of the world, and this wisdom of inter-being.  Yet, we are not “strangers.”  Bound together heart to heart, we are deeply kin, as we always have been, as we are with all beings.

The beginning. . .

My heart donor, Jodi.

20+ years later

Ultimately, the wisdom of interbeing is that “our being is not limited to what is inside the boundary of our skin. It is much more immense . . . There is no phenomenon on earth that does not concern us. . .. We have to look deeply at things in order to see” (Peace, 104.)

May we learn to look deeply.  

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Notes

Griffin, Susan. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War.  New York: Anchor Books, 1992.

Hanh, Thich Nhat. Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. New York: Bantam, 1992.

hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Piercy, Marge. The Moon Is Always Female. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf, 2021.

Steingraber, Sandra. Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood. New York: Berkeley Books, 2001.

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[i] Bohm’s theorem; the observer effect; chaos theory.

[ii] Botanist Suzanne Simard’s work on this, demonstrating what indigenous peoples have always known, has finally found recognition in the scientific community.  See her Finding the Mother Tree.

[iii] For a detailed examination of the effects of toxins on fetal development, see Sandra Steingraber’s Having Faith.

[iv] For several perspectives on this see:

Back to Normal? Many Immunocompromised People Feel Left Behind as U.S. Lifts Pandemic Measures | Democracy Now!

Covid-19: For the clinically extremely vulnerable, life hasn’t returned to normal | The BMJ

The Pandemic Isn’t Over for Immunocompromised People - The Atlantic

Vulnerable to Covid, High-Risk Americans Feel Left Behind - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

'We're doing everything we can to survive.' As US pushes to a pre-Covid reality, high-risk and disabled Americans feel forgotten - CNN

Finding Integrity

Certain pieces of writing have changed my life unalterably. At the top of that list is Adrienne Rich’s essay, “On Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.”  I cannot imagine who I would be in this world without having read it.  I can barely remember the woman, the girl, I was before. 

As bell hooks would generously put it, as a girl and young woman, I had learned “the fine art of dissimulation” – meaning, in her words, “taking on whatever appearance is needed to manipulate a situation” (All About Love, 35).  At the time, I would never have regarded my changeable personas or my secret acts to be manipulative, but rather simply attempts to be liked, to gain approval, to be “nice” so as not to cause others to feel discomfort.   It took Rich’s strong words of “lying,” “liar,” and “manipulation,” to get me to face the harsh reality of my actions, to call me to account, to own my lies, secrets, and silences.  “When someone tells me a piece of the truth which has been withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can also flood me with a cold, sea-sharp wash of relief” (193).  Adrienne Rich did this for me.

So many of the lines in this piece spoke truth to me.  “Lying is done with words, and also with silence” (186). It had never occurred to me that silence was a form of lying.  Yet this was so often the form my lies took – silent nods and smiles, not articulating my true feelings and thoughts, hiding my true self.  “A subject is raised which the liar wishes buried.  She has to go downstairs, her parking meter will have run out. Or, there is a telephone call she ought to have made an hour ago” (187).  Avoidance. “The liar is afraid. . . .She is afraid her own truths are not good enough” (191). Ah, there it was, at least in part. If I exposed who I truly was, what I truly believed, and later on, the sheer weirdness of being so sick, weak, and most likely dying in my twenties, I would face rejection, judgment, and loneliness.  The irony is that by hiding so much of myself, I was alone.

“The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness” (187).  Having been taught that it was most important to make people comfortable, to be pleasant, to avoid or smooth over conflict, I was likeable, agreeable, nice. I had lots of “friends,” “knew” lots of people, but nobody knew me, including myself.  I rarely shared my true thoughts or feelings with anyone, in large part because I didn’t know them myself.  I remember those years from adolescence through my twenties as floating along the surface.  I often wondered to myself, “Who am I?” and never knew the answer.

“In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves.  We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. . . . Thus we lose faith, even with our own lives” (188). I had lost faith with myself.  In the center of my being was a bottomless abyss – what Rich named “the void.” However, she wrote, the void “is not mere hollowness and anarchy. . . . the void is the creatrix, the matrix.”  Nevertheless, “the liar fears the void. . . . The liar in her terror wants to fill up the void, with anything. Her lies are a denial of her fear; a way of maintaining control. . . . We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core. Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of our truth” (191).

And so my journey began, and I discovered that Rich was right.  Far from an empty abyss, here breathed the greatest depth and substance of my being. This marked the beginning of my encounter with my truths, my self, my deepest spiritual knowings and connections.  The truths uttered by Adrienne Rich guided me back to myself, grounded me, centered me. I know that dark core now. It is indeed the matrix, the dark mother out of which I give birth to myself each day.

In living a life of truthfulness, I discovered the quality most essential for a spiritual life – integrity – the quality of being whole. In Camus’s words, “everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask” (Lyrical, 69).  To surrender nothing of myself is to be open to all possibilities, questions, intuitions – wherever they may lead. It is to travel the sometimes arduous, often surprising, always blessed journey of an authentic encounter with existence.  “The truth” said Rich, “is not one thing. . . It is an increasing complexity” (187). I learned to embrace paradox.  As Rich wrote in her poem, “Integrity,” “Nothing but my self?  My selves./ After so long, this answer./ . . . Anger and tenderness: my selves./ And now I can believe they breathe in me/ as angels, not polarities./ . . .the spider’s genius/ to spin and weave in the same action” (A Wild Patience, 8-9).  Angels, and the genius of spiders. 

Anthropologist Angeles Arrien wrote that the essential task in the second half of life is that “we actualize all aspects of ourselves and weave them into an inherent symmetry and whole” (Second Half, 18). As we engage in the vital process of integrating our internal and external worlds, “we move beyond polarities and dualities to see both worlds at once” (17).  In learning to befriend paradox and to live in ambiguity, we are able to plumb our spiritual depths.  I have known this to be true. This was, for me, the greatest of the many gifts of “On Women and Honor.”

Who would I have been without the wisdom of this piece?  Perhaps one day I would have stumbled onto these truths, but perhaps I would still be floating on the surface, still wondering who I am.  I would have missed out on the best of my life – deep and cherished friendships; the discoveries that come of self-scrutiny and self-awareness; soul journeys into the depths; profound connections, relationships, and community; my true work in the world; unimaginable wonder, joy, and love; and occasional encounters with angels.

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Notes

Arrien, Angeles. The Second Half of Life: Opening the Gates of Wisdom.  Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2007.

Camus, Albert. Lyrical and Critical Essays.  Ed. Philip Thody. Trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.

 Hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow & Co. Inc., 2000.

Rich, Adrienne. A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1981.

______. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978.  New York. W.W. Norton & Co., 1979. 

In Memoriam: Thich Nhat Hanh

Yet another of my great spiritual teachers has died.  Buddhist monk, peace activist, author, and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh died today at Tu Hieu Temple in Hue, Vietnam.  I have found wisdom in so many of his books, but it is his The Miracle of Mindfulness that has become almost a daily guide.  I discovered it sometime in my four-year wait for a new heart after being put on the transplant list following my second cardiac arrest in my 30s. In that time of living with the ever-present fear of sudden cardiac death, it probably saved my life, and certainly my sanity and spiritual well-being.

During that time, I would try traditional meditations that required me to focus on my breath, but as every irregular heartbeat intruded on my breathing and invaded my awareness, that practice became more an exercise in increasing anxiety.  And then the miracle – mindfulness. While many mindfulness exercises do focus on the breath, Thay’s book opened up so many more possibilities.  Washing the dishes, chopping carrots, cleaning, reading a bedtime story to my son all became exercises in mindfulness. “Wash the dishes relaxingly, as though each bowl is an object of contemplation. Consider each bowl as sacred. . . . Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life.” Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life.  That line has stuck with me, reminding me that whatever I am doing, whoever I am with, is the most important thing in my life at that moment in time.  Being fully present to the actions, the thoughts, the surroundings, the people, the many beings in any given moment has been a precious gift in my life.   I don’t always remember.  I have to remind myself rather continually.  But every time I do, I am immediately more centered, and certainly more present not only to my own life, but to the other people and beings in my life. 

Of all the mindfulness exercises, the one that was most helpful to me at that time, and continues to be, is mindful walking.  I used to be a very fast walker.  I loved a brisk pace.  But when my heart, and the defibrillator attached to it that would shock me if my heart went too fast, commanded me to slow down, mindful walking turned what had felt like an impediment into a gift of awareness. Walking oh so slowly, I noticed the feel of the ground beneath my feet, the sound of the wind in the trees, the warmth of the sun on my back, all the variety of mosses, ferns, and grasses that had previously been a sea of green, the particular bends and twists of tree trunks, the songs of spring warblers and so many varieties of frogs, the patterns in the rocks, the way the snow squeaks at certain temperatures, the shifting shapes of clouds, the sweetness of my child’s voice delighting in the day as we walked together. A miracle indeed.

Years later, mindfulness exercises became a regular part of my Women and Spirituality classes.  I would bring in a trayful of fruit – segments of oranges or tangerines, slices of apple and banana, grapes, and always the classic raisin, along with some dark and milk chocolate. Each student would choose one thing to eat, slowly, with full attentiveness to the smell, taste, sound, and texture of the fruit or chocolate as they chewed, sucked, swirled, and swallowed the piece.  When they were finished, they would share all they had discovered, things they had never before noticed in something they had eaten routinely – the way the taste of an apple changed from the pulp to the skin, the way the pulp of the orange lingered long after the juice trickled down their throat, how long bits of raisin could stay stuck in the crevices of their gums, the silky velvet of a slowly melting piece of chocolate. What everyone noticed the most was how full and satisfied they felt after eating one small piece of fruit.  Another miracle.

I also would ring a bell at random times throughout the class, and then ask the students where they were.  About a third would be present in the class, but the rest were somewhere else -- reviewing a conversation they had had earlier in the day, thinking about a homework assignment they had to do, looking forward to the weekend; some were hundreds of miles away or ten years in the past.  Students would laugh or demure self-consciously about not paying attention in class.  Many were startled to discover how often they were not actually “in class.” How many of us are either in the past or the future, or someplace else entirely in any given moment of the day?  Yet it is here, in this present moment, that we are fully alive to the miracles happening all around us.  At this moment, as I write, miracles abound – the way each vein of the poinsettia leaves are illuminated in the sun, the way the snow cushions the earth in a peaceful softness, the way the sun pouring through the window can warm me even on this subzero morning, the tenderness that arises as I watch my dog soundly sleeping curled up in his chair, that the tapping of my fingers on this keyboard creates shapes on a screen that have meanings, and that I can share them with others by sending them on invisible waves of energy through the atmosphere. 

The practice of mindfulness has given me a gift of centeredness and calm that I can draw upon at those times when I’m feeling scattered, unfocused, or anxious.  It has made me a better teacher, a better listener, and hopefully a better friend.  It has given me precious moments that might otherwise have slipped away unnoticed. For all of this, I am grateful.

All this week, ceremonies in honor of Thich Nhat Hanh will be held at Hue Temple in Vietnam and at Plum Village, the monastery Thich Nhat Hanh founded while living in exile in France.  All are invited to join the services via livestream, and to engage each day in memorial practices.  One of the practices for today is a walking meditation, “walking with Thay, and connecting to our own and Thay’s unborn and undying nature.”  Today, I will walk with mindfulness and gratitude for all the ways that Thich Nhat Hanh’s generous sharing has centered my being, deepened my awareness, and awakened me to walk in wonder.

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Notes

Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness, Rider Books, 1991.

Memorial Services for Thich Nhat Hanh | Plum Village

In the Bleak Midwinter

Ever since the holidays, strains of “In the bleak midwinter . . . ,“ have been accompanying my thoughts on my wintertime walks. Yet the first line strikes me as absurd, for “bleak” is the last word I would use to describe these glorious winter days. The sparkling snow, the dazzling sunshine, and the deep blue of the sky against the white tree branches all offer solace to my soul.  Still, the song rings true, for in this midwinter, bleakness – a sense of desolation, loss, and despair -- shrouds the land. In the first year of the pandemic, I lost several people in my life, mostly older or ailing, two of them some of my closest friends.  However, this year the losses are not my own, but of those near and dear to me. Friends have lost brothers, mothers, sisters, children, friends, partners and spouses – to cancer, suicide, alcohol, a hit-and-run driver, injury from a fall, dementia, sudden death, and sheer despair – each of them too young, all of them tragic. Beyond the finality of death, an aggrieved world spins out tendrils of affiliated losses -- of community and companionship, safety and security, watersheds and wild places, touch and tenderness and trust; family and faith -- whether in god or humanity or the future. Thousands have lost the tangibles of jobs, shelter, savings, and physical capacity, and millions more the intangibles of dreams deferred, hopes for a nation, and belief in the basic decency of our fellow humans. And then there are the ordinary, everyday losses.  As a friend recently posted, “I am grieving. I miss Sunday breakfasts at the cafe. Live music. Dinner parties. I miss seeing people smile in the grocery aisle” (Jana Studelska, Facebook Post, 1/9/22).  We are all suffering utter and ongoing loss. 

In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller illuminates what he calls the five gates of grief: 1) loss of someone or something we love; 2) the places that have not known love --“the profoundly tender places . . .[in us that] have lived outside of kindness . . .” (31) — the shadow places of trauma and shame that we hide away;  3) sorrows of the world – the loss of nature and the existential crises of an increasingly uninhabitable planet; 4) what we expected and did not receive -- to be valued for our gifts, to feel of worth and purposeful, and simply to know that we matter; and 5) ancestral grief. The first we collectively grieve with family and friends in rituals of mourning.  We bring food, comfort the mourners, gather together, are present to all that arises, understand the need for time away from the ordinary. We are also finally beginning to recognize the very real impacts of the last, as we learn more about historical trauma and the ways that those living today carry the wounds of past generations. But we have no funerals for the traumas and wounds we hide away, no flags flown at half-staff for an embattled polity, no wailing walls for an earth on the precipice of irretrievable climate change, no coffins to hold the tears for all we had at one time hoped for, if not counted on -- whether that be that our work in the world be valued, our needs for health and well-being be respected, a shared sense of reality, a collective desire for the public good, or simply a smile in the grocery store aisle.

As a society, we are not good at grief. We don’t allow it. Three days max, then we are expected to be back to work, keep the economy humming – shop, go to the movies and the mall, “put on a happy face” and “smile though your heart is aching.”  We are uncomfortable with sorrow and pain.  Expected to wear a cheery countenance, we deny our suffering and the suffering of others.  However, loss unacknowledged compounds its effects, creating more damage and harm.  Grief will unleash itself somewhere. Unrecognized and unpermitted grief may manifest as excessive consumption – of food, alcohol, Netflix, stuff – anything to fill the void; or in unquelled anger, violence, hatred, enemy-making, and scapegoating -- all of which have erupted onto our world; or in the unmetabolized pain we pass on to the next generations. It is essential to our individual and collective well-being that we welcome grief, and that we tend it.

In the Sumerian tale of Inanna*, we find Erishkegal, Queen of the Underworld, in mourning. Her grief over the death of her husband and her displacement from her seat of power and reign, unacknowledged by the world, have left her angry, bitter, vengeful, and murderous. When her sister, Inanna, hears Erishkegal’s anguished cries, she journeys to the Underworld to comfort her, but in her bitterness, Erishkegal turns on Inanna and orders her killed.  Prior to her descent, Inanna had asked her faithful servant, Ninshubur, to send help if she did not return in three days. Help comes in the form of two creatures formed by Inanna’s Father Enki, who instructs them to cry when Erishkegal cries.  It is only when they reach Erishkegal and moan with her moans, cry with her cries, scream with her screams, feel her every pain, validate her loss, and tend her woundedness with compassion that she begins to heal, and finally releases Inanna.

Asian American feminist thealogian Rita Nakashima Brock shares a similar Shinto tale of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, who, wounded and angered by the rageful and desecrating acts of her jealous brother, retreats into a cave of silence, and winter descends upon the land. She is finally lured out by the noise of celebration outside the cave. The gods and goddesses have placed a mirror at the entrance to the cave, and so fascinated is Amaterasu by her reflection that they are able to block her return. The moral Brock draws from this story is of the need for good mirrors who will reflect back to us our pain, our brokenness, our suffering. In order to begin to heal, we must first be willing to acknowledge and share our pain to those who will mirror it back to us. Brock writes, “In our pain is the power of self-knowledge that brings us to a healing wisdom and compassion. We will not be made whole and healed until the truth of our lives can be seen and told,  . . . telling our own pain in a community of sisters who hear our gentle murmurs of loneliness and suffering and mirror ourselves back to us” (240).  We must be those mirrors to others as well, to moan with their moans, cry with their cries. “We must learn to listen to, hold, and support others for their empowerment and ours” (237).

We can release the grip of grief in our lives. We need ongoing ways to share our losses, especially those we hide away, to have them heard and mirrored back to us and compassionately tended. The particular cruelty of the pandemic is that it denies us what we most need to heal our grief — physical comforting, spaces for sharing our stories, singing and sobbing together, coming together in consolation — so it is especially important that we both seek out and be those good mirrors to each other in those places that we can.

Healing is also to be found in the company of our more than human relatives. Bring your losses to the trees, to the waters, to the four-legged and the winged ones, and they will hold them. “The cure for susto**,” writes Linda Hogan, “ . . .  is written in the bark of a tree, in the moonlit silence of night, in the bank of a river and the water’s motion. . . . in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of sunlight, the waking human in a world infused with intelligence and spirit” (157-158).

A modification of Job 12: 7-8 has also been accompanying me on my walks of late, reminding me in this midwinter of our lives to -

Ask the beasts, and they will heal you;

the birds of the air, and they will comfort you;   

ask the plants of the earth, and they will give you peace.

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*”The Descent of Inanna,” inscribed onto tablets around 1750BCE, was discovered in the ruins of Nippur, Sumer’s spiritual and culture center, in an excavation between 1889 and 1890.  It would be decades before the 14 cuneiform tablets were translated and woven into a coherent tale. 

**Indigenous peoples of Latin America understand trauma and its accompanying grief as “soul loss,” or susto.

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Notes

Brock, Rita Nakashima. “On Mirrors, Mists, and Murmurs: Toward and Asian American Theaology.” In Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ, eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. New York: Harper Collins, 1989.  235-243.

Hogan, Linda. “The Great Without.” In Hogan, Linda and Brenda Peterson, eds., Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism, and Awakening. New York: North Point Press, 2004. 154-158.

Strouse, Charles and Lee Adams, “Put On a Happy Face.” Strada Music Company, 1960.

Turner, John and Geoffrey Parsons, “Smile.” Bourne Co., 1954.

Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2015.

Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer. Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.

Longing for Darkness

Hale Bopp

When I moved to Minnesota from Ohio, everyone back home voiced concern about how cold the winters would be.  Nobody warned me about how dark they would be, nor how long the dark would last.  For years, I complained, but gradually I have come to embrace the dark.  The dark invites us to slow down, to rest, to sleep, to dream.  It is a time to open to our depths, and to others. There is a kind of magic in the dark. Without the harsh light of judgment, in the dark we are more likely to share our secrets and stories, our wounds and our wonderings, our hearts and hopes with each other. As the deciduous trees lose their leaves, the sky opens as well, giving birth to the night sky.  As Sara Thomsen sings in her, “Darkness Cover Me”: “Holy Maker of Moonlight, singing through starlight. . . . womb of the night.”  The dark gives us the gift of stars. In the brief nights of summer, I rarely see the stars, but in winter they blanket the sky, giving me a sense of my place in the universe. They arrive like old friends -- the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades appearing in the evening, and Orion greeting me out my window every morning. When Hale-Bopp was visible from earth, I would look for her on my late-night drives home from teaching night class, and there she would be, my constant companion on those cold winter nights.  The stars remind us that we are not alone, that we are all related, for we are all made of the stuff of stars.

Lately I’ve been longing for darkness. When I first moved to my home in the woods, the night was dark. As the city has grown, and more houses have been built, and streetlights added, the dark is eclipsed by a never-ending twilight.  In my neighborhood, more and more people keep “security” lights on all night long, leaving me feeling invaded by the perpetual light.  In our human efforts to resist the dark, we have forgotten the earthly command to rest, and we are all suffering the consequences. Light pollution affects our health, throwing off our circadian rhythms, diminishing the release of melatonin – paving the way for loss of sleep, increased anxiety, and a host of other ailments.  Other animals’ health is affected as well, as is the migration of sea turtles and birds who navigate by the stars and by moonlight. We light up the night in order not to get lost in the dark, but perhaps we all have lost our way by being too much in the light. We were born out of darkness, and like the spring bulb that needs cold and dark in order to bloom, so do we need the nourishment of the deep dark to restore our creativity and power. 

In our longing for darkness, it is not just the physical dark that we crave, but the metaphysical, the spiritual, the deep well of the ancient dark divine, the original matrix.  As China Galland mused, “The longing for darkness [is] also a longing for the womb of god” (54). In her Longing for Darkness, Galland reminds us of the persistence of this longing, and her emergence as Ishtar, Isis, Astarte, Asherah, Tara, Kali, Parvati, Durga, as well as Mary and the Christian mystics writing of the motherhood of the divine. Her iconographic representations abound throughout the world, from the temples to Tara throughout Asia to the many shrines to the Black Madonna throughout Europe. It’s no wonder that it is within this time of deep darkness that Mary is celebrated within Christianity – Mary not as passive, but as the strong, courageous, fiercely protective, earthy maternal divine.

 Lucia Birnbaum reminds us that the first African mother is everyone’s genetic inheritance, honored for millennia as Erishkegal, Isis, Lilith, Kali, Oshun, Hagar.  It was only with the rise of patriarchy that the dark feminine divine was demoted, displaced, erased, and forced underground. Yet she continues to rise in our psyches and our deepest longings.  Each year, thousands walk hundreds of miles in pilgrimage to visit these shrines, all seeking connection with dark, divine, pre-patriarchal female energies of which we are all sorely in need.

Galland writes, “To say that one is ‘longing for darkness’ is to say that one longs for transformation, for a darkness that brings balance, wholeness, integration, wisdom, insight” (152).  Certainly, if there was ever a time when we have needed to restore balance, and to gain insight and wisdom, it is now.  We are a world profoundly out of balance.  It is theorized that dark matter is what holds the stars and galaxies together -- “matter,” from the same root word as “mother” – mater. Banishing the dark mater has thrown us off balance.  I image our world thrown off its axis, wobbling through the universe.  The energies and acts of hate, violence, oppression, domination, and patriarchy that have been surging throughout the world have thrown us off kilter.  We need the qualities of the dark feminine divine -- compassion, justice, equality to restore our balance, and to transform the violent, hierarchical, patriarchy which governs too much of our lives into a peaceful, radically egalitarian democracy (Birnbaum, 147). We have been there before; we can return.

To do so requires our vision and energies. bell hooks wrote of how as a child she would make the treacherous walk through a white section of town, where she could feel the hate pouring down on her, to the safety and homecoming of her grandparents’ home.  It was in the homes of Black women that she found her spirit nurtured.  Black women resisted white oppression by creating places to heal and be affirmed, and have one’s dignity restored – places where possibility could rise again.  The matrix of the dark feminine divine is such a homeplace, fostering both our resistance and the creation of new possibilities, in defiance of systems of hate and oppression. Like the places of renewal and resistance hooks found in the homes of Black women, dwelling with the dark feminine divine was for her an encounter with “ . . . the ground of our being, the place of mystery, creativity, and possibility, for it is there that we can construct the mind that can resist, that can revision, that can create the maps that when followed will liberate us” (2009, 243).  We can begin this resistance and revisioning by, as Audre Lorde said, “re-member[ing] what is dark and ancient and divine within yourself” (69), for it is in these dark places within “. . . where hidden and growing our true spirit rises. . . (36). The dark feminine divine renews us, strengthening our capacity to resist, and inspiring our vision for a different way to be possible.  

In the far north where I now live, the winter Solstice is celebrated with bonfires and candle lighting and feasting. For many years, I attended a women-only Solstice celebration at a lesbian collective homeplace. We would gather in a circle; an invocation to the Solstice would be read; and then as anyone in the circle felt so moved, she would light one of the thirteen candles, expressing her thanks or hopes or blessing – for health, for a loved one, for the earth, and always for the four-leggeds. Then the great potluck feast began with soups and stews, tater tot and pasta hot dishes, green and fruit salads, smoked fish, vegetables of all kinds, quiches, breads, and a plethora of desserts.  At some point in the evening, the announcement would come that the fire had been lit.  We’d pile on our winter jackets and boots and head out in the night, often in below zero temperatures. Each in turn would place the wreath upon her head and then, with clear intention, jump the fire, leaving behind the ills of the previous year and leaping forward into those things we hoped for in the new year.  Three of us who made music together would link arms and leap the fire together, before making our individual jumps.  It is at cherished times like these that I have truly felt the dark, divine, ancient, pre-patriarchal feminine energy – that place of possibility. The world could be like this.

Living in a place of such a long dark, I do rejoice in the return of the light at the Solstice, but now with a great appreciation for the gifts of the long night as well. The woman who was the firekeeper of the Solstice gathering recently passed, and as I was writing the section on bell hooks, I learned that she, too, had just passed.  This year, I will jump the fire in their memory and honor, and in honor of the ancient, dark, rich, feminine divine in us all.

“bell hooks” by Kris Simonson

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Notes                                                                               

Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers.  San Jose: Authors Choice Press, 2001. 

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. NY: Harper One, 1988. 

Galaxies Protected by Dark Matter | Space 

Galland, China. Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna. NY: Penguin, 1990. 

hooks, bell. “Lorde: The Imagination of Justice.” in Byrd, Rudolph et. al. eds. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2009. 

______. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. 

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 

Light Pollution | National Geographic Society 

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984. 

Thomsen, Sara. “Darkness Cover Me.” Fertile Ground. 1999.