Father Bede Griffiths, Surrendering to the Feminine

If the video isn't working (I'm still figuring out this process of embedding videos) you can watch it here.

“...What my experience taught me was that when everything thing else goes, you discover this love, which is in you all the time, it’s there deep down and you know nothing about it. But let everything go and it comes. And I got a tremendous insight into Jesus on the Cross from this. It was very interesting. And at the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” you see, that was a climax for him. And I think at that moment he had lost everything. His disciples had fled, the jurors were all against him, the people rejected him, and now he had to let go of his God. Do you see? “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” And the moment he let go of God and faced death, darkness, nothingness, he was taken to total Love you see. That is the experience of death. Behind all death is this tremendous power of Love. ..."
Father Bede Griffiths

Sitting with desire

A note on the sweet tooth

(butternut squash)

(licorice assortments)

Hello sugar crash--

I know I'm supposed to be sitting with my desires. But I guess that's why they call for "practice, practice, and never-ending practice." Cause tonight I went just a little overboard... And I'm regretting it.

Imagine the Joy in one delicious spoonful of my creamy butternut squash. Imagine how long that warmth, that sweetness would last me.

But a bowl full, then a handful of licorice, and then, I admit, some of Bill's leftover cocoa b-day cake with chocolate morsels and strawberries on top.

After all of that, I'm feeling empty again, my gears screeched to a halt, and overflowing.

But--

With just this breath I begin again (over and over and over again).

Opening my lips to this glass of water, or to this cup of hot tea, like baptismal waters, their cleansing waters flow. And I know now --not Joy, not yet-- but emptiness. I know emptiness and I know hunger, sitting here, my desires washing (wave upon wave upon wave) through me.

Throwing Flowers Against Evil

In an interview with Derrick Jenson (Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros, 1995) Terry Tempest Williams describes how for several weeks during Easter season, Yaqui people reenact the passion play by throwing flowers against evil. Her description of the Easter ceremony is worth quoting in full:

"Imagine this: a slow, inexorable build-up of evil against the forces of good. The fariseos, of pharisees, are dressed in black cloaks. They are masked and they march to a slow, steady dirge, to the haunting flute music that is accompanying them. They are carrying the weight of evil that is leaning against the village. In their long black capes they forcefully make their way through the crowd of onlookers. Their goal is to literally penetrate the church. They have stolen the body of Christ, they have violated every sense of decency within the community, they have marred and destroyed the sacred.

The fariseos charge the church in full run. As they do this, they are showered with flower petals thrown against evil by the children, by the women on both sides of the human gauntlet. The young girls--five, six, seven years old--are adorned in crisp white dresses. They are the final barrier to the community's holy altar that the fariseos must penetrate. The fariseos charge again. The girls raise boughs of cottonwood and mesquite and wave them over the fariseos. The fariseos are repelled.
They retreat, take off their black capes and return to the santuario in confession. A deer- the Deer Dancer--the most peaceful of animals, covered with flower petals, dances in the middle of the fariseos. The fariseos have been 'changed to good' and are 'forgiven.' The universe is restored, health and peace have been returned to the village."

After reading TTW's description of the Yaqui Easter Ceremony, I plucked the petals off of my Valentine's Day bouquet and stored them in the fridge, waiting for the perfect occassion to perform my own tiny version of "throwing flowers against evil." I decided to wait for a Sunday because, as I understand it, Sundays in Lent stand outside of Lent (as a time of exile) as days of epiphany, celebrating the manifestation of God in our lives...

So, yesterday, the second Sunday of Lent, I tossed my Valentine's Day flowers onto a pile of waste stacked outside of my husband's place of work (a barrel of compressor oil, and fan motor for an old heating and air conditioning system). Obviously, my gesture here is symbolic, but I think the symbols we carry with us from generation to generation and the stories we tell have power to change, and to heal.

before

and after

A gentle wind picked up after I distrubuted the flowers, circling them round the old engine in dance, as if to consecrate my simple gesture...

On the way back to our apartment, my husband and I passed a truck, its bed filled with flowers, mourning, honouring and remembering a marine lost to the war in Iraq. Attached to the truck was a trailer filled with crosses, flowers, photographs, names of soldiers, and the American flag. The words "faith" and "hope" framed the bumper:

Fasting

I'm thinking of fasting today, of sitting with my desire, of giving it space to move through me, to wash me out and to undo me.

I'm thinking of what it means to live and love with a broken heart, raw, wide open, and exposed. I'm thinking about what it might mean to be, as I am, in the world, unattached to the labels I have been given, to the deep shame of being told how I've been broken.

into fragments.

that can't be pieced back together again.

I'm wondering what it would mean to unravel these broken pieces while standing strong, breath steady and deep.

Fasting: the practice of peeling back those layers built to divide and to hold apart, to protect us from being human.

I pray to be broken open.
...Over and over and over again.

Ah Holy Jesus

Played at the Ash Wednesday service I attended, just piano... hauntingly beautiful. Here's a version on YouTube I enjoy:

Ah, Holy Jesus

And Lent begins...

"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me."

Psalm 51:10

Rebirth

stars flashing through our hearts

A poem for today, Ash Wednesday:

REBIRTH

Corridors of the soul! The soul that is like a young woman!

You clear light

and the brief history

and the joy of a new life . . .

Oh turn and be born again, and walk the road,

and find once more the lost path!

And turn and feel in our own hand

the warmth of the good hand

of our mother . . . And walk through life in dreams

out of love of the hand that leads us.

* * *

In our soul everything

moves guided by a mysterious hand:

ununderstandable, not speaking,

we know nothing of our own souls.

The deepest words

of the wise men teach us

the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows,

or the sound of the water when it is flowing.

ANTONIO MACHADO

translated by Robert Bly

Sculpture: twig art

"Go back inside yourself and look: if you do not yet see yourself as beautiful, then do as the sculptor does with a statue he wants to make beautiful; he chisels away one part, and levels off another, makes one spot smooth and another clear, until he shows forth a beautiful face on the statue. Like him, remove what is superfluous, straighten what is crooked, clear up what is dark and make it bright, and never stop sculpting your own statue, until the godlike splendor of virtue shines forth to you. . . . If you have become this, and seen it, and become pure and alone with yourself, with nothing now preventing you from becoming one in this way, and have nothing extraneous mixed within your self . . . if you see that this is what you have become, then you have become vision. Be confident in yourself: you have already ascended here and now, and no longer need someone to show you the way. Open your eyes and see."

Plotinus, I 6,9,7-24