During joys and concerns on Sunday, a man shared he could hardly contain his excitement as this would be his first time to vote as a new American citizen. He came here from war, hunger and turmoil and now feels that he can finally begin living the story written on the walls of his soul. A story he was cut off from most of his adult life due to simply having to survive day to day.
This election season, there’s been a huge debate over what makes us great. We often think it’s something or someone in the outside world that can make us great, that greatness is a thing waiting for us on the horizon somewhere, if only we could pull the right levers, meet the right people, get the right education, etc. But we are confused about greatness. It is not something we can do for ourselves, rather, greatness is something planted in us by a Divine hand, it is love.
We are all born with greatness in our hearts, it is just part of our DNA, our innate ability to love and receive love. But we are also cut off from it in many, many ways in our world. Our ability to access this deep love already within us and connect with it is what makes greatness grow.
As we exercise our freedom today to choose a new leader for our nation, let’s remember what makes us truly great. It is connecting with our deep reserves of love within and building bridges with others. We make a refuge for one another in our hearts as great love grows in us.
I’ve shared a few thoughts here and a song from the old hymn book that was co-written by one of my heroes, theologian and poet, Georgia Harkness.
Do you like witch stories? There is a wonderful little encounter tucked away in the Bible, in 1 Samuel 28:3-25. Here’s a fun re-telling of it here in a little theater show I did with Tennessee storyteller, Michael Williams, where his story and my song are featured:
…the kind of imagination it will take to re-invent the world.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes said that the words “wild” and “woman” create a fairytale knock on the door of heart. Theologian Paul Ricoeur convinced us that words create worlds. “Deplorables” as a word used to describe a group of people with heartbeats who pay taxes and love their children is unacceptable, too.
Words create worlds and we are all wondering what kind of world we will wake up to on Nov. 9th. Whatever that world looks like, the reality is, it will be up to us to re-invent it and it will require a great deal of imagination and care for the words we choose.
The truth is, as much as I am reluctant to admit it, one whose very profession is studying the nature of God in the world,much of our impoverished imagination comes directly from the ways in which we have interpreted Bible.
Depth Psychologist C.G. Jung said that in order to understand the American psyche, one must read the Bible. And what he meant by that was that America was built largely through an early partnership between politics and church. My own denomination, Methodism, was the largest Protestant sect in early America, forming towns, cities, schools, hospitals and was the a great center of the civilizing force of our country. Ulysses S. Grant said that there were three great political parties in America: Republicans, Democrats and Methodists. The best selling book in the world, the Bible, still has major game and influence when it comes to worldview.
The wake up call for us is that the Bible’s social and political framework for a delivery system for the Word of God was patriarchy, and not necessarily the benevolent kind. The stories that narrate our faith world and have formed the psyche of a nation, the stories that make up the best selling book ever in the world, the stories that tell us who we are as a people are often hostile to over half of our national population. That said, even this realization hasn’t hindered individuals and faith communities from practicing the Bible’s mandate of unconditional love, it just doesn’t seem to make the daily news.
What we realize, faith communities who choose to re-imagine faith in the 21st Century, is that just because the Word of God came to us in the framework of a social and political system beginning over three thousand years ago known as patriarchy, doesn’t mean faith communities are confined to a system that is oppressive for many people. In fact, even Jesus challenged to reform by saying to his followers “you will do greater things than me.” And we all know he was a liberator of those oppressed by the system, particularly women.
And just because the candidates for leaders of the free world (one of them Methodist) may lack imagination in the words they use to describe one another doesn’t mean we have to go and do likewise. In fact, we can do better.
Our world will only be as good as we can imagine it to be. Because imagination is actually our built in communication system with God, we can even re-imagine our interpretations of Bible. Because there are also stories that tell of a counter-narrative, hidden in the Bible’s unexplored territories in which women rise above their status as property and become leaders: warriors, prophets and military heroes.
We don’t have to throw out our old traditions in order to grow to a place that creates an environment of flourishing for everyone. In fact, that would be tragic. We hold on to the traditions that help us move forward even as we let go of the ones that hold us back. Tradition pulls one way, progress pulls the other, and we arrive at a third way forward. That is how we grow. Because love is always preferenced as the way of God in the end and to love is to allow people to grow. Too much emphasis on either tradition or progress causes stagnancy or deterioration. We learn to grow best in the tension. Our democratic system is actually built for positive movement forward, that is, if we can only imagine it.
On November 9th, we will all have a new reality no matter who is elected and the truth is, we will all have a big job on our hands, the re-imagination of our world. Perhaps the true leadership is in our hands and our hearts and yes, even and especially in our faith communities.
Near a remote monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky called Gethsemani, I sat in the living room of the nun who managed the guest house down the road as she read me this poem. I had no idea what it meant at the time. In what I refer to as my mass Exodus moment, I had just left a life of being a rock star and the marriage that came with it. I had exchanged a role in which I got to play a goddess with crunchy guitars, with a private wind machine and spotlights, for a life of waiting tables at a pasta restaurant in downtown Nashville. Only four blocks away from where I had played to 15,000 people on the river at a summer festival and just four months later I was asking people on a nightly basis whether they wanted ranch, blue cheese, thousand island or balsamic vinaigrette with their endless salad and butter soaked rolls. Yet, somehow, I felt safe. When the nun asked me what I wanted, I simply said, “I want to be clean.” That’s when she read me this poem.
One day you finally knew
What you had to do, and began,
Though the voices around you
Kept shouting
Their bad advice‚ Though the whole house
Began to tremble
And you felt the old tug
At your ankles.
“Mend my life!” Each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do,
Though the wind pried With its stingers At the very foundations‚
Though their melancholy Was terrible.
It was already late
Enough, and a wild night,
And the road full of fallen
Branches and stones.
But little by little,
As you left their voices behind,
The stars began to burn
Through the sheets of clouds,
And there was a new voice,
Which you slowly
Recognized as your own,
That kept you company
As you strode deeper and deeper Into the world,
Determined to do
The only thing you could do‚
Determined to save The only life you could save.
-Mary Oliver, The Journey
A wild night had fallen upon me that lasted eleven years. My mentor tells me that God works in the form of a four letter word: S-L-O-W. There simply are no shortcuts on the path of the soul’s journey and that is okay. The soul’s calling may be urgent, but it is not in a hurry.
She read another poem, as if to say, read this anytime you have trouble locating your navigation point. and I suppose I have navigated between these two poems and a spiritual journey as I have sought to claim the truth within me and live it out in the world, that thing in my spirit that keeps tugging at me, saying, “let me live.”
We have not come here to take prisoners But to surrender ever more deeply To freedom and joy. We have not come into this exquisite world to hold ourselves hostage from love. Run my dear, From anything That may not strengthen Your precious budding wings, Run like hell, my dear, From anyone likely to put a sharp knife Into the sacred, tender vision Of your beautiful heart. We have a duty to befriend Those aspects of obedience of our house And shout to our reason “Oh please, oh please come out and play.” For we have not come here to take prisoners, Or to confine our wondrous spirits But to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom, and Light! -Hafiz
I studied theology and got my M.Div. during those eleven years and became an ordained minister, drawn to the mysteries of the sacred life, I am a pastor who seeks out creative expressions of the soul’s life in the world. A theology professor, after spending years training us up in the technical aspects of the church, God, Jesus and the history of how it all got to where it is today, finally said, with a sigh, “after everything is done, the most important thing is poetry.”
To quote a line from one of my songs based on the life of one courageous woman prophet warrior, Deborah, from the hidden pages of the Bible, “Your life is poetry and every time you love, you set the hurt of the world free.”
What sacred and tender vision is calling out to you today? What is keeping you from answering it?
One day you finally knew what you had to do….
May you have the courage to live it out, just for today, your soul’s love sonnet to the world.
If you’re like me, one of the statistics, the one in three women of the world who has suffered violence in the form of sexual abuse, then you understand why this time we are living through is both wonderful and horrible. What I refer to as a fantastic terror. I can’t watch a presidential debate or news surrounding the election without feeling sick in my stomach, a burning sensation deep in the belly. It seems to occur no matter who is speaking. Judging from the many articles with similar titles as this one, this election has become synonymous with the word trigger. On the feeling wheel, they call this feeling shame, but that seems off somehow. It feels like a jagged stake or a dagger, five thousand butterflies with teeth, a nightmare going on in the belly.
So, I, like so many other women, can’t turn on the news that much, or be on Facebook more than a few seconds, we are living through the massive unveiling of thousands of years of feminine suppression, and it’s not pretty. Change rarely is.
Many predicted this time, in fact, Depth Psychologist C.G.Jung, a few decades ago, predicted that in the 21st Century, we would live through a time in which the feminine asserted herself as a dark force in the world, an angry energy demanding that she be restored to her original self. He said she had lived way too long in the shadows, in a kind of indentured servitude to male authority. He was talking about the archetype of the feminine, that identity that is the root of all women, the one that we have such a hard time connecting to due to its suppression in systems constructed around male authority. This is not demeaning males in any way, systems are much bigger than individuals. It’s just the way things have been constructed for a very long time.
So, I suppose that is what we’re living through now, some are calling it a “moment,” but I feel it’s more like the kind of earthquake that created the Grand Canyon, it’s shaking the foundations of the structures we’ve built our lives on, and when this kind of change is on the horizon, there is always pushback. As Tennyson said, “nature’s red tooth and claw.” She is, indeed,
The difficult thing about being a statistic of sexual violence is that in order to recover from the trauma, coming out of denial is the first step. Until you come out of denial, you simply have very little choice in your own life. And coming out of denial is a long, long process, sometimes taking years. That means that over the course of this “moment” we are in, likely millions of women will begin to come out of denial, judging from the already clogged support hotlines heating up during this mass unveiling we are living through. And it can be a dangerous thing to come out of denial to a family, a community, a country, a world that is not receptive to something as fragile and potentially life threatening as a person’s stored trauma and pain. We are going to need some massive efforts at healing this massive pain.
For me, a women’s recovery group has been the healing agent, along with faith, writing, a loving church family and supporting males and females who play the roles of mentors and friends in my life. Healing is not an option for me anymore, it’s simply a necessary journey. Coming out of denial and the victim narrative was a very important first step, and many, many women are taking some of their very first steps right now.
The interesting thing is that the women who have been the assaulted ones, the wounded, are becoming the healing agents, the ones leading the way by having the courage to speak up and tell their stories, the wounded healers. For many women, it’s a huge risk to do this publicly, because women who have been victims are often seen as weak and defenseless or on the flip side, they are blamed for their misfortune. When, in fact, the pain that we have lived through in silence approaches what some recovery material calls holocaust dimensions. It is very real.
The truth is that a woman’s identity has largely been a hidden thing for a few thousand years. We are not going to recover over night, but we will recover if we take the journey. There is a soul inside of us all, the image of the Creator, waiting to be born, waiting to rise, a true self waiting to emerge. And when this healing happens for women all over the world, it will lead us into healing narratives for all the other pains we are living through. We know that the wounds of trauma begin to heal in relationships as we become open to being the agents of healing for one another. We may be in a moment, but let’s hope something has begun that will shape us all in the path of wholeness. We will get through this election, somehow, together.
Trickster figures are stock characters appearing in myths and stories from all over the world. Like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, the trickster moves across traditional boundary lines, causing chaotic events to unfold by exposing what is hidden, often through reprehensible behavior. Trickster figures can appear in real life as well, some say we all have aspects of the archetype within us, we see the trickster looming large in the persona of Donald Trump.
Tricksters generally come onto the scene when there are important decisions to be made and something big is at stake. They challenge the main characters of the story to reconsider their views, question the journey they are on and become reconciled to their truest path. Tricksters expose the dark realm within us all where fear lives, namely, the shadow. Trump represents this trickster figure who has come into the story of our culture for such a time as this and we are the main characters, each one of us. He forces us to either ignore or examine, at the shadow level, what we really believe about issues that have largely remained hidden, particularly what we believe about women.
While we might be outraged at his perspective on women, if we look at the statistics of violence against women, (1 in 3 women have experienced violence against them) we see that his degrading views actually support the statistics. This is how the shadow works when it is ignored inside of us, it begins to have power over us and becomes extremely uncomfortable with the truth, rationalizing or intellectualizing the facts and protecting its power through responses of hatred, rage and control. While we may feel that the ways in which we devalue women in our culture are unacceptable on the surface, we still somehow have enabled the system to function as our dominant state for whatever reason. Perhaps we feel helpless to change it.
But, strangely, the key to changing the treatment of women and examining our core beliefs about women resides less in our common responses to people like Trump, such as anger, outrage, blaming, shaming or doing nothing at all, and more in the shadow he brings out in all of us. The question is not necessarily, do we support, are we afraid of, or could we ever believe in Trump, but rather, what do we really feel about women, daughters, mothers, grandmothers and sisters? Do we really expect them to be subservient to men? And if we feel this statement is off base, then why do our statistics not support it?
We are engaged in an epic battle for a woman’s voice to be her own. We are in between two systems, the old and the new, the known and the unknown woods, where the action takes place, where the shadow is revealed, sometimes dressed up in grandma’s pajamas. The question is not what will we do with Trump, but what will we do with us? How will we invite change into our own hearts to produce the kinds of leaders who value us, all of us?
The shadow is always shocking when it is revealed, tooth and claw, exposing our core beliefs about women. Women are even shocked when they get to the bottom of what they believe about themselves. But the truth doesn’t have to be paralyzing and it doesn’t have to jump up and swallow us for lunch. Trump, with his big-ness, though he seems to have paralyzed half a nation with fear, has actually done us a huge favor, he’s brought the shadow out into the open, named the elephant in the room. And now the choice is ours, what do we really believe about women? Our answer to that question could change the world.
