by Sherry Cothran | Mar 21, 2019 | Uncategorized
When we think about the Bible, we don’t often think of the beauty and power of songs, especially by women. They aren’t sung loudly over edgy guitar riffs or punctuated by trance inducing beats. They’re not delivered to us via Youtube by stylish singers in trendy clothes. But if we go searching for them, we find that songs are a big deal in the Bible, and though they may not make it to the top 40 Billboard charts, they are some of the most powerful tools we have for claiming a new world order. One in which the hungry are fed, the weak are made strong, the oppressed are set free and the lion lies down with the lamb. A world in which swords are turned into plow shares.
If I were to get a hook out of the songs of Hannah, Deborah and Mary it would be this: God has done the impossible again, should we be surprised?
Though there are nearly two hundred songs in the Bible, some of the most powerful ones are created by these three women.
What makes them so special?
They teach us how to sing our faith into existence by envisioning God’s action in a song, it’s classically known as praise. But the word itself is deceiving. It brings to mind joy, beauty, ease or happiness. But their songs of praise tell us a different story. Praise is hard. That’s what makes it so powerful. These women do the gritty, scrappy, world ordering work of praise in their songs, and it’s what makes them world changing.
Praise is hard because it must be uttered over and against
evidence that points to the contrary. It’s much easier to believe the evidence
that the world is a horrible place than to speak the good news that it is not.
To praise God in a world in which violent hate crimes seem to rule the daily news, where children become targets just for attending school, where women are sold every day into sex trafficking, even in our own backyard, is a radical act. But that’s exactly what faith is, praising God in adverse conditions. This is how the world is changed. Channeling the love of God over and against the reality in which we live. That’s exactly why it’s crucial. Because praise not only heals us, it heals the world, too.
The women of the Bible who sang God’s powerful and healing
love into the world weren’t the product of warm, fuzzy, comfortable societies.
They were scrappy and lived in a culture that often held them to a rigid
standard of having to negotiate life as the property of men. They also lived in
a time in which a woman’s worth was often measured by her ability to bear a
male child, remain a virgin until married and be submissive to male authority.
But the three women whose songs changed the world, Hannah,
Deborah and Mary, colored outside of these lines. Not because they were seeking
attention for themselves but because God asked them to, they simply responded
to a calling from on high.
Hannah, Deborah and Mary were not only prophets, but women who overcame cultural adversity to channel God’s miraculous power into flesh and bones, into peace and love. Deborah’s song tells of an impossible victory that she commands with her vision, grit and military prowess as the right arm of God on earth. Hannah’s song claims God’s miraculous power to do the impossible through a woman that the world had given up on. Mary’s song creates a new world order in which God’s love is Sovran.
Through their songs love is made possible in the world through the odd combination that women carry so well -vulnerability and strength.
The songs of women are special, because they are uttered from hearts that know of sacrifice and oppression, hearts that are well acquainted with sorrow and the impossible. Hearts that have experienced the pain of rejection. Women who didn’t settle for being the victims of an unfair system, who didn’t believe the victim narrative but rose up out of it through God’s strength to share the truthfulness of God’s mighty power with the world.
They also teach us that we can’t do important work alone, we need others to be our best selves. In a culture in which we can easily feel isolated, lonely and without nurturing love, we need to remember that their songs were not sung alone. If they had been, the outcomes could have been very different. Deborah could have gone into battle without enough of the manpower she needed. Mary could have been abandoned by her family and friends and had to face giving birth alone. Hannah would have had no sacred vessel into which she could dedicate God’s gift to her. But because they sang their songs in communities that believed in them, and believed that their words were from God, the outcome was miraculous, every time.
God has done the impossible through the songs of women, should we be surprised?
Check out some of my modern interpretations of the radical stories of the hidden women of the Bible here.
May God add a blessing to your reading of this blog.
by Sherry Cothran | Dec 24, 2018 | Uncategorized
Tis the season of the longest night. Darkness arrives earlier and the sun takes its time waking in the morning. We are worn out by the Christmas rush and feeling the long stretch of winter’s yawn, inviting us into stillness.
In this time of speeding up to slow down it is not uncommon to sense feelings of sadness creeping in around the edges of our hard earned joy, once we slow down, that is. But if our first instinct is to chase the sadness away with some kind of distraction, we would be robbing ourselves of the hidden gift of winter. The wondrous gift that is given silently in this season of the longest nights.
Ancient holy people referred to this time of year as “thin space,” a time when heaven moves a little closer to the earth. Whenever this time of year approaches, it can be both wonderful and frightening.
For Christians, it’s also the season in which we celebrate the birth of the Christ child. Another event of the heavens that prompted the angels to inform humans that even though the whole world was about to change forever, there was nothing to fear. Tidings of great joy delivered into frightful times.
Following Jesus’ birth, Matthew’s gospel tells us that the infant boys were
massacred throughout the region of Bethlehem by order of King Herod. But, as the
angels said, we simply have nothing to fear.
I’m not sure why heavenly events are also terribly fearful, or why the
emotions of sadness and loss accompany supposedly joyful holidays, but these
are things I’ve come to accept…sort of. Or let’s just say, I’m working on it.
I suppose it’s all about perspective. When I can view winter solstice
and the annual always-coming-before-I’m-ready re-birth of the Christ child as an
opportunity rather than a burden, things get better.
I’ve come to realize that each of us is given the tools of our lives, and when we begin to apply these tools to our partnership with heaven, we soon find that we all have one material, a very necessary one without which we can become nothing at all. It is our own woundedness. Our wounds hold years of stored loss, sadness, and layers of grief. Like a big gray, cold, blob of hardened clay sitting there inside of us, uninvited, wanting to be expressed, wanting to become something useful. Often stuck and keeping us from moving forward.
But Old Man Winter brings a unique opportunity with his spinning wheel
of transformation, always turning. It’s a great season to go sit at this wheel
of time and learn how to work with the material of our pain. Reaching in to
pull out a little evidence, a little substance to offer up to the spinning
wheel.
Stubborn pain and loss sits there, shapeless and dark, and has become a
constant reminder of what has not happened in our lives. We need to take it in
hand and shape it into something, but we have no idea how to do that. We would love
to believe that our lives could become a vessel of good, but we don’t know how
to work with it, we are not artisans of our pain. We’ve never worked with
anything so stubborn and hard, so unwilling to be molded into something practical.
We reluctantly pick up our blob of pain, we spin the wheel, we poke some
holes. We cry, we get therapy, we join a 12 step group, we do yoga, we go to
church, it gets worse, it gets a little better, maybe our pain is becoming
something more than pain. At least we are willing to acknowledge its existence.
The point is, it will never move if we just let it sit there, we have to
touch it, throw it on the wheel of transformation, scream at it, caress it
gently, add water, pray to God to show us what it is to become; pray to God to
give us a clue about what to do, the master potter, who knows our pain by
heart.
We need a Higher Power to help us sort out the information of our grief
and lift from us the burdens, the overwhelming emotions that are too heavy for
us. What happens in this process is nothing less than amazing. Season by season
of working with grief, we see God, the master potter, working with us and
turning it into a vessel we can use, a vessel that can be filled with joy to
pour out to others.
Eventually, the season that we dreaded so much becomes a springtime. And
we have something forming on the wheel of our lives, a new thing, a vessel,
that we can use to hold love.
If we see grief as something we need, if we understand it is our grief that holds the vital information we need to move forward, then we can accept this winter as being one of the greatest transformational periods of our lives. If we don’t seek to distract ourselves from it. Rather, taking the risk of turning into it. With God’s help, and with the help of a group or a community, we can see this winter as an opportunity.
God takes the information stored in our big blob of grief and turns it
into something we can use to hold our wholeness and become that fully alive
person God intends for us to be.
It will get messy, no doubt, you will get your hands dirty, there will
be ugly tears, and sorrow, but each time you press against the edges, it takes
a different form. As you identify your grief and offer the layers to God to be
lifted, something new begins to appear, a hollowed out place within, big enough
to store joy, peace and love.
This is God’s promise to us and it will be met as we become willing.
At the heart of this season may be a dark night of the soul, but it is
also the place where we find God looking back at us, ready to meet us and get
to work with all the various materials of our pain. Saying, just as the angels
said on the dark, silent night in which the Christ child was born, “Do not
fear, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy.”
Each Christmas is an opportunity for the Christ child to be born anew in
all of us. From the churning chaos of the wheel of time, out of the elements of
pain, comes joy.
“How Silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.”
by Sherry Cothran | Sep 26, 2018 | spirituality
When I was a child, two things kept happening. One, I was always stepping on bees and getting mercilessly stung. Bees were more abundant back then and I was barefoot most of the time, I didn’t like shoes in the summer, still don’t. Second, I seemed to have a knack for finding the one, live electric fence in the whole world left on when kids are playing around it, the one that held within its boundary a few stray cows and a couple of half broke horses.
The other day I was taking a stroll through a lovely botanical garden. Around one of the flower beds was situated that long, painfully familiar, barely visible string of wire with a nice little sign that read, “please pardon the electric fence, it keeps the deer from eating the flowers.”
I was slightly offended by it. Who cares if the deer eat the flowers? High voltage fences are more dangerous than the deer.
Running into an electric fence feels like being hit in the stomach by a projectile basketball, forgetting to catch it first. With enough voltage to scare off a nearly one ton cow running through you all at once. As if that weren’t enough, there are the accompanying feelings of stupidity as it dawns on you that you forgot to remember that one, nearly invisible boundary you were never, ever supposed to forget.
The bee stings weren’t quite that bad, but always delivered a pulsating ache that stopped me in my tracks, eliciting a familiar shriek that beckoned the neighbor or Mom to come running , bee sting remedy in hand, at the call of that special cry. Tobacco was the best medicine, much better than the green stuff in the plastic vile, tobacco really does the trick, with a little spit thrown in to draw out the pain.
Everything in this world has a boundary. A bee, a flower, a field of stray cows and half broke horses, a little girl roaming the world barefoot. Even the wilderness has its own kind of boundary called survival and our lives have a boundary, too, called death.
My best friend told me that I didn’t have a problem with setting boundaries, rather, I had boundary fatigue from other people trying to tear them down.
“There’s a difference?” I asked.
A beautiful, ripening tomato reaches its boundary for potential if it isn’t plucked off the vine within the window of its ripeness. A storm reaches the boundary of its territory before conditions change and it dissipates. A whale will eventually reach the boundary of what seemed an endless sea when its migration is complete.
A person with great potential for love will put a boundary around her heart reasoning that it will keep others from coming near and perhaps wounding her more deeply than before. She thinks that she will not be able to bear the pain again. She feels stupid for forgetting the one thing she was never, ever supposed to forget. Little by little, by the grace of God, others who care for her dearly teach her how to build safe and healthy boundaries.
In my grown up life, I’ve learned that I can still walk barefoot in the grass, I just have to be careful around the clover. I’ve also learned that wherever there are domestic animals, there is likely going to be some kind of barrier, maybe even a high voltage one. I’m much more careful around farms. I’ve learned that it’s okay to set boundaries around my time, work, relationships and love. I have control of the voltage, But I also realize that I can draw these boundaries way too firmly when I am too hurt, too lonely, too tired or too empty. Keeping healthy boundaries is all about keeping myself healthy.
It’s okay to make mistakes when we are trying to figure out where the boundary markers are. In fact, we most surely will draw our boundaries too firmly at first, or not enough. We learn, we try again, we observe ourselves, we reflect, we make adjustments. We learn balance as we go along. We most likely will not be very good at setting boundaries when we begin. But over time, we’ll get better. We’ll know what to do to get back on track.
These days, I keep a pouch of tobacco in my purse, strictly for medicinal purposes.
by Sherry Cothran | May 11, 2018 | Uncategorized
“Nobody escapes being wounded, we are all wounded people. Whether physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually. The main question is not, ‘How can we hide our wounds, or hide from them?’ but ‘how can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.” – Henri Nouwen, “The Wounded Healer”
The Wounded Healer is a human archetype that’s been around for thousands of years. In native culture, the wounded healer is the shaman or holy man/holy woman who heals themselves and others through becoming a channel for the Creator’s power to flow through them. They often use their wounds as a source of information for healing others. Jesus became the great Wounded Healer (the topic of Nouwen’s book) as his wounds became a source of healing for the wounded of the world.
It’s a beautiful idea, that our wounds could become a source of healing. But if you’re like me, you might initially balk at the thought of placing your wounds in the service of others. After all, if you’ve been on the earth very long, you soon learn from the school of hard knocks that you have to heal yourself before you can help anyone else, right? But here is what Nouwen is getting at and it’s also the real genius behind Jesus’ core teaching of “love one another.” The way to unleashing the wounded healer within isn’t in the fixing of our wounds or the wounds of others, it’s in the loving.
We so often confuse fixing and loving, and it’s easy to do.
When Jesus told his followers that the most important thing was that they love one another and love God, he knew they were broken people in a broken world. The thing is, he wasn’t telling them to fix the world or fix each other, he was telling them to love each other. It is somehow very important as we find solutions to the problems of the world like hunger, homelessness, climate change, violence and oppression that love leads the way.
Loving is different than fixing. We can’t fix each other but we can love each other, and this is where the magic happens, this is where the healing begins. In fact, Jesus was clear on this point too, that we need not get involved in trying to fix each other, but loving, loving one another is necessary for our own healing. Because it is love that connects us as human beings. People tend to suffer from loneliness, isolation and abandonment without love. Without love, we are just doomed to live out the nature of our wounds.
Healing our wounds is really important to human thriving. The field of psychology informs us that if we don’t heal our wounds, then they become the pain that we inflict on others. We project the dark attributes of our wounds onto others because we are trying to find some kind of method to cope with them. When we are not able to go through the healing process, we tend to project our pain outwardly, it’s how we manage the emotions we can’t process. Because we’re projecting the material of our wounds such as hurt, fear, mistrust, jealousy, it makes it difficult to connect with people, to love and have intimate relationships. Without healing our wounds, we are controlled by our pain.
But, as it turns out, the opposite is also true. That when we project love onto others, we go in the direction of love, in ourselves as well as outwardly. Love begins to give us messages about who we really are, because love is inside of us, the most powerful force in the universe. Love leads us to healing. We begin to crave more love as we get to know love, as we seek to love without conditions, we want more of that in our own lives. It leads us to seek our own healing. If we get into a program of healing, then our wounds can give us the information we need to move forward into friendships, love relationships, intimacy and a sane, manageable life. We become wounded healers.
Healing happens as we learn to give and receive love, as we share our brokenness with other human beings who are also broken. It took me a long time to really accept this. Because I always felt that I had to fix things, situations, problems; that in my ability to fix impossible situations, I could be spectacular and finally be worthy of love. I found out, in ten years of being the pastor at one of those churches Pope Francis has called “the frontlines of the world’s pain” that I was wrong. I couldn’t fix anyone or anything, all I could do was love broken people and eventually, learn to love myself. I learned that if I let love lead, solutions to problems would arise and I could see the way clearly.
Check out Sherry’s latest book: reflections from a pastor on homelessness and her spiritual journey.
The act of loving one another actually gives us access to our wounds. Because often, they are buried so deeply within us, we can’t reach them by ourselves. We need others to become mirrors for us so that we can locate them, have language for them. Sometimes our wounds are buried beneath layers of a false self that we’ve developed to survive because the pain of these wounds has been too overwhelming for us to process. Our real self or true self goes into hiding to survive. But the genius of Jesus’ teaching, “love one another,” is that as we risk loving instead of fixing, something deep within us begins to vibrate, God’s love, hidden inside of us all. It wakes up like a sleeping giant and begins to shake these layers of the false self as we connect with others through love. We begin to realize there is a truth inside of us that is much more powerful than our pain, that is Divine love. It shines out from inside as we risk loving, as we realize we are broken. Somehow our hearts need to break so we can believe that love is inside of us, love rescues us from within because it is innate in us all. We were all created with the image of God within, we just have a hard time believing it. Love holds us steady, loving others stabilizes us as we take the healing journey.
There is a wounded healer inside of us all. As counterintuitive as it might seem, we find our healing by putting our own wounds in the service of a greater love. God begins to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
As the poet Rumi said, “the wound is the place where the light enters you.”
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by Sherry Cothran | Mar 8, 2018 | spirituality
“Is it the end of the world?”
The thirty-something Cherokee woman asked me, sitting across the table at the mission.
“It feels like everything on the reservation is falling apart and the world is, too,” she said.
To her, there were two worlds. The one “out there,” which was more desirable than the one “in here.” Until now, that is. The lifelong destination of her dreams, the world I had come from, the one that held the strange mixture of oppression and opportunity, didn’t seem much better than hers. The boundaries had become blurred and she didn’t know what to make of it. She was in need of a Holy Woman or a Beloved Woman, to interpret the signs. Aren’t we all?
We long for this Wise Woman, the one who turns the end of the world into a new beginning. But where has she gone? We read about her in the Bible, we hear about her healing, her songs, prophetic insights and stabilizing force in tribal stories, but can she still be found? This question is what brought me to the Qualla Boundary of the Cherokee Nation and it’s a question that has haunted me most of my life. Where is the woman “out there” who feels like the one I have “in here,” inside of me? I began my journey with the ones with whom I share ancestry, the Cherokee.
Sally (her real name is undisclosed) was one of the few women who agreed to be interviewed. Their resistance was understandable. Exploited by society’s hunger for the exotic and rare, they were clinging to what little threads of identity remained past the thin veil of the Hollywood generated images that brought in tourism dollars. It was all they had left, and it was a thing to be protected.
Apparently, my application for interviews was still on hold at tribal council. But Sally agreed to speak to me because I was a minister, she was hoping to be one herself. She heard I was on the hunt for the memory of the Holy Woman, in Bible and in native cultures. To me, the Holy Woman had become almost extinct, but I had read stories about this type of woman, call her an archetype if you will, in Bible and in native history. I hoped to discover remnants of her to bring her influence to my own faith, to shed light on how these women might have functioned in the tribal cultures whose stories haunt the unexplored territories of the Bible. If we could get a glimpse of her, maybe we could believe that she actually exists, maybe we could say with more confidence, “here we are.”
Holy Women or in Cherokee, “Beloved Women,” were the property owners, not the owned, women warriors, prophets, owners of crops and lands, negotiators, judges, matriarchs. I was given this definition of a Beloved Woman when I asked the tribal historian for his understanding of her role in Cherokee culture:
“The Beloved Woman is an important community figure among the Cherokee people. The wise woman bestowed this role acts as a one-woman legal counsel and judicial authority over all members of her tribe. Her word is law and all people must abide.”
It would be a miracle if this woman survived.
When the early American settlers came, the men were shocked that they were forced to negotiate with Cherokee women for goods and food. It didn’t fit into their scheme of how the world worked. If a society wasn’t patriarchal, to them, it just wasn’t civilized. It hadn’t been that long ago, relatively speaking, a few generations back. I wanted to know if anyone remembered, or if anyone was still carrying on this tradition.
I began with the question, does the “Beloved Woman” still exist or has she become a force of the past? Her feminine powers brought into submission through patriarchy, as in many dominant strains of my own Christian tradition? I knew that at one time, the Cherokee tradition had revered these women as tribal leaders, judges, warriors, property owners, prophets and healers. But did she still live, if only in ancient memory?
We sat across the table in the fellowship hall of a quaint, stone church in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountain range. The mission, constructed in the 1950’s, was what remained of the Methodist efforts to bring Jesus to the Cherokee, an effort begun out of the early 1800’s missionary zeal of the circuit riding preachers. I guess the Methodists were not aware, in the beginning, that Jesus had already appeared to the Cherokee almost two thousand years prior. But even Jesus, the one in the Cherokee legend who was known as “the great healer that walked the earth,” and the Methodists, as powerful as they were at the time, couldn’t stop the Great Removal. All that was left of the mighty nation that once roamed the entire southern region freely was a stamp of land known as the Qualla Boundary and an identity that lived somewhere beyond the pages of history books; somewhere beyond the layers of intergenerational trauma, in the river, in the land, in the wind, in the lost women who were once “beloved.”
Sally told me that she had longed to take a spiritual journey but she felt trapped. I encountered a similar sentiment in each of the woman who agreed to speak to me. A deep, unmet spiritual yearning that seemed to run parallel to the beautiful, winding river flowing through the mountains, constant and determined. It was something that each of them felt intensely and yet also felt sealed off from, as if they were not allowed access to the beauty of their own souls. It was as if this spiritual desire that ran through them belonged to someone else from another time. As if their very identities were the property of an elusive power they couldn’t even name.
Though these women were connected to one of the richest spiritual traditions on the continent, Cherokee spirituality, they somehow struggled to make the connection at the soul level. Sally felt bound by many things, her husband’s illness, her mother’s recent death and her many children who had taken what she called “bad roads,” succumbing to the rampant drug and alcohol epidemic that plagued reservation life. But more than that, there was a kind of binding of her spirit that she struggled to give language to, to her, it was only a distinct feeling she could name as “the end of the world.” The blurring of the boundaries between the “outside world” and the “inside world.” I told her that when it feels that way, when it feels like something important is crumbling, then something more valuable than money, property or power is usually wanting to be born. Something old, a hidden treasure, wanting to be discovered.
Like the woman in Revelation 12, the woman at the end of the world, clothed with the sun, golden, full of light. She had to endure the epitome of suffering in order to give birth to something new. All the while fighting off a dragon. I wanted to tell Sally that she was that woman, that we all are, at one point or another in our lives as we embrace the terrifying freedom of the birth of our very own souls in the world.
But the Holy Woman would have understood these things, she would have interpreted them for the women of the tribe with her songs, stories, healing and her prophetic insights. The Beloved Woman would have made the end of the world feel normal.
Like this story? Find more like this one here in my latest book.
When I asked her about the tradition of Beloved Women in her culture, she said she didn’t really know of any. She grew up in a time in which it was dangerous to be native. She had always felt disconnected from Cherokee culture and though her grandmother spoke the language, she only spoke it among trusted friends. To be Cherokee was to remain hidden, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to keep your true identity a secret.
I wonder if the bones of the Holy Woman are buried in the spiritual longings of these women. Longing to connect with the grandmothers who spoke their language freely.
I wonder if the Beloved Woman is walking alongside the “great healer who walked the land,” two thousand years ago, gathering her medicine in the mountains, fighting off the dragons, clothed with the sun. Singing her songs as the boundary between the end and the beginning fades. Giving birth to something old.
Maybe she is still alive in us all.
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