![Woman I Have Not Found: Shaking the Foundations]()
by Sherry Cothran | Mar 1, 2016 | faith, Native American, religion, Sherry blogs, spirituality
Picasso, Wisdom & Folly
Whoever finds me, finds life – Woman Wisdom, Prov. 8:35
Woman, as it turns out, was not a mistake or an afterthought or an addition to some more superior version of human. In fact, if we look into what I call the open secrets of Bible story, we find woman to be the vessel through which the Divine is often born into the world. She co-creates with God, (Woman Wisdom, Prov. 8) is the first to name God, (Hagar, Gen. 16:13), gives birth to God’s son (Mary) and is the first to be approached by God’s little trickster serpent in the perfect dome-globe creation of paradise with the choice to become fully human (Eve), just to name a few. Woman as a category in the Bible tends to bring out a unique aspect of God, the ongoing creation of the world.
When we re-read Bible story through the eyes of Woman, these stories take on new meaning, one that casts Woman in a different light. But, of course, it all depends on the interpretation. Hebrew is a slippery language, each word having a wide variety of meanings, depending on context and the many facets of linguistics. This is why, as I heard Hebrew Bible scholar Johanna van Wijk-Bos exclaim, “you will never get to the end of it, you will always see new layers of meaning each time you return to the text.” Building a world, a political system, a religion around a fixed interpretation of Bible is like building your house on a fault line, it will eventually shift and re-arrange every aspect of your habitat, it is the nature of created things to do so.
Many of the women who roam the Old Testament stories of the ancient world have become lost in translation. Not just in our modern world, but this was happening in the ancient world, too, as civilized culture came to dominate the landscape. While those in power invested in the tools of progress, it became more and more important to subvert the feminine role, to dominate the powers of created things in favor of invented things.
Why? Some say it has to do with disenchantment. Charles Taylor, Max Weber and others say that there have been several periods in history in which human beings made a concerted effort on every level – political, educational, industrial, social, religious, to believe more in material things than spiritual things. They call it Disenchantment and they have warned that it is fate of our time, the downfall of humanity.
One if Disenchantment’s victims (and there are several) is Woman. Not only was she made subservient to man in the Hebrew creation myth (written down during one of the great civilizing periods) but she has been made property and the target of violence, her nature so overly franchised and disfigured over time, that Woman, in today’s culture, has a difficult time finding a clear image of a true Self. When a woman hears the phrase, “just be yourself” it often creates a state of internal confusion, and it’s no wonder.
But it has not always been this way, we carry within us a memory that lives at a deeper level, the archetypal level, the level of nature. We see in some of our native and ancient cultures the archetypes of the Wild Woman, the Healer, the Warrior and many others that exist as a deep memory within us, a part of our unconscious that seems to be awakening in our time. Our native cultures, more victims of Disenchantment, have kept alive the memory in us of honoring the feminine, the reverence for Mother Earth, the power within the female body. I have even read in some Lakota literature that a woman’s body and power are so revered that she is not able to practice any kind of healing art, such as shamanism, until she is past menopause, because her power shifts during this stage to a deeper, more spiritual level. What a radical concept in our culture, a woman, more revered post menopause.
In Cherokee myth, there are two deities, male and female, Selu and Kana’ti, who bring their respective gifts into the world and are seen as co-equals, partners. In other creation myths, we find a more balanced concept of the male and female as co-creators, bringing life into the world, but somehow, we have not interpreted Bible this way as our dominant belief system. And if you doubt the Bible undergirds our dominant beliefs, read depth psychologist, C.G. Jung, who claimed that you cannot understand America, its history or your life within it, without reading Bible.
We are living through a time when these foundations are shaking and we are finding some things we have overlooked, namely, Woman. We are rescuing parts and pieces of ourselves that may have become lost in translation. Woman Wisdom is a prime example. She appears in Proverbs, one of the wisdom literature books, as God’s companion in the creation of the world. (Proverbs 8). But somehow, we have not seemed to notice that she is there.
We have also just assumed that the preacher/exhorter from the book of Ecclesiastes, another wisdom book, Qohelet, who says some pretty famous things like, “there is nothing new under the sun,” and has been quoted in great songs such as “Blowing in the Wind” and “Turn, Turn, Turn,” is a male voice. Yet, some interpreters claim there is much evidence in the Hebrew to support the fact that Qohelet is a feminine voice. Does it matter?
It changes things, like an earthquake changes things, creating new landscapes, new ideas and new forms when we begin to read these foundational stories from a different perspective, from the view of Woman, when we discover her archetypal remains right where she left them, in her own voice.
“See, this I have found, says Qohelet, adding one to another to find an accounting, which my heart still seeks and has not found: One human being in a thousand I have found, and woman in all these I have not found.” Ecclesiastes 7: 27,28 (Johanna van Wijk-Bos)
It changes things when a woman claims she cannot find Woman in her culture anymore. It causes the foundations to shake as Woman goes searching for her Self.
Those who miss me injure themselves. -Woman Wisdom – Proverbs 8:36
by Sherry Cothran | Mar 25, 2015 | faith, religion, Sherry blogs, spirituality
John 12:20-33 (meditation)
Often we find that as those who follow Christ, we have once again signed our names on the dotted line and said “yes” to the strange adventure before reading the fine print. Perhaps we were caught up in the excitement of the moment.
Later, upon much reflection, we admit that we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing or what some of his ideas could possibly mean. Such as this one, for example, in today’s passage, it’s a real gem: “those who love their life lose it…those who hate their life in this world keep it for all eternity.” What?
It is understandable that our perception would be quite dim, most of us don’t speak the native tongue and we have a rather dismal connection with the ancient mind partnered with the conviction, in an age of massive violence and suicide, that hating one’s life is a really bad idea.
As we wade into this passage, a good place to begin might be with the Greek word for “life” which is “psychē.” When Jesus says that if we love our life we will lose it, he’s referring to something different than what we might think of as our lives. Psychē means breath, spirit, soul in the Greek, but when we think of our lives, we don’t generally gravitate towards concepts of spirit or soul. We often think of our lives as a series of things that have happened to us, a childhood, an education, a family, a career, children, grandchildren, loss, success, etc. Life is generally, for the modern person, a series of events occurring to us that accumulate over time and become the definition of life itself. While the soul, our specially designed, God invented dream vessel, often sits idle for most of our lives until the day we decide reject this as an acceptable definition of life and join up, as Jesus says here, with the eternal.
It’s a difficult concept, though, because we tend to think of our souls as separate from our bodies, we have our physical life day to day, we work, come home, eat, have some social time, some entertainment, some hobby, maybe, we pay our bills and try to have some fun, and then we have our spiritual life, something we do on the side and sometimes on Sundays. That thing that we would really like to tend to, a nagging feeling in the pit of our stomachs, but we rarely have the time and we often find that distractions keep us moving along as long as there are no major events to pull us out of our routine of distraction. But the ancient mind would have viewed the soul and the body as one, there would have been no such idea that you could live a life separate from your soul, that would be something like, as Jesus says in another place, withering on the vine.
Those who love their life will lose it.
Not only are we confused about life, we are also confused about love.
We are taught that love is something we must secure in this life, we think we can possess it or earn it. If we just secure the right mate, the right job, have the right kids, the right platform or brand, then we are convinced we will find true love. We often believe that love is tied to how well we perform, our value and worth is measured by whether or not we are good producers in the world. Many of us are taught that if we behave the right way we will become worthy of love. So we come to believe in all of these things that substitute for love, these synthetic brands marketed to us every minute of every day.
It follows, due to our conditioning, that we believe to love our lives is a good thing, because in loving our lives, we are becoming good, upstanding citizens, self-sustaining and independent, we are securing our lives.
Yet, Jesus tells us just the opposite. Those who love their life will lose it. It often comes as a shock to us that love is simply a gift, free. In a world where we are daily bought and sold, we have a hard time fathoming that love cannot be secured or earned. However, the reality is that we do not own, contrary to our belief, either love or life, they are both, as it turns out, free agents, gifts from God. Jesus tells us, too, that gifts from God are different than other gifts, they cannot be possessed, only continuously given, that is how they remain active and alive, igniting our souls to life in the eternal.
Jesus’ ministry is built around this idea that each individual is to place their life in the design of God. A community that follows Christ fully cannot really be authentic unless a good core group of its members are committed to this, that constant and daily reminder “not my will but Thine.” This is not what we have been taught to believe.
We have been taught, even in our religious culture, that the self is more important than the community. We are in this for ourselves, generally, for some kind of self-seeking good. Entire theories of community organizing are built around appealing to self- interested individuals. But Jesus turns this upside down and tells us that if we want to have full lives, free from doubt, fear, anxiety; full of wholeness and compassionate interactions that make us feel clean on the inside, yes, even financial security, I did not say wealth, mind you. To live fully, to be meaningfully related in community, Jesus simply states that we need to turn over our lives in service of the greater good which he defines for as loving the stranger and loving God. In doing so, we participate in the great stream of eternal love flowing in the world. It seems that when we become really fixated on ourselves or place conditions around what it means to love, we get stuck and it and it becomes difficult to flow.
This passage is about dying in order to live. The grain that falls to the ground in order to produce more fruit, this is your life merging with God’s great and generative creation. It is what Jesus is doing, he’s on the way to fully laying down his life in service of the world, in order that the world might be saved. As we follow him, we do the same thing, not literally as he did, but ritually, through the community that is dedicated to unconditional love, acts of compassion, selfless giving and worship. Worship and ritual are vital to us living out our faith, we have to get ourselves out of the way and invoke God in our lives. This is where we discover our joy.
It is vital that we have communities practicing this ritual of giving our lives in service of the world community, the healing of all humankind. It is how we find our lives again. We make space for the Holy to move in us and we are changed.
We can do nothing of our own power, all true power comes from God. When we abuse this God given power in us, the soul life and its gifts, when we use it to harm others, then great descimation of soul, spirit and the created world occurs. We are in this moment now in our world.
When we have individuals and communities that decide to do as Jesus instructs us to do here, to put themselves in service of God, our souls, our spirits, our breath, to become hollow so that God can flow through us, to enact the rituals of worship that we do here that get ourselves out of the way so God can move in us, when we decide that we are going to get serious and committed about this, it doesn’t’ matter how small we are, we can accomplish great things on behalf of the kingdom of God on earth because we simply decided to get out of the way and let God move in us.
We are a channel for the Spirit of God to move in the world, we are a system, a unique sight for God’s grace to redeem the darkness here, to lift up the oppressed, to do miraculous things in the world. But if we cannot decide that we are going to let go of what substitutes for real love and allow God to do a greater work, then what is at stake is so much greater than the loss of a church building or the loss of identity. What is at stake is your very life.
Those who love their lives will lose them. Those who deny themselves and take up my cross will live.
In these final days of Lent, we are walking with Jesus, once again, on a journey to lay down our lives so that God’s love might be made manifest in the world, so that we might find our true selves in the greater whole.
Maybe it’s not what we signed up for, but it’s why we’re here.
by Sherry Cothran | Apr 3, 2014 | Sherry blogs
Sherry’s official website: www.sherrycothran.com
If there were a manual for interacting with Bible stories, I would like to think the first line might be something like, “Forget everything you know.” The second line, “Engage your imagination fully.” In such a world of wonder and mystery, a world of wild spaces and untamed humanity, one easily gets lost when navigating with a 21st century mind. To imagine that God is a God of wildness, wonder and mystery, the Divine one who is constantly creating would be to unlock a door to a heart that has been sealed by industrial strength guilt, shame and fear. These were the very forces that overtook Adam and Eve (according to the old, old story).
Speaking of ancient humanity and creation stories, I really thought “Noah” was a decent movie, a great story and a wonderful jaunt for the imagination, and here is the key word, imagination. Let’s face it, if the movie was merely based on the scant literary information found in Biblical text, it just wouldn’t be that great of a movie. We forget, so often, that when we are reading the Noah Bible story of Genesis, we’re using our imagination to interact with a story and to expand meaning. The movie re-imagines an ancient story, inviting us to do more of the same. If we were part of that early community to whom the story first belonged, we might be sitting around a campfire or a dinner table listening to Uncle John tell us about how we came to BE in the world and our imagination would be on fire.
“Noah” re-imagines a world where the ancient human is completely dependent on the Creator (the movie’s language) to sustain daily life. The Creator provides according to the Creator’s will, which is basically Divine goodness. The Creator places this goodness in the human self and the development of the self is intended to unfold according to this awareness (that is, if not for the tragic garden event.) This is Noah’s language throughout most of the movie as he tries to follow his understanding of Divine will.
However, in this early, ancient world of 10th generation humans, the spirits of good and evil are at full on war, within and without. How do you depict a war of good and evil waged in the human soul? The Nephilim roam the earth, evidence of God’s footsteps in the garden still appears now and then and from this garden emerge the two paths, light and dark, the divine and the shadow sides of human nature. Even Noah is complicit (the human struggle) as the movie suggests, under extreme pressure and on the brink of insanity, he moves towards the dark side himself. The whole world was literally on his shoulders, we would all crack a little, if not a lot, under such pressure with no entourage to do political spin on our behalf. In such a world, the Watchers, magic berries, sleep inducing herbs, seeds of Eden and golden fire rocks seem to make sense. The Bible world is not a flattened out reality, the one that we sometimes live in when we overlay our millennia of information and technology (not to mention 2000 years plus of theology) over such ancient creation stories. There are many layers, helpful though they are, to peel back.
To engage Bible story with imagination might also give us the courage to take the God we have created in our own image out of the box, the box we’ve built for a God we can manipulate and comprehend. The truth is, the Divine will still be the creative force of our universe, not to mention all the other numerous galaxies that float and hover around us, long after we are gone. This is a mystery we’ve been trying to capture since we knew how to speak and dream and tell stories.
by Sherry Cothran | Feb 11, 2013 | Sherry blogs
Where was Moses when the lights went out? In the dark. My brother and I would squeal with laughter as kids even though we had heard this joke a hundred times, it was, perhaps, my grandfather’s perfect delivery that prompted the laughter or perhaps the anticipation of the spookiness that was sure to follow — the perfect, complete and utter back-lit darkness of the rural, West Tennessee bottomlands.
Moses may have been in the dark, but his face was shining. Way back in those gossamer pages of the family Bible, and, of course, way beyond them, too. Like an interstellar headlight from the ancient world. His face shone so intensely that he had to cover it with a veil, for him or for them or for God, who knows? The Hebrew word like so many other Hebrew words for so many other things could have also meant “horn,” but shine sounds better than horn. I like to think of them as horns or shafts of light. Marc Chagall thought the horns painted well and he painted them over and over again in his Story of Exodus series.
Chagall travelled from Russia to Palestine when he was commissioned to paint the Old Testament. Though he had hoped to see the Bible there, he instead said that he dreamed it. I love his perspective, he once said, “Since childhood the Bible has fascinated me. I have always thought of it as the greatest source of poetry of all time. I have continued to seek out its reflection in life and in art. The Bible is like a musical vibration of nature, and I have tried to communicate that secret” (The Biblical Message of Marc Chagall, p. 15).
The Bible as reflection, as musical vibration and as secret revealed. These images drive me to go deeper into the stories of text, I find myself there in those gossamer pages, in that ancient living word, far beyond the cultural constraints of manipulative interpretation. It is there that I can dream a world of compassion, of justice and truth, it is there where I can meet God and gain the courage to lift the veil of this heavy, human existence. It is there where commandments are transformed into covenant and believers are transfigured into love.
I quote a line often in my sermons from a Killer’s song called, “Read My Mind,” the line is, “I don’t shine if you don’t shine.” What if we really approached life this way, encouraging one another to embrace the light within, the gifts within and helping one another develop those gifts in order to truly shine?
Like so many artists throughout history, it is that musical vibration, that great poetry of the text that motivates me to create. I find it to be gracious space with a language all its own that transforms me, inviting me to shine as I extend that same invitation to others.
