Our First Glimpse of Love
Father Richard Rohr speaks of the significance of our first images of God:
Most people first experience unconditional love not through the image of a man, but through the image of a woman—in most cases, their mother. It seems that for much of the human race, the mother is the one who first parts the veil and allows us to glimpse what love is, through experiences of grounding, intimacy, tenderness, and safety—things that most of us associate with God at God’s best. One of the disappointing things I have witnessed as a priest and spiritual director is how many people operate from the opposite of that—from a toxic and negative image of God. Nothing wonderful and nothing transformative is ever going to happen as long as that’s the case.
One of the reasons I started to do men’s work was because I realized that an awful lot of people didn’t experience, expect, or trust that beloved relationship through the masculine. The more cultures I traveled to around the globe, the more convinced I became of the universal nature of what I call the father-wound. It seems to be a wound that many people cannot break through; they don’t expect love to come from that place.
Author Shannon K. Evans considers the importance of allowing both masculine and feminine qualities in our experience of God:
The feminine elements in God are an important balance to the masculine ones. If all we have known of the divine is God the Father, we are walking with a spiritual limp, yes, even those of us who were lucky enough to be raised to see “him” as loving and tender rather than aloof or stern….
The masculinity of God is not the culprit here. Imaging God as male is valuable and good for our spiritual selves…. But left unbalanced, a belief in a God who is exclusively male can lead us down a road of legalism, perfectionism, fear, self-criticism, and a plaguing sense of unworthiness. Sadly, many of our religious experiences have been marked by such things.
On the other hand, when we integrate the divine feminine into our understanding of God, we find we have an easier time internalizing compassion, inclusivity, radical acceptance, justice for the outcast, and unconditional love. In my own life the divine feminine has offered me a maternal invitation to rest and be present. After a lifetime of assuming that striving and sacrifice would always be required for my spiritual growth, this was good news indeed. [1]
Richard concludes:
Whoever God is, God is somehow profoundly revealed in what it means to be feminine and masculine—both! But in our time, we have to find a way to recognize, to fall in love with, and to trust the feminine face of God. Most of us were not given that face in our churches, although we Catholics resolved it in an ingenious way through Mary. She, for many people, has become the accessible, trustworthy, and safe face of God.
Why “She” Matters
Novelist Sue Monk Kidd describes why cultivating an image of the Sacred Feminine is so important, particularly for women raised within Christianity:
A young girl learns Bible stories in which vital women are generally absent, in the background, or devoid of power. She learns that men go on quests, encounter God, and change history, while women support and wait for them. She hears sermons where traditional (nonthreatening) feminine roles are lifted up as God’s ideal. A girl is likely to see only a few women in the higher echelons of church power.
And what does a girl, who is forming her identity, do with all the scriptures admonishing women to submission and silence? Having them “explained away” as the product of an ancient time does not entirely erase her unease. She also experiences herself missing from pronouns in scripture, hymns, and prayers. And most of all, as long as God “himself” is exclusively male, she will experience the otherness, the lessness of herself; all the pious talk in the world about females being equal to males will fail to compute in the deeper places inside her.
When we truly grasp for the first time that the symbol of woman can be a vessel of the sacred, that it too can be an image of the Divine, our lives will begin to pivot…. Internalizing the Divine Feminine provides women with the healing affirmation that they are persons in their own right, that they can make choices, that they are worthy and entitled and do not need permission. The internalization of the Sacred Feminine tells us our gender is a valuable and marvelous thing to be. [1]
Public theologian Christena Cleveland explores how an exclusively white, male image of God is limiting and even oppressive. She shares a mystical experience of encountering the unconditional love of the Sacred Black Feminine while on a mindfulness retreat:
I sat cross-legged on my mat, and as soon as I closed my eyes and turned inward, a wave of Love crashed into me, a wave so formidable that it forced my upright body backward and onto the floor pillows behind me…. This was a mighty force that didn’t abuse. It was force without manipulation, force without control, and force without shame. It was the force of Love—a force I had never encountered in whitemalegod’s world….
I had never before experienced formidable strength in the form of Love and it undid me. I marveled that after an entire day of earnestly clearing my mind of fearful clutter, what lay beneath it all was not another to-do list from whitemalegod…. No, Love was underneath it all, just as I had hoped. That day, I discovered that at the heart of reality … flows wave after wave after wave of Love … for me….
This experience showed me that no matter what is going on around me and no matter how much fear tries to consume me, the Sacred Black Feminine is always available to guide me into Love.
| NADIA BOLZ-WEBERMAY 12 |
Wednesday afternoon: Sugar under the carnitas
Pastor Samm and Vicar Sa7ah were already on the other side of the metal detector when I got to the women’s prison yesterday. I signed in and joined them as quickly as I could, grabbing a couple bags of sopapillas to help lighten their load.
We are allowed, just a couple times a year, to bring a special meal in to be shared with New Beginnings church council, and as is our tradition, we like to share a Mother’s Day dinner together.
So the three of us made our way through the clanking security gates and sally ports crowned with billowing razor wire, before crossing the prison yard and into the gym.
We forgot paper plates, but these women know nothing if not how to be creative with limited resources, so they separated the two halves of the clamshell to-go containers and no one seemed to mind the dusting of sugar at the bottom of their makeshift dinner plates.
Before us, a feast of street tacos: crispy birria (with consume), cilantro dusted carnitas, pulled pork, abundant elote, and so many sopapillas (now piled in a shopping bag after the repurposing of their containers).
For an hour and a half we got to feast and fellowship. It felt joyous. Liberatory. And at the same time, normal.
I worked my way around the table eager for updates from everyone. N. spoke of having her first child when she herself was just 15 years old. Another gal (a woman whose determination to heal from and still be accountable for her addiction inspires me every time I speak to her) teared up saying her own teenage son was just charged with a class A felony and will likely be inside for most of his life now. Then S. described how, now that she’s clear headed and off of meth, the conversations she is having with her own children are more honest and tender than ever. Motherhood from inside a prison is complicated, and has its own beauty to it.
Not everyone is inside here for drug charges or crimes committed while the throes of their own addictions, or as a result of fetal alcohol syndrome, or as a result of a childhood surrounded by addicted adults, but it sure feels like most are.
There was far more than just heartbreaking updates from their loved ones shared that night. We also spoke of things we were grateful for in each other, and there was some good-hearted teasing for everyone (me included), one gal got to celebrate getting paroled early than expected, and then D. somehow showed off her handstand pushups after eating tacos, which felt very risky.
God set a table before us in the presence of prison guards, and the savory goodness of the carnitas was un-dampened by the accidental sugar in the bottom of our makeshift dinner plates.
Wednesday night: A Wild God
I drove home and quickly changed before friends picked us up for dinner and a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds show. Walking into the Butcher Block Café, my heart lifted when I saw a booth filled with people I love from House For All Sinners and Saints days. When our dinner came, I tried to hide the fact that, like a child, I was obsessively trying to keep my eggs and bacon away from my French toast and syrup. WHY are they served on the same plate?
The Wild God show, at moments, felt like a trance of exultation. Thousands of people, arms in the air, singing bring your spirit down. Cave, our unlikely liturgist: former heroin addict. Goth-chaos post-punk rock monster. Grieving father. A dark evangelist for joy.
So many times that night I turned to Eric and say “wow”. He responded by just gently nodding his head as if to say, “exactly”.
During a quieter song I slipped away to the women’s room. Washing my hands, I hear a familiar voice behind me.
“Stella?” (name changed) I asked.
“Girl. What the HELL?” she said as she hugged me.
She and I spent years together as sober sisters, going to meetings, swapping stories, laughing too loudly over mugs of translucent diner coffee.
When I looked in her eyes I could see she was high as a kite. In that unmistakable clattering speech pattern she tells me she left the respectable job she had studied hard for and was eventually certified in, and has instead returned to . . . sex work.
Fucking addiction.
The gift that keeps on taking.
I returned to Eric and our friends and soaked up the rest of a magnificent performance which felt like being taken to church…like being held in the telling of a magnificent story by a reliable narrator with back-up Gospel singers. It was soaring.
A ghost in giant sneakers
In 2015 Cave’s 15 year-old son Arthur fell off a cliff and died. The coroner’s report showed he’d ingested LSD. Anyone who has followed his career knows that this unspeakable tragedy stripped him down into a man who writes from the point of view “that something can happen to your life that is absolutely shattering that can also be redemptive and beautiful.”
So when I returned to my seat to the song Joy, I felt it.
I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head
I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head
I felt like someone in my family was dead
I jumped up like a rabbit and fell down to my knees
I jumped up like a rabbit and fell down to my knees
I called out all around me, said have mercy on me please
And over by the window, a voice came low and hollow
And over by the window, a voice came low and hollow
Spoke into my pain, into my yearning sorrow
Who is it, I cried, what wild ghost has come in agitation? Who is it, I cried, what wild ghost has come in agitation?
It’s half past midnight! Why disturb me so late!
And then I saw a movement around my narrow bed
And then I saw a movement around my narrow bed
A ghost in giant sneakers, laughing stars around his head
Who sat down on the narrow bed, this flaming boy
Who sat down on the narrow bed, this flaming boy
Said, we’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy
And all across the world they shout bad words, they shout angry words
And all across the world they shout out their angry words
About the end of love, yet the stars stand above the earth
Bright, triumphant metaphors of love
Bright, triumphant metaphors of love
Blinding us all who care to stand and look beyond and care to stand and look beyond above
And I jumped up like a rabbit and fell down to my knees
And I jumped up like a rabbit and fell down to my knees
I called all around me, have mercy on me please
Joy. Joy. Joy. Joy
-Nick Cave
I’m not sure what I’m trying to get at here. Maybe that I cannot manage through my own sobriety to keep the wrenching reality of addiction from infecting my life.
Or maybe that some days are an unbelievable mind-fuck of crushing sadness and liberating effervescence.
Or maybe just that pain and sorrow are always served on the same plate as joy and despite my best efforts, I cannot keep them from touching.
Whatever it is, know I am in it with you,
Love, Nadia
