On Community

Once, many many years ago, when I was young and isolated inside my own skull, I sat on a hillside above the ocean and felt miserable and bereft because I was so alone. I couldn't imagine a community in which I would fit -- couldn't fathom how I would ever find anyone who would like me.

That day, in my imagination, a large silver serpent came to me. She was huge, sensuous in her undulations, a cobra and deadly. I was afraid she would bite me. I thought I knew how that fantasy would go: death and eventual rebirth in some new, less anxious form. Instead she indicated that I should follow her.

She led me down the hillside through the tall grass. We sinuated through a stand of oak trees, across a scree slope, down a cliff face, to a beach teaming with people. On the beach she disappeared. I was left among the people, none of whom took any notice of me at all.

A little perplexed, I looked around. It took me a minute to see what I was meant to understand. Standing there on the sand I was suddenly aware that everyone was breathing in and breathing out at exactly the same time. Everyone, including me, was breathing in and breathing out in unison.

It had never occurred to me before that other people probably often felt just like me. We all, I realized, have our places of insecurity and isolation. Amazed, I followed the thought to its natural conclusion: meeting people there was something I could do, something natural to me. If everybody was like me, why, then, I could speak to them. We could have a relationship. People need to be reached in their tender places, I realized. They need to be touched and acknowledged, welcomed.

Coming back to ordinary time there on the hillside, I was relaxed and at peace. I began to enjoy my surroundings. A tiny cool breeze carried the smell of fish and seaweed along with the distant rhythm of surf from the ocean below. Light played through murmuring leaves above me, ran in waves across the pale grasses and danced off the scattering of bright orange poppies among them. A meadowlark shouted his distinctive hail.

After awhile I picked myself up and began the walk back to my car. No one was on the trail with me. I followed it's dusty length in a reverie, beginning to doubt my insight a little. Suddenly something moved almost right under my feet. A huge brown and gold snake had been sunbathing on the path. This was no imaginal beast; she was entirely, solidly in the three dimensional world. Startled by our sudden arrival in one another's world, we both nearly had heart failure. She slid quickly away into the grasses. I scurried off home, totally nonplussed by the synchronicity. I had learned to take such things very seriously.

So, I took my insight more seriously than I might have otherwise. Still it took me a long time to live into it. Now, looking back on the cobra's visit, I see that the wisdom she brought me was very serious indeed. In fact, though it worked slowly and over years, it was every bit as transformative as a venomous bite. Forced to her radical understanding of community by my own anxiety and pain, I am not released from the vision as it expands in ever more broadening ripples. There are places where all of us can meet one another. There are places where we are the same. Across the boundaries of class, the barriers of race, the divides of histories, religions, cultural understandings, sexual awarenesses, bodily abilities, gender orientations, and the fences raised by any other differences between us we belong to one another. Period.

And so I am reminded to pay attention to the ripples cast by the dropping of a stone of wisdom into the pool of spiritual understanding. We Americans tend to stop too soon. We learn the "can do" aspect of a lesson, applying it to the transformation of our personal psychology and our individual lives. We forget to let it play out into the realm of implications for all of us together. The further the ripples go the more scary and dangerous are the insights. At some point they begin to demand the world of us.

The Upstairs Room

Today I am thinking about Jesus' disciples straggling in from wherever the explosion of his death and reported resurrection threw them. Like blind people, they grope their way toward one another, coalescing in community. They find an upstairs room with a door that locks and they just stay there -- together. Maybe they compare notes about Jesus' post-death appearances, seeking to grasp what happened through pinning down the particulars. Perhaps they just look at one another and shake their heads, saying things like, "Amazing. Who would have thought?" Likely they begin sentences they cannot finish, laugh helplessly, cry abruptly, and shrug. They just hang out. Everything is the same as before and yet everything is different. What sense can they make of what has happened? They need a whole new frame of reference: new wineskins for the new wine they've been given. There isn't much to say until that structure evolves.

True revelation seems always to need a time of incubation. Its immediate consequence is a feeling of dislocation. The world goes on as usual. People go to work, advocate for causes, pick their children up from school, play out their loves and competitions; and the receivers of the revelation feel like a curtain has been drawn between them and all these activities. They are suddenly strangers in their own lives. Not knowing what to say about this, they hope that they need say nothing.

And yet the urge to integrate the experience is also strong. They want to name and describe the revelation lest it disappear. They begin to search for people who have the experience to hear them, who can help them with words, who understand that what happened is real. No wonder the disciples sought one another out.

A wise mentor can be an invaluable asset in a situation like this. It's always a good idea, if you're on the receiving end of a revelation, to find somebody who can help you process it. It generally takes time. Contrary to popular belief, instant fully-formed insights are not usually the rule when divinity informs humanity.

The disciples eventually emerge from their room. They become a dynamic community in Jerusalem, a community that understands the revelation so well they can describe it in many different languages and can live it in such a way that everybody takes notice.

For now, let's hang out with them in their upper room, in the state of uncertainty and wordlessness, in incubation. In this way we'll be empty bowls to receive whatever the Holy has to give us. We'll grow it into something before we let it loose on the world.

Good Friday

It's Good Friday. Today I'm wearing my "Leo" socks as a reminder of what is altogether too human and untransformed in me: the inner Roman Empire where Pax is a matter of human will and force.

Here's why I am an Episcopalian: the Eucharist unglues me. Since I first entered an Episcopal church when I was 19, it always has. This ritual works, symbolically, on every psychic level. In the immediate language of dreams it is the act of incorporating that which we would emulate, of "swallowing the leader". Then again, it is the sacrificial breaking open of the Godhead to become food for the people. Or, on the other hand, it is the shattering of divisive human egotism into the larger God-centered awareness. It is unity and abundance, the ever-flowing abundance of the Holy. It is the dance of humanity and divinity meeting and parting and meeting again.

These sentences only approximate the meaning of the Eucharist. At it's heart, like any good symbol, it is mystery. It is something to be lived into, understood, and even then not perfectly, through a lifetime of engaging it.

These days, for me, the Eucharist is about family. It is the blueprint of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the table at which all are welcome, the only table where I eat with people who are different from me in almost every way. Different races and ethnicities, socioeconomic strata, sexual orientations and gender identities, political affiliations, spiritual understandings -- we all eat bread and wine, elbow to elbow, at Christ's table. We divide up a common loaf of bread. We share a single cup of wine. Nobody gets more; nobody gets less. We're all in it together.

Good Friday, empty Friday: the male followers of Jesus scatter like leaves in a wind in the face of the death-by-torture of their Rabbi. The women, who as people of no account are flying under the radar, witness and mourn. It's all such a very public, so very demeaning tragedy -- for everybody. The Romans show their most brutish un-Pax-filled natures. The spiritual leaders of the Jews flamboyantly display their petty self-centeredness. The common people reveal the tendency of people everywhere to become with little provocation a mindless mob. Everybody is so very, very human. Re-enacting the story today I can find the bits of me that are like all of these characters.

Through all this walks Jesus, embodiment of the Kingdom of Heaven. In everything he does he remains true to his larger vision of Pax, a Shalom with the heart of God. He sees everything with compassion, teaches where he can and submits where he cannot. He gives us a Way to go forward with one another and he remains true to that Way through torture and death.

Pax will never come to the Earth through human effort and force. It only arrives when we become open to the Shalom with the heart of God. By myself I am like all the characters in the Passion narrative: petty, abusive, blaming, judgmental, terrified, vindictive, and stupid. Fortunately I have a family that comes together over bread and wine to approximate a different understanding. Each faith tradition has a place like this, a place where we are family and our hearts become transparent to the heart of divinity. From these places Peace can be made. May God help us to recognize them in one anothers' Way.

Christian Loyalty

I am a Christian. In this day and age that admission is not without cost. Nevertheless I confess: I have a relationship of discipleship with the enigmatic, powerful, demanding Christ of the New Testament of the Bible. I believe him to be God incarnate, and accept all the challenges to the way I live my life that that belief brings.

When I was younger I used to wonder if I would have become a disciple of Jesus had I been alive and met him in first century Palestine. He was a dirty anti-establishment peace monger, a fringe dweller who demanded everything of the people who followed him. He turned all the dearly-held beliefs of his society upside down. Simply, forcefully, he introduced a whole new understanding of God, one that didn't include special privileges for people of certain tribal affiliations or levels of affluence. He taught radical inclusion, even of the ritually unclean. He demanded his followers learn the way of forgiveness and that they break old ties to kin and state. He asked, in other words, a fundamental realignment of loyalty away from the concerns of "the world" and toward this kooky understanding he called "the kingdom of heaven".

Lately I have come to see that of course I would have followed this weirdo. I follow him now. That might be partially an accident of culture and upbringing, but it is also a much deeper matter. He speaks to me from the center of my heart, from the room in my psyche where I stand in the presence of the divine. Certainly he would have spoken to me from that place had I met him in the outer world.

The real question is how well am I doing in being his disciple now. That is a moment to moment issue between me and the weirdo. As I understand it today, the kingdom of heaven is a bond of mutual accountability and care between me and all else that is. I have learned over the years that the distinctions between "the world" and this other kingdom are always murky. I think I am choosing in one direction and discover later it's really the other. Or my reasons for doing something morph midstream. Often I'm pulled into some course of action or involvement with others against my own will. The realignment of loyalty is tricky. I've learned to go slowly, look for feedback that comes over time, and not to be too flapped about playing the part of the fool.

Being a fool for Christ -- there's something noble about that. But just being a darn fool -- that's another matter. Unfortunately, you have to risk the latter in order to arrive at the former.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday. With millions of people around the world I reenacted the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and then the passion of his crucifixion. I heard the stories of how Christ's disciples reeled away from the outrageous, horrible, affronting realization of what choosing the kingdom of heaven really means. Betrayal, denial, violence, running naked through the streets -- we all have trouble looking through that bright, bright window that is the cross.

Entering into Holy Week, focal point of the Christian year, I will have plenty of opportunity to reflect on all these things. Thank God for the communities of faith with which I make this journey and for Christ himself, speaking from my heart.

A Hag Wearing Jeans

This morning, sitting with my tea and my journal, I was visited in my imagination by a hag wearing faded jeans and a saggy grey sweat shirt. She was all over wrinkles, like the before pictures on the Weather Channel website.

I hate those images of wrinkle removal: the craggy face, exaggerated; the magic line, like a curtain dropping over reality, that transforms the face to youthful smoothness. The image, in maddening, boring repetition, etches itself on my psyche, one more form of subtle misogyny.

My heterosexual women friends have told me about the descent into invisibility that aging has brought them. No longer important in "the eye of the guy", as one woman put it, makes them feel worthless, like maybe it's their time to go out on the ice and die. I am assured that the most skilled and proficient career woman will feel this irrational tug. For me, a lesbian, "the eye of the guy" has been at best an irritant and at worst downright dangerous. Not being seen has always suited me just fine. And even so, I sometimes feel that aging diminishes me.

The hag, of course, would like to be called Sophia. "Hag" once meant wisdom instead of ugliness and invisibility. That this is a perspective from a long-ago time is attested to by our collective tales. In our stories and myths, what goddess hasn't hidden herself in some toothless old maid, to watch her people from secret vantage? Even Christ has taken the form of the helpless old widow. This could not happen if hags were attractive, held people's attention.

Sophia chuckles at me, daring me to quit projecting. Uncomfortably I remember the times I have smiled indulgently at collective wisdom as embodied in, for instance, the older women in my church. Then even more uncomfortably I think about the ways I am beginning to resemble those women. I'm just a teeny bit hard of hearing sometimes -- often because I think I know what someone is going to say before they actually say it. I ran into a door a couple of days ago -- gently, with a thud -- because I had expected it would be open and so didn't bother looking. I see paradigms I have longed to shed being broken open and discarded matter-of-factly by people a few years younger than me. That makes me unspeakably joyful. It also serves as warning that it is time for my leadership to take a different form.

Sophia nods, satisfied that now she has my attention. She reaches in the pocket of her jeans and removes a small vial. She prizes off the lid and pours a few drops of some liquid into her hand. Tucking the bottle under an arm she rubs her palms together, then comes at me hands outstretched. I close my eyes, expecting she will rub her ointment on my face.

Instead I feel her fingers against my heart. Small and cool, with that unmistakable sensation of another person's healing touch, they massage the oil in. And I remember -- my wisdom. I remember some of the hurts I have transformed through making them conscious, suffering them, allowing them to be healed; some of the projections I have reeled in and used as teachers; a few of the angers and resentments I have engaged and let go; one or two of the bumbling idiosyncrasies I have seen in myself and come to love. I discover in myself a valuable storehouse.

I can't tell you, just at this moment, what more to make of this vision. Sophia has wiped her palms on her jeans and is regarding me with eyes all a-twinkle. I am grateful that Wisdom treats me so gently. I am awed that she loves me with all the quiet certainly of a snowfall. I aspire to love all her children in just the same way. Impossible task for a little biased human -- I know. Yet still -- I can aspire.

The Old Woman

In the middle of the forest, somewhere off the beaten track, hidden, there is a little hut. This is the place where the Old Woman lives.

The Old Woman is the friend of the forest. She cherishes and attends. She is always present in the shadows, part of the breath of trees perhaps, or the small heartbeats of birds. She watches from the mouths of squirrels' nests, from the eddies behind the speckled rocks in the creek, from the line between shadow and light along the stems of grasses, from the flash of the wing of a bird. Once in awhile you might catch a glimmer of her out of the corner of your eye -- but never for long, never in a way that makes you certain.

She is a weaver and a healer, gathering blossoms and seeds, combing the jackets of coyotes and rabbits for the fibers for her blankets. Her concoctions bring the fever that helps us shed outmoded beliefs, and the inner quiet that helps new understandings to grow.

In the numinous juncture where the forest of the world meets the forest of the heart, she is the guide. Look for her when the outer world has exhausted you, when your well is dry and your work no longer brings you meaning. Her hut will suddenly appear in a little clearing as day slides into evening. She will meet you there. Her fire will warm you; her meal will nourish you. She is the attendant of the releasing, the setting down. In the simple silence of her forest dwelling, if you are willing to be empty and in need of her, your wounds will be healed and insights will come. She is catalyst for transformation.

As she helps tear down and tear apart, as you weep the tears that have festered inside you, she is the terrible soul-scourging witch. Afterwards, in the feathery blanket of her nurturing arms, she is Mother and Granny.

Here is how you find her: get good and lost in the forest wilderness. Leave the trail or follow it until it disappears. Lose the words and identities that have guided your way. Loose your understandings. At the threshold of darkness her cabin will appear. No matter how fearsome she is, address her respectfully and do not be afraid to go inside.

Then, give it time. A healing season in the forest lasts until all vestiges of your old self have fallen to the ground, been covered over and snowed on, often many times. The achingly tender new growth comes through the detritus into piercing air, and it must be sheltered until it is strong enough to meet the world. Get used to not knowing, not having an address, having no answers to anybody's questions.

When the Old Woman is ready to release you, a path will find its way to her door. It will be a tiny thing, strewn with boulders and sudden cliff faces, but you will know it is meant for you, and you will take it. You will walk it one step at a time, lamenting the necessity to leave the forest even as you anticipate an undefined future. You will know by then not to form definitions too quickly, and how to listen to the quiet wisdom of your own soul.

In My Dream Last Night

In my dream last night Rosean and I are with a young woman priest. We are all walking somewhere together, maybe at a mall. She tells us there is something she has known since before the beginning of time. Rosean wants her to tell us what that is. She is quiet. We wait. Then there is an interruption of some sort. People come and the priest talks to them. We continue walking, looking in shops, greeting friends. Rosean and I keep waiting for a moment when we can ask her again. There are too many distractions.

This is the sort of dream that begs for active imagination. In my imagination I can go back into the dream, dream the dream onward, maybe find out what I couldn’t learn last night. To do this I have to listen very carefully. My awake consciousness will want to take charge of the dream images, put words in everybody’s mouths instead of letting the characters speak out of their own integrity. The sign that I have set aside my usual conscious perspective and heard the truth of the dream will be that I learn something new.

I focus once again on the priest. She is short, dark eyed, with dark brown hair held back in a clip. She wears a grey skirt and powder blue blouse with a clerical collar, shoes with low heels. Her lipstick darkens her mouth to an earthy pottery color. She is serious, intent. Rosean and I walk one on each side of her. We are in an open plaza outside a number of small shops.

I stop and face her. “Please tell me”, I say, “what you know.”

She smiles sagely out of her deep brown eyes. “You know what I know,” she says.

I sigh. I hate these kinds of answers. I tell her I can’t think of a single thing I know since before the beginning of time. She looks a little nonplussed. Rosean and I both wait. We are not going to let her off the hook this time.

She looks at us both for a long moment, as though concerned that maybe we really don’t want to know what she has to tell us. We wait patiently. She nods and reaches in a large handbag she has been carrying. She pulls out a silver chalice and paten.

The chalice is etched with intricate designs. She hands it to me. When I touch it I know it is very ancient. As I look into it, it begins to fill with water. I watch the liquid reach the rim and spill over. As I stand there holding the cup, streams of water flow out in four directions, north, east, south, and west. I realize I do know this image. I have painted it, many years ago.

I set the chalice down on the ground. It continues to fountain.

The priest hands me the paten. As I hold it it expands. The plaza becomes a great plain stretching away to the horizon in all directions. Green grass waves. The streams from the chalice carve their way through the rich soil. There are tiny fish in the streams now. Little animals of all sorts come to drink and bathe. Miniature people scoop water into pots and take it away to their camp sites, bring their laundry to wash and their livestock to water

I am both holding the paten and standing on it with Rosean and the priest. I set it down, placing the chalice on it. The priest and I look at one another for a long silent moment.

I shrug. “I know this. But I don’t know what it means.”

“Yes you do,” she replies. “You know exactly what it means.” She taps me on the chest. “Know with your heart, my dear.”

I come to see that the image I have been given is a picture of divinity in its nurturing and sustaining capacity. The Holy is our ground of being and the nourishing water of our souls. It is central to all life, the most important thing. Everything moves and has it’s being in this great sustaining presence: The Tao, the Way of Things, the Source, God.

The priest is staring at me. When I finally look into her eyes once more she smiles at me. She smiles at Rosean, holding her eyes as well. She reaches out and takes each of us by the hand. “Feed my sheep,” she tells us. She squeezes our hands. Then she disappears.

I’m left with the image of her lipstick hanging by itself in the air like the smile of the Cheshire cat.