[Dialogue] 5/13/2021, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Deshna Shine: Divine Mother Letting Go; Spong revisited

Thu May 13 05:50:42 PDT 2021

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Divine Mother Letting Go
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|  Essay by Rev. Deshna Shine
May 13, 2021My daughter loads up her arms with her school backpack, her suitcase and her guitar. I help her carry her things downstairs, lingering with her as long as possible before her dad picks her up. I snuggle in next to her on the couch, breathe her in, soak her in with my eyes, trying to notice any details I might have missed. Her legs are stronger now, her softness is leaner, her body has more curves. She has a confidence and a groundedness that is new. She has always been confident, but this is different. I notice all these things and more, but I don’t say anything. I just smile at her and do my best to keep the tears from rising up through my body, into my eyes. She is 17, nearly an adult, and yet. And yet, she is my baby. She is part of me. But she is becoming more and more her own separate self. I celebrate this as much as I mourn it. She goes to her dad's now every two weeks. Two weeks on, two weeks off. That is our new thing. The two weeks she is with us, we get to really settle in with her and enjoy our time together… it almost feels normal again. But then. But then, she goes off to her dad's for two weeks and it feels like there is a hole inside of me. Like I am slowly bleeding out. Someone once said that being a mother is like having your heart walk around outside your body. So, when she is at her dad's, I practice. I practice being whole again. I practice letting her go even more. I have been practicing this since birth, like all mothers do. Every step after their first step is a step further away from us. There is nothing in the human experience like being a mother. It is this profound, all penetrating love at every cell of our body and yet. And yet, we are constantly having to let go. Let go of the new born baby, let go of the pudgy adorable toddler, let go of the curious young child. Some would say that they are still that person. But they really aren’t. Yes, there are pieces, but as they grow, they shed and become new. And as a mother, you grieve the loss of all those shed parts. If I could just hold my baby for an hour or two and fully remember her. As I prepare for the empty nest, as I prepare for her leaving and going out into the world as her nearly fully developed whole self, I celebrate her individuation. After all, that is my job as a mother, and if she is ready to go and is her own unique whole self, then I have done my job well. It isn’t so much an empty nest that I am preparing myself for, though, it is more that I am preparing for my empty self. Being a mother who births their child means that we grow our child from our own body, within our own body, then hold that child on our body, and feed that child from our body. They come into the world very much a part of our body. As they grow, they stay close to our body, but then. But then they start to separate. And it’s good because that is what is meant to happen. They go further and further away from our bodies as they become more and more themselves. I think about Mother Mary and her pride alongside her anguish as her son became more and more himself. A self that threatened the powers that be. A self that would hang for being who he was. What must she have felt when he told her, I must go out into the world and share these teachings. I must share with the world this great love I have experienced. In a Catholic funeral I recently attended, we repeated the mantras of Hail, Mary, "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” All I could think about was Mary seeing her baby hung to die, nails in his hands. How? How can a mother survive this? But even before that, when her young son was merely 12 years old, she nearly lost him, when he stayed behind at the temple for 3 days to listen to the teachers. Eventually, he would leave and become a teacher himself. She had to let him go. Her heart walked outside of her body out in the world. Our hearts walking around outside our bodies. I wonder if this is what God feels. I have never tried to really make sense of God (how can we?) and I rarely put my human feelings onto the Great Mystery of our Source. But as I learn more about the world, as I go deeper within myself, I see God more and more like a Mother. Our Ancient Mother. Our Source. Whom we were once a part of and now we are seemingly separate from. But in truth, we are never separate from our Mother. We are made of Her. Our beginnings came from Her body.  God is not separate from nature, but immanent within it. God is also the Unity which holds the universe together and feeds and nourishes it. God as Mother of All exists within all that we are, feeding and nourishing us. When I look at Nature, I see God and I experience the Great Mother. What an incredible display of the Divine available to us at all times. And what happens there? Everything comes from and returns to the Divine Ground.If the Divine Mother God is also the wholeness which transcends the world, then this wholeness includes not only the manifest world, but the “unmanifest” or latent potentialities which have not been realized in nature.  For example: Look at the fruit tree in all of its forms and stages - from seed to fruit. First, we have the seed, buried in the darkness, which pushes through the ground to manifest into a new form, then bud forms on the stem and what has happened to the seed? When the blossom bursts out of the bud, the bud seems to disappear. And when the fruit appears, the blossom seems to have been just a temporary illusion compared to the truth of the fruit. They are unique, yet separate, but they cannot exist without the other. The philosopher Hegel illustrates this through analogy to the growth of a plant in his opus, The Phenomenology of Spirit:“The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant and the fruit now emerges as the truth instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.”When you look at it from a scientific perspective, there is still the space for Divine Ground, or Source, or Great Mother, underlying the universe and guiding its order. Perhaps one can not exist without the other, perhaps there is mutual necessity as we see in all of life. In his article, "Beyond Belief: Divine Knowledge," James Cross writes, “Modern cosmology actually accepts the idea of a quantum void from which the universe was brought into existence at the Big Bang. Physicists think of this void as a cauldron of random fluctuations with particles going in and out of existence. The energy associated with this void is called zero point energy. For some reason the calculations for the amount of energy in empty space is absurdly large. Physicists naturally would not use the term  “divine” in describing this void but the quantum void certainly corresponds scientifically to the religious concept that Aldous Huxley calls “Divine Ground”.”The Source from which we are made and to which we return, which is always a part of us, but we feel is separate from us. My daughter has told me she isn’t comfortable with me telling her I miss her every day when she is at her dad's. When I do, she feels sad and guilty. I try to explain to her that I always miss her, even when she is in the other room and that my missing or my sadness is not her responsibility and that I am okay missing her. But she doesn’t get it. Not yet. And so, I ask her, “Is it okay then, if I tell you I love you every day?” She says, “Of course!” So that is what I do. I tell her I am thinking of her, I tell her I adore her, I tell her I love her and I am proud of who she is. But I keep my missing to myself. And I practice becoming more whole. Part of that practice is remembering that she is a part of me and that I am in her always. Like the Divine Mother God, my heart goes with her when she leaves. And yet, I am still whole. I am the Ground, the Seed, and she is the Stem, the Flower and Fruit… but I am intertwined in all that she becomes. Hence my heart is out there blossoming in the sun. Something new and different from the Source she came from, but still deeply connected. And the practice is to remember I am also the flower and fruit, come from my own Mother. Imagine having a whole universe of children, your heart spread out all over this planet. Imagine the yearning, the missing, and the pride. Imagine the love billowing out over the entire creation from our Mother.Does She long for us? Does She celebrate our becoming? Are we the sparks of God moving around this world learning who we are and individuating? Have we forgotten Her? She may be quiet. She may just be showing us her love through the clouds, the sunsets and the dew drops, but we came from Her and She is a part of us, even as She lets us go.  ~ Rev. Deshna Shine
Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Deshna Shine is Project Director of ProgressiveChristianity.org’s Children’s Curriculum.  She is an ordained Interfaith Minister, author, international speaker, and visionary. She grew up in a thriving progressive Christian church and has worked in the field for over 13 years. She graduated from UCSB with a major in Religious Studies and a minor in Global Peace and Security. She was Executive Director of ProgressiveChristianity.org, Executive Producer of Embrace Festival and has co-authored the novel, Missing Mothers. Deshna is passionate about sacred community, nourishing children spiritually and transforming Christianity through a radically inclusive lens.  |

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Question & Answer

Q: By Elene

What is it about the Temple Mount?  It seems to always be the flashpoint of conflict in Jerusalem.

A: By Rev. David M. Felten
Thanks for your timely question, Elene. The current crisis around the Temple Mount has emerged over a pending Israeli Supreme Court decision regarding conflicting claims to land near the site. But this is just the most recent skirmish in a quarrel that goes back millennia.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all gilded the site with layer after layer of sacred significance. Tradition has it that Adam was buried on the site and Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son here. Solomon is alleged to have built his Temple here, Jesus would have walked here, and Muhammad is said to have begun his ascension to heaven from the stone beneath the dramatic golden-domed building people associate with the Temple Mount today, the Dome of the Rock.

While there’s scant archaeological evidence for Solomon’s First Temple having been built here, sacred tradition places it beneath where the returning exiles rebuilt the Second Temple that King Herod refurbished in Jesus’ day.

After the Romans ransacked and burned Herod’s Temple in 70 C.E., the site was left in ruins for hundreds of years. In 638, then-Christian Jerusalem was conquered by Muslims and the Dome of the Rock was built with a mind toward overshadowing “the competition’s” Church of the Holy Sepulcher. In 1099, the Crusaders besieged the Holy Land and established Jerusalem as the capital of a new Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Al Aqsa Mosque became a palace for the new Christian King of Jerusalem and was later used as the headquarters of the Knights Templar. The Dome of the Rock was converted into an abbey and had a cross placed on top.

In 1187, Saladin’s Muslim forces overwhelmed the Crusaders and since then, Muslims have managed the Temple Mount as a waqf, a charitable trust charged with maintaining the site. Today, the Temple Mount is just one of the holy sites that the modern state of Israel honors as sacred for Christians and Muslims.

A couple of years ago, my kids and I set aside time in our visit to Jerusalem to navigate the TSA-style security gauntlet required to visit the Temple Mount. Access includes long lines, metal detectors, and the scrutiny of sober Israeli security guards searching people and back-packs for any prohibited religious literature or paraphernalia. In an effort to maintain the fragile status quo, any non-Muslim symbols, literature, or prayers are banned on the Temple Mount. As we gathered with friends to take a quick picture, guards quickly moved in to disperse us. Security protocol deems that any size group may be conducive to prayer breaking out and is therefore prohibited. Because the actual location of the Temple (and therefore the Holy of Holies) is not known, many Jews don’t venture onto the Mount itself. The closest the Jewish faithful can get to this sacred site is the Herodian-era retaining wall that we recognize as the Western Wall.

Adding to the ongoing tension over who has ultimate control over the site are some within the Orthodox Jewish tradition who predict a third Temple being built on the Mount to usher in the arrival of the Messiah. Jewish right-wing extremist plans to blow up the Dome of the Rock to make way for that new Temple have, so far, been thwarted. Add to that the controversial recent move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, the continued incursion by Jewish settlers into the West Bank, and the humanitarian crisis that is Gaza, and it’s understandable that security measures are in a constant state of high alert.

So, what is it about the Temple Mount? Overlapping religious and real estate claims, both ancient and modern, from Muslims, Christians, and Jews. It’s no wonder this otherwise tranquil setting at the center of one of the most revered cities in the world is often rife with tension – if not out in the open, then percolating just below the surface. ~ Rev. David M. Felten

NOTE: The answer above responds to a question that touches upon a rapidly unfolding current event. Every effort has been made to assure that the historical and factual details were current as of its writing. As the May 2021 Israel-Palestine Crisis continues to escalate, please refer to reliable news sources for the most current information. 

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions” and authors of Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. A co-founder of Catalyst Arizona and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet. David is the proud father of three reliably remarkable human beings.  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

How St. Luke's Church in Tarboro, N. C.
Challenged My Racism

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
October 14, 2010As I stood in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Chapel at Morehouse College recently to witness the unveiling of my portrait to hang in the Hall of Honor, I could not help but look back on my life with wonder. I was raised uncritically in the racist prejudice of the South and yet I had somehow been able to escape its clinging power. How did such a dramatic transition occur? In my mind I began to recall the turning points. I am happy to recognize that two of these turning points occurred in church, which somehow helps me to accept this institution’s constant failure to grapple with its own negative history. The others were personal experiences. Allow me if you will to share with you the key moments of transition on my journey out of racism.

First, in my early childhood during Lent every year, my church used something called a “Mite Box” for the children’s Lenten offering. This box derived its name from the story of the Widow’s Mite in the gospels. We were taught to place the coins that came from our Lenten sacrifices into these boxes. Some of us would give up candy for Lent; others ice cream; still others our Saturday trip to the movies. Whatever the “sacrifice,” the money saved became our “mites,” given to aid, we were told, the Christian mission around the world. The impressive thing to me, however, was that on the sides of this “mite box” were pictures of children from all of the nations of the world kneeling in prayer. These children were wearing native clothes and their faces revealed the pigmentation and the ethnic identities of their heritage. There was a Native American child dressed in buckskin; an Asian child with black hair and eyes slanted a little differently; a Dutch child with wooden shoes; black children from the various nations of Africa that we called “The Dark Continent;” a child from the people of the North Pole then called Eskimos, and wearing a fur lined coat and hood. This was my earliest childhood knowledge that enabled me to embrace the fact that there were different kinds of people with different dress, different looks and different shades of color, but all of them were portrayed as praying to the same God. It was an indelible impression.
When I started the first grade, I was informed by my mother that I could no longer play baseball with what she called the “Negro” children, who lived on the other side of our woods. I did not understand and was angry, but the decision was final. Segregated fences were erected.

In January of 1942 when I was in the fifth grade, my grammar school accepted the invitation of another school in Charlotte, North Carolina, to send representatives to a patriotic assembly they were planning. The strong emotion of patriotism was in the air since this was about a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that plunged the United States into World War II. I was chosen to be one of my school’s delegation. When we arrived it was obvious that this school was for black children. I had no idea at that time that there was such as thing as a “black school.” It had frankly never occurred to me that there were no black children in my school. My consciousness was clearly underdeveloped.

In the assembly at that school on that day, however, I had three more indelible experiences. First, we all said the Lord’s Prayer to the same God so I began to wonder why only white people came to my church. Second, we all said the same pledge of allegiance to our flag. This meant that they, like me, were full citizens of this country. Third, when we were asked to stand to sing the national anthem, much to my surprise and confusion that assembly sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which someone told me later was the “Black National Anthem.” Its words spoke of bleeding feet on the march to freedom and the lash of the master on the backs of the slaves. At that time slavery had been presented to me by “good Christians” only as a benevolent act designed to offer the people in Africa “a better life, civilization and a chance to be baptized.” Reality, which was quite different from yesterday’s racist propaganda, was beginning to crack through my comfort zone.

I had no classmates of color throughout my educational days in public school or even at the University of North Carolina. It was not until I entered the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1952, to begin my preparation for the priesthood, that I had my first black classmate. A native of Detroit, his name was John Walker and, prior to his death, he became not only the highly-respected Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., but also the vice-president of the Episcopal House of Bishops. While we were fellow students, however, John Walker could not go with me to have a cup of coffee at the local drugstore. For the first time I felt existentially the pain of racism, but it was so entrenched I had no idea how to confront it as I, newly ordained, headed back to my North Carolina home.

In 1957, with racial tensions rising, I became the rector of Calvary Church in Tarboro, a wonderful town of 7,500 people in eastern North Carolina. One block away from Calvary Church, which backed up to Panola Street, was St. Luke’s Episcopal Church which faced Panola Street. Panola Street was the dividing line between Tarboro’s white and black populations. St. Luke’s was a black church. In this town in 1957, the gospel was clearly segregated.

St. Luke’s had no priest. It has been served long and faithfully for many years by an elderly black priest named The Rev. Dr. Milton Moran Weston, but he was now in his eighties and had finally retired. No one else was available to serve St. Luke’s. So the leaders of this small congregation came to me, the rector of the “white” church, and asked me if I could provide them with worship services, including the Eucharist on two Sundays a month. I agreed and thus began my association with that wonderful congregation. We gathered for worship on the second and fourth Sunday mornings at 9:30 a.m. I literally went one block away to preach a segregated gospel to this black congregation that never had as many as fifty members. The people of St. Luke’s took me just as I was and they loved and stretched me into being something that I never imagined I could be. One does not lead worship without also becoming a pastor. So I married black couples, baptized black babies; counseled troubled black people; walked through sicknesses with black patients and conducted funerals for black people ranging from an infant who digested poison to the elderly who died of natural causes. Working with black teenagers I began to feel both their despair and their anger. They saw no job opportunities except as domestic workers or manual laborers, which made incentives to stay in school almost non-existent. I also crossed the social boundary that the white community thought was sacrosanct. I went to the rehearsal dinner parties when St. Luke’s couples got married and to wakes at the funerals of the members of this congregation. I was frequently the only white face at these gatherings. In time two things happened. First, increasingly I was invited into the affection of the people of St. Luke’s. They became not parishioners, but friends. I still remember so fondly people like Jesse and Sadie Wilson, Callie Hyman, Betty Forbes Gray, Shirley and John Freeman, Reg and Judy Moss, Helen Quiggless and the wonderful stately and strong Dr. Weston and his wife along with their grandson, Winnfield Crews, whom they were raising. There were many others for whom I became the first white person they had ever trusted. They shared with me family secrets. I knew who they were related to in the white community. I began to embrace the sexual component of racism, that is, the way black women had been used as sexual objects for white men over the decades since slavery. Miscegenation has always been an unadmitted fact of American life from Thomas Jefferson to Strom Thurmond, even in the pious Bible Belt of the South. The second thing that happened was that I quickly came to the attention of the Ku Klux Klan, who saw me breaching the walls of segregation and daring to “socialize with N—ers!” The result was that I and my family underwent hostility and threats from the Klan.

In that town and with the members of both of my churches I lived through the tension of the events, both locally and nationally, that engulfed our country in the fifties and sixties. That included sit-ins, public demonstrations, traffic tie ups, the Selma march, the use of fire hoses and police dogs against peaceful demonstrators and the bombing of black churches that killed little children in their Easter finery. In Tarboro I watched a black dentist whom I knew well dare to enter the political process as a candidate for the town council, something that had never happened before. He won and years later was elected mayor. I also knew and respected the sheriff, who was charged with protecting the first black children ordered to attend Tarboro’s heretofore all white schools. He carried out his duties with integrity, even though he opposed that decision with all his being. In that struggle for civil rights, I was called by my priestly vocation to look at human oppression in all its forms: race, gender, sexual orientation and religion and I vowed to oppose any attitude that diminished the humanity of any child of God. It was through St. Luke’s Church that this all became clear to me. I became committed from that time on to work to affirm the fullness of humanity for every person and to stand on the side of any victim of prejudice whatever its cause. In the living out of that vocation I became more deeply and fully human. That was the gift of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Tarboro, North Carolina, to me. More than any other experience that I can recall today that congregation made it possible for me to become the person who would someday be honored by having my portrait hung in the Hall of Honor at the King Chapel. Through this column I express my gratitude and continuing love to that small, but heroic congregation and I salute them with deep appreciation.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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