[Oe List ...] 6/11/20, Progressing Spirit, Jenifer Berit: The Powerful Medicine of the (Divine) Feminine
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Jun 11 07:01:24 PDT 2020
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The Powerful Medicine of the (Divine) Feminine
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Essay by Jennifer Berit
June 11, 2020
Twelfth century Christian Mystic Hildegard of Bingen says of the divine feminine, “she is so bright and glorious that you cannot look at her face or her garments for the splendor with which she shines. For she is terrible with the terror of the avenging lightning, and gentle with the goodness of the bright sun. And both her terror and her goodness are incomprehensible to humans. But she is with everyone and in everyone.”
I’m really interested in how we, and by we I mean seekers, teachers, preachers, clergy, laymen, mystics, atheists and everything in between, think and talk about the divine feminine. Hildegard, who 800 years after her death was canonized as a Saint and Doctor of the Church (only one of four women to ever receive that honor), was an advocate for women’s empowerment in her time, and even she describes the archetype of the divine feminine with two tropes about women that we see endlessly: the gentle goodness, and the vengeful ferocity.
I’m particularly curious about how exactly the divine feminine is “terrible with the terror of the avenging lightning.” Is there something true about the feminine carrying not only the nurturing sweetness of motherhood, but also the frightening scorn of a woman wronged? Or is that a misperception of western philosophy that has been unconsciously passed down generation by generation so that even the wisest and most radical of us forget to examine it?
It feels important to emphasize that Hildegard in speaking about the divine feminine was not talking about female humans as opposed to male humans, for we each carry both the feminine and masculine archetypes within us. And as I continue on this subject I want it to be very clear that is how I approach it as well: I want to consider the spiritual energy of the feminine and how it shows up in each and every human being, and in our world. And also where it is critically absent.
In the summer of 2016 I spent six weeks walking the 500-mile Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Northern Spain and experienced an incredible physical and emotional healing that to this day I attribute to the blossoming of the divine feminine power within me, aided by my journey and the companions I met along the way. But that’s a story for another time. I was blessed on my walk to make friends with an Episcoplanean priest and after a few days of walking together, to my great benefit, he started practicing his sermons on me.
One morning he asked me if I was familiar with the biblical character Lilith. I told him I wasn’t, and he looked at me as if he were about to give me great news. Then he told me a true story, that went roughly like this:
Did you know that there are two conflicting creation stories in Genesis? There are two distinct stories about the moment that humankind was created and they don’t match up.
The second story is the one I myself was very familiar with, and it appears in Chapter Two. It’s the one where Eve is created from Adam’s rib cage and it begins in verse eighteen.
“Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.”
Then Adam names all the animals, but found that none of them was a helper “fit for him.” So this happens in verse twenty-one.
“So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”
Ahem. Excuse me? Does anyone else feel the tingles down your spine when you read it? In this version of the creation story “Woman” was made as a helper to man, and in fact formed from a measly rib bone, taken out of Man. There are two words in particular I want you to pay attention to because they are very telling. The words are “at last.” This, at last, is bone of my bone. We’ll get back to that in a minute.
There’s another creation story that comes before this one, in Genesis Chapter One. After God makes light and water and land and fish in the sea and animals, this happens:
“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Then there’s the bit about having dominion over everything that I reinterpret in a previous article. And then there is this:
“So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Now that’s a different story. In the image of God he created male and female. He created them, and blessed them. Together. That sounds like a story in which men and women from the beginning were created equal.
There’s another interesting linguistic thing happening here. Both of these verses are pulled from the English Standard Version of the bible and the diction is very telling. In the story of Eve created from Adam’s bone she is described using the word “woman,” the origins of which are “wife of man”.
In the chapter one creation story where the two are equally made in God’s image, she is described as “female” whose origins are simply the scientific description for any animal who has the physiologically capacity to breastfeed.
The female created in God’s image is described by her own unique power and offering to life. The woman created of Adam’s bone is described simply as his wife.
If you have ever read the Bible or are somewhat familiar with Christian theology then you know that it is littered with inconsistencies like this. You may also know that there is a whole canon of texts about the old testament written by Rabbis, called the midrash, which attempt to interpret and explain the more challenging passages of the Bible, or Torah, particularly the frustrating ones that utterly contradict themselves.
They have an explanation for these two conflicting creation stories, and the explanation is Lilith.
The midrash interpretation says that the original creation story shows the moment that God created Adam, male, and Lilith, female. And Lilith was powerful and strong, created in God’s image just as Adam. And one day in the garden they were having a dispute. Now I’m not making this up, the dispute was that they were being fruitful and multiplying, and in doing so Adam, the strong man, wanted to be on top. But Lilith, an equally strong woman deeply aware of pleasure and passion and love, also wanted to be on top.
The story goes, they couldn’t get over their dispute and Lilith decides, rather than remain in Eden with Adam, to escape it. So Lilith, powerful and wise as she was, learned the name of God, whispered it on a wind, and flew out of the garden, never to return.
Remember that “at last” part? Adam doesn’t have such a great time living with his equal, so finally when God makes a subservient companion for his aid, made from his rib, he sighs in relief. “At last, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh” and thus Eve comes into existence.
But that’s not the end. Lilith doesn’t actually disappear. Rather, over the centuries she becomes absolutely demonized in Christian theology.
Women feared her. Men feared her. When men were unfaithful to their wives, Lilith the seductress was often blamed. She evolved over time to take on a demonic image, often depicted with Medusa-like snakes in her hair, or a grotesque face. Right around Hildegard of Bingen’s time, women would chant incantations against Lilith while they were pregnant, for fear that she would find them and steal their newborn babies and eat them.
Now don’t we see this stereotype play out over and over, even in our modern fairytales, movies, shows and books? Isn’t Lilith the wicked witch of the west? Isn’t she Nurse Ratched? The evil step sister? The spiteful, jealous wife or girlfriend? The devil who wears Prada?
Of course our pop culture and media is an expression of our lived culture, and aren’t there many ways, both vulgar and subtle, that we live with the same message every day?
I think about growing up as somewhat of a “tom boy.” I loved hiking and being active, wearing shorts and getting dirty, playing soccer, and was praised for being strong and driven. At the same time my transgender younger sister who, though socialized as a boy, loved to wear dresses and put on makeup even from a young age, was shamed for being “weird” or “indecent.” In the way that we sexualize and engender children from an early age, and what is considered acceptable, do we not subtly tell them “it’s okay to want to be like a boy, but not at all to be like a girl”?
If the microcosm of the demonization of femininity is my trans sister not feeling safe to fully express her feminine nature until her late twenties, the macrocosm is the one we are so familiar with: the way humanity has repressed mother earth and all her creatures and the wild nature within ourselves for centuries.
This is what is at stake. Our full beautiful identities. The planet we call home. This is what we sacrifice when we demonize divine feminine power, force her out of our hearts and bodies, and replace her with a distorted, subservient ghost of who she is.
Friend and Mentor Matthew Fox says in the introduction to his book about Hildegard de Bingen, “even today, despite all our progress, denial of the feminine is so pervasive that anthropologist Glenn Hughes says a male terror of women is woven into every institution. It’s this denial of the feminine that’s destroying the ecosphere.”
And yet, I know there is a way to integrate the two energies, the masculine and the feminine and the power of each, in a divine dance in ourselves and in our world. There are examples everywhere around us, that don’t require action or effort, only a willingness to surrender.
In his book, Fox calls Hildegard a “mover and shaker” and even “a virtual earthquake to the establishment today.” I grew up in California, the land of earthquakes. It’s such an interesting way to describe a powerful woman channeling the Divine Feminine.
In the world of Man, the world of dominion, the one where we enslave animals to eat them and build fortresses to protect ourselves from the feared wild earth, Earthquakes are indeed one of the most destructive and violent natural forces a human can encounter. The year I was born, the Loma Prieta Earthquake brought its wrath on my home city of San Francisco. It killed people, destroyed homes, started fires in the outdated electricity of our buildings. It must have looked terrible with the terror of avenging lightning. It must have looked wicked.
And yet, taken out of the human context, say in a time before humanity, or in a place we haven’t colonized, what is an earthquake? It is a powerful natural force of creation - one that has the ability to create seas and mountains, much like God. Are they really terrible? Are they wicked? Or is it our fear of the uncontrollable wild that moves us to call them disasters?
We learned a lot in California about the intensely hard, structured, rigid buildings that penetrate our skylines all over the world. We learned how to adapt to these “disasters” knowing that there would be no way to attack, distinguish, or trample over them. So we figured out how to build our cities in such a way that they wouldn’t crumble if the earth shook beneath them. The only way. Do you know what brings a modern man-made building to code in earthquake country? It has to be flexible. It must be designed to shift and move. It has to make room for the intense force of nature. It needs to surrender to the earthquake, so as to stand before it and let it move through its very bones. It needs to be able to dance. This is how palm trees survive intense hurricanes: they bend.
Is that not the same in each and every human being? If we could relax the masucline rigidity we have been conditioned to build up within ourselves, and allow room for the uncontrollable wild feminine within, then we are flexible enough to dance with all the divine forces this universe offers.
As I write, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to sweep the globe, while Black Lives Matter protests ignite across the country. In this unprecedented shake up of cultural norms and business as usual we are seeing the floodgates open that have long repressed our collective anger toward toxic masculinity, while at the same time we have gotten a glimpse of a possible world where feminine energy balances the masculine, in the COVID lockdown.
With no intention of trivializing the deep suffering that has been caused by the pandemic, I do want to share how I have felt optimistic and inspired by peering into the possibility of a new story for our culture: one where mutual aid is a way of life, where humans respect the well-being of total strangers to the point of being willing to sacrifice their own agendas and comfort, where we prioritize our relationships rather than our to-do lists, check in on one another just because, make meals for those who can’t provide for themselves, slow down our work, our commute, where we need less and want less and ask for less of the planet, where our rigid masculine skyscrapers remain mostly empty, where wildlife once again roams the landscapes they’ve been banished from for generations. We have called the pandemic disastrous for how it has absolutely upended the way of life we are so used to. How might it also be contributing to building a new world?
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke says “Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.”
The divine feminine is not terrible or wicked or disastrous. Neither is the masculine, though we’ve allowed it too much toxic dominion over it’s creatively opposing force. If we can make room for the fminine within us and within our world, if we can stand between the polarities of the energies between us and let God move through us to learn, we will find ourselves collectively dancing to the rhythm of love.
~ Jennifer Berit
Read online here
About the Author
Jennifer Berit is the co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action and works in book publishing as a private consultant for authors assisting with manuscript editing and book publicity. She is also the co-director of Wild Awakenings, an adult Rites of Passage organization dedicated to fostering the thriving of Earth, life, and humanity. Jennifer was on the Board of Trustees at the Unity in Marin Spiritual Community for three years, serving as the Board President for 18 months. Also at Unity in Marin, Jennifer was a guest speaker for Sunday mornings, she led Rites of Passage groups for teenagers, and founded a young adult interfaith group committed to conscious connection, community service, and social activism. She is a passionate hiker, reader, writer, and public speaker.
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
When people say I want to walk the way of Jesus what should that mean?
A: By Rev. Matthew Syrdal
Dear Reader,
This is a big question. I suppose nothing is more important than getting curious about Jesus, and what his Way really was.
Become a beginner and forget (nearly) everything you think you know about Jesus. Jesus asked a lot of questions. Ask questions like, was Jesus a Christian? If you read through the Bible thoroughly and the Gospels a few times, what do you notice really mattered to Jesus? How did he live his life? What was his view of money? His relationship to power and privilege? How did he understand (and use) his sacred texts, Torah? The Prophets? Writings? What was his relationship to nature like? From what inner-authority did Jesus speak and act? What’s that about? To whom did Jesus speak — the egoic personality or to the deeper nature — in his encounters with strangers and when teaching his disciples?
There are many ideas and images out there about the way of Jesus. Many great resources, even communities can help shape our faith. But at the end of the day, no one can walk the Way for you, and to some extent at least, you must go it alone. To paraphrase Carl Jung, to pick up your cross and follow Jesus is not to do what Jesus did, rather it is to live your life as fully, as authentically, and as dangerously as Jesus lived his. When people talk about ‘walking the way of Jesus’ can mean justifying our own moralistic and self-righteous attitudes (those of the ‘in-group’, whether we are Bible-believing fundamentalists or progressive eco-feminists) that actually impede our development and spiritual growth (individuation). Moralism in this sense is a survival strategy, like an inner-conformist, victim, or critic that keeps us safe by keeping us (and our image of God) small. ‘
‘Walking the way of Jesus’ should mean putting the journey of individuation before all else. “Whoever would come after me must take up (their own unique) cross… for whoever would save their life will lose it, but whoever would lose their life (for my sake and the sake of the kingdom) will find it.” This journey is cruciform for it always necessitates a death before a resurrection, a collapse of an old way, before opening a new path. It often leads through multiple little deaths, ‘molts’, to who we thought we were, and who we thought God was, or what the world actually is. The way of Jesus offers conflict, fear and pain, but it also leads to the treasure hidden in the field and the pearl of great price!
~ Rev. Matthew Syrdal
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About the Author
Rev. Matthew Syrdal M.Div., lives in the front range of Colorado with his beautiful family. Matt is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian church (USA), founder and lead guide of WilderSoul and Church of Lost Walls and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Matt speaks at conferences and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country. In his years of studying ancient Christian Rites of Initiation, world religions, anthropology, rites-of-passage and eco- psychology Matt seeks to re-wild what it means to be human. His work weaves in myth and ceremony in nature as a way for people to enter into conversation with the storied world in which they are a part. Matt’s passion is guiding others in the discovery of “treasure hidden in the field” of their deepest lives cultivating deep wholeness and re-enchantment of the natural world to apprentice fully and dangerously to the kingdom of god. Matt has been coaching, and guiding since becoming a certified Wild Mind nature-based human development guide through the Animas Valley Institute and is currently training to become a soul initiation guide through the SAIP program.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Study of Life, Part 3:
On Meeting a Shaman in the Amazon Rainforest
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
August 13, 2009
In studying for my recent book on life after death I spent considerable time examining the religious history of human beings. Our religious journey has been long and complex. Beginning in the hunter-gatherer religion of animism we have traveled as a species through the fertility cult religions of our early agricultural civilizations into the coupled gods of the Olympus and then through tribal religions into the budding monotheism of today. At each stage we picked up practices that still remain a part of the human religious scene, from the fire we place on our altars at the time of worship to the evolving recovery of the feminine that is occurring now in the Christian Church. Far more than most religious people know or are willing to admit, modern religious practices have ancient roots stretching back far beyond the boundaries of our particular religious system. We tend, however, to have very little understanding of, or sympathy for, the religious traditions of those who are different from us. It was, therefore, a rare privilege for me, while in the Amazon Rainforest, to have an opportunity to meet a Shaman, who lives and functions within an animistic religious world akin to that of our earliest human ancestors and to see firsthand some of the most primitive stages of human religious development. It was an experience so moving and profound that I want to share it with my readers through this column.
The Shaman’s name was Domingo. That is all, simply Domingo. He was about 65, though he looked old for that age. He was a single man, having never married. Being single was not a requirement of the office, but it was encouraged by suggesting that sex was not appropriate while actually functioning as the Shaman. Domingo had served his people in this office for some 40 years. In true animistic fashion he viewed the world as “spirit-filled” and defined himself as a “spirit-filled man” or at least as one through whom the spirit flows. His role within the tribe is to be “the banisher of evil spirits,” a not an untraditional role for the designated “holy man.” Both he and his tribe believe that he enhances the wellbeing of his people. Domingo was introduced to us by our guide in the Amazon. It was a regular feature offered on the tour, a unique way to open Westerners to the culture of the area.
While pleased with this opportunity, I discovered in this meeting what the barriers to real communication were. The Shaman spoke no language other than his tribal dialect. There are perhaps six different tribal groups in the rainforest, most of whom cannot even communicate with each other, to say nothing of with the outside world. It slowly dawned on me that because of this language barrier, this Shaman had never read anything unless it had been translated into his native dialect. He had not heard of Galileo and had no concept of space as we know it. He had not heard of Darwin and had no sense of evolution. He knew nothing of Pasteur and had no awareness of the causes of sickness other than “evil spirits.” He had only the vaguest sense of the world beyond the rainforest. Places like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea had no content in his mind. In order for us to talk with the Shaman we spoke to our guide, who translated our English into the Spanish of our native expert, who in turn translated the Spanish into the native dialect of the Shaman. The Shaman responded and his words made the reverse journey. One never knew how our questions were interpreted or what was lost in translation.
We wanted to know how he became the Shaman, what the selection process involved? He answered that he was “chosen by the spirit of the forest” and that it was the responsibility of the Shaman to reflect the “unity of the forest.” We asked how the “spirit of the forest” made the selection. He said that a young man or woman (yes, in rare instances women could be Shamans in this tribe) would go into the forest and have some kind of transcendent experience, perhaps losing consciousness and even staying in the forest under the forest’s protection for a number of days. When regaining consciousness, the candidate would seek out known hallucinogenic leaves in the forest in order to test the vision. The three major hallucinogenic leaves available and used for this purpose were ayawaska, the most potent of the three; wanto, also called “angel’s trumpet;” and tobacco. All have known hallucinogenic properties. Domingo favored tobacco, hand rolled, but he also used wanto. He tended to avoid ayawaska. In this drug-induced state of euphoria, Domingo said he saw visions and perceived things that others could not see. Among them were the causes of sickness and the harm that evil spirits did to people. He used these powers in the practice of his healing art. When the people of the tribe heard about these experiences upon his safe return from the forest, they acclaimed him chosen by the “Spirit of the Forest” to be the next Shaman. He was then apprenticed to a Shaman nearing the end of his life and career from whom he learned the rituals and the words to use in fulfilling his calling.
People came to Domingo to escape perils like the evil eye, a spirit of weakness, or in an attempt to contact the dead in time of grief. His treatment included the use of hallucinogenic leaves so that the boundary between this world and the Spirit world might be breached, fear banished and the comfort of seeing a deceased loved one happy or at peace could be known.
Domingo indicated a willingness to perform one of his ritual practices on a member of our group. A volunteer quickly raised her hand and was invited to sit on a stool in front of him. She closed her eyes and the rest of us were told to be silent and to enter as deeply as we could into the meaning of this experience. We did. The ritual began. Domingo carried a leaf fan, gray in color, that rustled audibly when he shook it or gave it a whip-like stroke into the air, which we were told meant that he had cleansed the troubling spirits from the victim. He moved the leaf fan up and down the woman’s body, not touching her with anything but the breeze of the leaves, while he chanted words that we could not understand. They did, however, seem repetitive as many religious chants are. Periodically, he would face away from his “patient” and flick his leaf fan vigorously toward the woods. After this had gone on for some five minutes, he began to make guttural sounds, as if to clear his throat of a lingering phlegm, then circled his “patient’s” head with his hand and began to blow on her head. This, we were told, was his attempt to pour a new and positive spirit into her. In about ten minutes the ritual was ended.
Was this Voodoo? I do not think so. It would be easy from our perspective to be critical and to see this as some primitive act that more developed cultures have discarded. But is it? In the Christian baptismal service, we pour water on the child’s head and pray that all evil spirits will be banished from the child’s life as the child renounces “the world, the flesh and the devil.” Is that really very different? Are not both experiences attempts to bring life into harmony with what we perceive to be infinitely real?
Can modern people make contact with the religious and health practices of a tribe of people who live isolated in the Amazon Rainforest? I think we can, but only if we make a crucial distinction. All human experience is the same. It is the way that we interpret that experience that is so different. All human beings live with forces we cannot control. To help us cope with that world and our powerlessness we all design cultural rituals to bring help from beyond ourselves. It is also the fate of self-conscious beings to feel alone, separated from the world of nature, and so every religion develops a method of achieving atonement which, we assert, is ultimate. Thus the thing we have in common with the people of the Amazon Rainforest is that we share the anxiety of what it means to be human, which includes the knowledge that we are mortal and on a one way path toward death. This human experience is universal.
When any one begins to explain or interpret that experience, each of us does so in terms of the way each perceives the nature of life and the nature of the universe. Here the explanations vary widely as the perceptions of the universe are based on the knowledge available to us, the time and place we live in history, the nature of our education, the values handed down for many generations and many other factors. Are our modern explanations better than those of a people who inhabit the Amazon Rainforest? We do see through a wider lens. We have lived through changes in the perception of reality that have been given to us by the intellectual giants of our cultural past. We know things about the universe, about the laws of cause and effect, about our evolutionary history and about germs and viruses as the causes of sickness that they do not know. We can minimize the effect of epilepsy with drugs while earlier, even in Jesus’ time, he sought to banish the demons that had apparently possessed the victim. We treat pneumonia with penicillin, leukemia with chemotherapy and remove tumors surgically. None of these things are available in the world of Domingo, the Shaman. The explanation of why things are as they are will always vary widely based upon the knowledge available to the one explaining. No human explanation, however, is ever final and thus no human explanation can ever be literalized. Every explanation is always an expression of cultural knowledge, but no explanation can ever be substituted for the human experience, which is common, universal and real.
I do not judge the work of Domingo the Shaman. I seek to appreciate it. He works within his animistic world view to make sense out of life. I work within my Western mechanistic world to make sense out of life. The goal of us both is to create human wholeness, to introduce us to transcendent dimensions of reality that our experience tells us must either be real or be delusional. Both Domingo and I are convinced that we are in touch with reality. I am glad I had the experience of entering, if but for only a few moments, into the worldview of a culture vastly different from my own and was able to see a oneness in the humanity we share.
~ John Shelby Spong
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