[Oe List ...] 10/22/2020, Progressing Spirit, Matthew Sydal: “Liminal Grief”; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Oct 22 08:09:01 PDT 2020
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“Liminal Grief”
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| Essay by Rev. Matthew Syrdal, MDiv.
October 22, 2020
............Those who will not slip beneath
............the still surface on the well of grief,
............turning down through its black water
............to the place we cannot breathe,
............will never know the source from which we drink,
............the secret water, cold and clear,
............nor find in the darkness glimmering,
............the small round coins,
............thrown by those who wished for something else.
- David Whyte, The Well of Grief
As the leaves turn color and fall into the ground, and the migratory patterns and bird songs slowly shapeshift into a dirge, as the sap sinks into its source, we might listen closely to our bodies and psyche. If we allow ourselves the space to pay attention we can feel the shift towards the liminal time of fall. Fall in-between the erotic vigor and embodiment of summer, and the pale, dormant latency of winter.
We seem to have been abducted into liminal time as a culture without fully understanding why or what it really is. The word ‘liminal’ comes from the word limen, a threshold between worlds, like crossing a doorway into new space or territory, where we find ourselves no longer here, but not yet there - betwixt and between.
........................The truth is, liminal time is really uncomfortable.
There is a quiet, but very real, temptation to not allow ourselves to fully feel into how uncomfortable liminal time really is. Like Noah, or Utnapishtim perhaps, we are sailing together through liminal time on several different levels: culturally, ecologically, and mythically. These ambiguous losses we are experiencing include the very ways we make meaning as a people. The god-images, centers of ultimate meaning, value, and power at the very core of our cultural identity, are decomposing.
It's like kneeling on the ground frantically sifting through this 'heap of broken images’, to borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot. Under the still surface of the ‘well of grief’ are feelings that we haven't allowed ourselves to fully feel, deep anger, wounded rage, grief, longing. We might feel strong resistance to one another or whole groups of people, to polarizing language, to anything that feeds our distrust in the human project. A stark numbness or a wallowing sense of lostness are symptoms of our disorientation.
These emotions are all important indicators that we are crossing a liminal threshold together and we find ourselves in tomb-time, an often neglected, repressed, or glossed over phase of the death and resurrection journey. The great pause of the pandemic might be showing us that we have been too steeped in “Easter Sunday consciousness" as a culture, without passing through the agony of Good Friday, or the death of Holy Saturday. This liminal unraveling of control and identity can be terrifying and painful, and everything seems to conspire to pull us back up to the surface of urgency.
As we approach the festival of Samhain, All Souls Day, or Hallowtide we are reminded that tomb-time is also womb-time, when the veil is thinnest. For the Celts, sacred wells were indicative of potent and pregnant space. The wells of this potent water have always been suppressed, covered over with a sign marked ‘threatening’ and ‘dangerous’ in a culture that has lost its way.
Sharon Blackie, author of If Women Rose Rooted, writes, “During its early days the Christian church, finding it impossible to forbid people to visit their sacred places, developed a strategy of taking them over. It built chapels and baptistries over the wells; it walled them in. And so there are many wells which, like Madron, are named now for the saints — but under their shallow surface ripples lie the deep, clear traces of far older stories.”
It is important to understand the significance of the underworldly imagery of the sacred well in its relation to the kingdom (queendom) of God. In Jesus’ teachings, the kingdom is never defined, only alluded to — pointed to — by way of metaphor, allegory, parable — the language of dreams and mythos. To say that the kingdom “is like,” is to illustrate by way of relationship and, more deeply, story. The kingdom is really the story of our unique and ultimate relationship with the world, revealed in mythic time.
For Jesus there is a hiddenness to the working of the Otherworld that is already present in this world. The working of the kingdom is hidden, almost imperceptible. It is surprising — often invasive like a mustard seed, or offensive even dismantling, like the woman who hid yeast in a lump of dough. The two worlds touch in the person and actions of Jesus. The living power of the Otherworld overflows and floods like a wellspring into this world.
As David Whyte says, “To re-member the otherworld in this one is to live in your true inheritance.” Jesus’ teachings of “entering” or participating in the kingdom is an invitation to re-enter, to re-member the primeval story of Creation itself. Jesus reenacts the original, primordial powers of Creation inaugurating the kingdom through human words and acts from a deeper mythic reality.
The image runs deep in our collective imagination. The word itself conveys so much more than the source of a stream or a spring. It signifies a deeper meaning, the source of life itself. A wellspring is the source of continual abundance, and is the reason why wells, in the same way as rivers and lakes, are recognized the world over as sacred by almost every culture on the earth throughout every age. John O’Donohue writes, “Wells were seen as threshold places between the deeper, dark, unknown subterranean world and the outer world of light and form… Wells were reverenced as special apertures through which divinity flowed forth.”
But the source of life, even divinity, like all things, must be cared for, cultivated and tended. The sacred well runs deep in Celtic tradition, as Sharon Blackie tells the story in If Women Rose Rooted:
............‘In the old days, as I was saying, the kingdom of Logres was rich
............and beautiful, and the land offered nourishment for all, for it was
............properly tended and cared for. It’s a contract you see, people and
............the land. You care for it, and it cares for you. The source of the
............kingdom’s life, the life-giving blood which surged in its veins, was
............the sacred water of the wells, which flowed up out of the deep
............potent waters of the Otherworld.
Christianity, like other world religions in their zenith of empire building, adapted to people’s need to visit their old sacred places, and would build chapels and baptistries over the wells to wall them in. Ancient baptistries were often built underground beneath the nave. The font was constructed in stone descending into a natural source of water — “living water.” These vestiges of a much older nature-based form of ritual and sacrament, were now enculturated into a Western Latin ethos in which the wells were renamed after the saints. But under the surface ripples, Blackie writes, “Lie the deep, clear traces of far older stories.”
............The wells were tended by maidens, and these maidens were the
............Voices of the Wells. And this is how they served: if a traveler in
............need should pass by a well in those times, a well-maiden would
............appear and, if he asked reasonably, offer him the food he liked
............best, and a drink of well-water from her golden grail. This gift
............was given to all, freely given in the spirit of service to the land.
Today, many are feeling the loss of the voices of the wells. There is an ‘as yet’ untapped reservoir of anger and grief over the suppression of the sacred feminine and the generative matrix of a wild world that has birthed its human aspect. Grief felt perhaps as a crack in the source of life itself. In the Westernized world we are experiencing a spiritual thirst of mythic dimensions, a collective longing for a deep draught of that life-giving water with none to offer us true drink.
Perhaps we, like Jesus, are called to re-member, or rediscover mythic consciousness. To live our lives and our life together as a poem, a prophecy, a narrative that runs counter to the dominant story that has oppressed and exploited all that is deeply human and more-than-human. To live as if our actions and words inhabit this hidden realm, this primordial queendom, beneath the shallow torrent of political life and the pirated and empty storerooms of religion. What would it look like to compassionately bridge our common anxieties, fears and injustices as an isolated and wounded people with the deep well of the life of the soul through attending to grief, to the land, and to ceremony?
~ Rev. Matthew Syrdal, MDiv.
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. Matthew Syrdal MDiv. lives in the front range of Colorado with his beautiful family. He 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 is a coach and 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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Question & Answer
Q: By Beverly
I keep hearing about “”Centering prayer” but I’m not sure what this is exactly. Can you give me a definition or where I can read about it?
A: By Skylar Wilson
Dear Beverly,
The name “Centering Prayer” was taken from Thomas Merton's description of contemplative prayer. Contemplative prayer is considered to be a much older and more traditional practice. Essentially, any prayer that is focused entirely on the presence of God.
Centering Prayer is a form of meditation as well as the act of creating space for being rather than thinking. It’s being present to stillness. It’s listening with one’s whole heart and body. It’s opening to the most intimate and direct experience of the divine. Centering Prayer is a mode of experiencing oneself and the world as one. It’s about opening to our inner experience without judgement, recognizing that God is, if anything, the emptiness and stillness found within and beyond all ideas, thoughts and things.
The modern concept of Centering Prayer in Christianity can be followed back to several books published by three Trappist monks of St. Joseph's Abbey in the 1970s: Fr. William Meninger, Fr. M. Basil Pennington and Abbot Thomas Keating.
~ Skylar Wilson, MA
Read and share online here
About the Author
Skylar Wilson, MA is the founder of Wild Awakenings, a conscious community of change-makers dedicated to the thriving of Earth, life, and humanity. He has led wilderness rites of passage journeys as well as ecological restoration teams for 18 years, specializing in creating sacred wilderness immersion experiences and interfaith ceremonies. Skylar is the cofounder and co-director of the Order of the Sacred Earth, a network of mystic warriors and activists dedicated to being the best lovers and defenders of the Earth that we can be. Skylar is the coauthor of the book by the same title as well as the co-host, with Jennifer Berit, of the podcast: "Our Sacred Earth" on Unity online radio. Skylar works closely with schools and organizations including the Stepping Stones Project in Berkeley, CA over the last 8 years while guiding organization-wide retreats, mentoring youth, group leaders, parents and elders. He also produces transformational events for thousands of people around the country including the Cosmic Mass, an intercultural healing ritual that builds community through dancing and the arts.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origins of the New Testament, Part XIII:
The Theology of Paul as Revealed in Romans
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
January 28, 2010
Paul of Tarsus was a first century man. He thought in categories consistent with the world view of his time. He believed that he lived in a three-tiered universe over which God reigned from a heavenly throne just above the sky. Paul had never heard of a weather front, a germ or a virus. He viewed both the weather patterns and human sickness as being divine punishment sent from this external, supernatural God and based on our deserving. One should not, therefore, read the first century Paul as if he spoke from the vantage point of eternal truth. That is what biblical literalism does. The Bible, which many Christians call “the Word of God,” includes letters that Paul wrote. They are personal, passionate, argumentative and sometimes even vindictive. Paul would probably be the most surprised person in the world, and the most disturbed, to learn that the words in his letters had been elevated by the people of the Christian Church to a realm in which they have achieved the position of ultimate authority in which Paul’s voice is actually confused with the voice of God.
This is not to say, however, that Paul was without insight. He was a keen observer of human life and one who was a perceptive, even if an introverted, examiner of his own inner thought and being. Our task as modern interpreters of Paul is to separate Paul’s incredible insights into human life from the dated and thus distorting world view of his day. It is not an easy task, but it is a doable one.
Paul was a human being with intense feelings. Prior to his conversion experience he was an uncompromising persecutor of the Christian movement. Following his conversion he was an uncompromising advocate for the Christian faith. While the object of his passion shifted dramatically his personality remained quite constant. Almost inevitably he interpreted both what he believed was the meaning of the claim of Jesus’ divinity and what he believed was the meaning of salvation out of his first century understanding of human life, and in the process he always universalized the lens through which he viewed his world and himself. One must, therefore, never forget the highly subjective nature of Paul’s insights.
Paul was also a Jew. He had studied under the great rabbi Gamaliel. He identified himself as a Hebrew, a member of the tribe of Benjamin and a zealot for the Torah. Judaism was the tradition in which and through which he viewed all of life. Paul did nothing, certainly including his religious life, in a halfway or lukewarm fashion.
We start to unravel this Pauline viewpoint first by looking at his understanding of the human situation. What does it mean to Paul to be human? From where comes the pain, the fear and the insecurity that marks human life? Paul was quite sure, out of his Jewish background, that human life was created in God’s image with God’s law written across the human heart. This human creature, who was in Paul’s mind almost divine, had fallen from that lofty status into what he called “sin.” It was, he believed, a cosmic fall that affected every human being, and it doomed all people to a life in bondage to the incalculable power of sin. So Paul, looking at all human life through his own experience, lamented: “We cannot do the things we want to do, indeed we do the very things that we do not want to do.” Sin for Paul was an alien power. “It is not I” who does these things, he offers defensively, but “sin that dwells within me.” We are not now and we cannot ever be, he stated, what we were created to be. The human impulse toward sin was, for Paul, so deep that it actually prompted the act of sinning. This impulse is not and cannot be part of nature, lest God be blamed for it, but it nonetheless holds human life in its power. Listen to the pathos in Paul’s words: “I delight in the law of God in my inmost nature, but I see in my members another law which is at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law that dwells in my members.” It almost sounds like schizophrenia, but that is how Paul perceived himself, and when he writes we hear his yearning to be freed from this state and his desire to be capable of directing his own life toward the purpose for which he believed he was created. To find the ability to do just that was for him the meaning of salvation, and it was this gift of salvation that he believed he had experienced in Jesus. Human life, which was, he thought, created for fellowship with God, instead has been estranged from God, divided within itself and separated from all others. His dream was to be made whole, to be at one with God. He sought a biblical explanation for this human reality in the creation story that, true to the mind set of his day, he assumed to be history and thus a divinely inspired analysis of the human condition. St. Augustine, the fourth century bishop of Hippo and the primary theologian in the first thousand years of Christian history, would take this Pauline insight and make it the basis for what is still called “traditional Christianity.” It was because of this Paul/Augustine line of thought that Christianity still today wallows in sin and traffics in guilt. The Protestant mantra, “Jesus died for my sins,” expresses it. So does the Catholic interpretation of the Mass as the constant reenactment of the moment in which Jesus overcame the sin of the world with his death on the cross. It was out of this mentality that guilt became the coin of the realm in institutional Christianity and that is how and why behavior control has become the primary activity of the Christian Church. When this “original sin” was tied by Augustine into sex and reproduction, the repression of sex became in Christianity an aspect of salvation. Celibacy and virginity became the higher paths. Repression, however, including sexual repression, never gives life. It rather creates victims. Christianity has become the major religion of victimization in the western world. Bad anthropology inevitably creates bad theology.
Paul, perceiving what he believed was this fatal flaw in human nature, saw Jesus ultimately as the rescuer of the flawed ones. Since all human life shared in that flaw, salvation was a universal gift given to all, “to the Jews first but also to the Gentiles.” In this gift Paul believed that Christianity had the power to transcend all human divisions, including religious divisions, even the divisions created by the holiness of the Torah, the Jewish law, which excluded all who were not bound to the Torah. Salvation in his mind was that process in which human wholeness is offered to all. In Christ, he wrote, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, bond nor free. Salvation was a call to a new humanity and it was this vision that compelled Paul to become the missionary to the Gentiles, the one charged with turning the message of the Jewish Jesus into the gift of salvation offered to the entire world. When he wrote his letter to the Church of Rome, he spelled out this point of view hoping that the Roman Christians would feel as strongly about this vocation as he did and would thus be willing to provide him with the means that he hoped would carry him and his missionary activities to Spain and thus to “the uttermost parts of the world.”
Paul’s message was in this one sense profoundly true. There is about human life a sense of separation, of loneliness and a drive for survival that does indeed make us chronically self-centered, at war with our higher instincts. Paul’s way of understanding and dealing with that humanity was and is, however, profoundly mistaken. Indeed it is inoperative and, by literalizing this mistaken understanding, Christianity is today threatened with extinction.
As post-Darwinians we now know that there never was a perfect creation. All life has evolved from a single cell into our present self-conscious, enormously complex human life, which is for the time being at least at the top of the evolutionary process. Since there was no perfect creation, then there could not have been a “fall” from perfection. One cannot fall from a status one has never possessed. If we have not fallen from perfection, we do not need to be saved, redeemed or rescued. So the way Jesus has traditionally been interpreted falls into irrelevance. One can only artificially resuscitate a dying form as long as the presuppositions under-girding that form are still believable. The human experience, however, still cries out for some other explanation of this experience. What is it?
We are self-conscious creatures. All living things are survival oriented. Plants stretch to receive the light of the sun in order to live. Animals fight for life or flee danger in order to survive. Neither plant life nor animal life, however, is aware of its survival drive. Human beings are. When self-conscious creatures make their own survival their highest goal, they then organize their world around that need. That is what makes human life inevitably and universally self-centered, separated and cut off from others. We are our own worst enemy and we do violence to others in our drive to survive. This is not, however, because we have fallen into sin, as religious people still operating in a Pauline context continue to assert; it arises directly out of the given nature of our biological life. As still incomplete, evolving creatures we do not need to be “saved,” we need rather to be lifted to a new level of humanity, a new level of consciousness where we can live for others, give ourselves away in love for others and be empowered to become all that each of us can be. This is what salvation means. This is what Paul experienced in Jesus, but he was trapped inside the presuppositions of his first century, Jewish view of human life. He found in Jesus the power to accept himself, to love himself and to become himself. “Nothing,” he said, “nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.” Paul’s experience of human life was correct. His explanation was wrong. His experience of Christ as life-giving love was correct. His explanation of how that love was manifested in Jesus’ life was wrong.
Next week, we will push this study of Romans to a new place and seek to translate Paul’s experience into our presuppositions. I hope you will join us then.
~ John Shelby Spong
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