May 31, 2017

Poem of the Day: the Real

I have heard the Sufis sing of
Allah – God – the One – Oneness –
the Real.

I love this Oneness,
the Real.
Oneness with Its 99 names, none
of which can capture,
contain
or comprehend You.

O Universe Whoe lives
within and beyond
and through us,

As the soft-furred bunny asked,

How do you get to be Real?

I am so often anything but.

I may be just a collection of narratives,
told by others long ago and now,
spoken and unspoken.
They have been stuffed into my own mouth
like a chloroform rag, making me panicked and sleepy.

Will you, Real, help pull the rag,
help me breathe?

The stories are told around and around,
a spiral somehow further and further
from the center
where Your drum beats in me.
Accretions of years of stories
Fat gluttony
Woman weak and tearful
Lost potential, ugh, that oily, poisoned word sticks and pokes with its slime.
And of course
failure
A carapace of hardened tales
told sometime out of some kind of love
concern(-trolling),
and sometimes simply mocking, belittling, wounded bear-baiting.

Can I wriggle out,
a cicada
singing Your Song,
the Song of the One
Who is Real?

September 8, 2016

Love’s Power in Weakness

I’m stuck. I’m really stuck about what to write to you. I’ve had a really hard day and I’m sad and frustrated and feeling like a failure.

However, many of you have written to me and told me how much you value the honesty and authenticity in my writing. Well, this is what I have for you today.

Inspiration Strikes

I have only one thought in my mind, and it is the beautiful tattoo a friend and colleague got on her arm this week. It has a gorgeous sunflower, and the biblical reference 2 Corinthians chapter 12, verse 9. The verse is as follows: My grace is sufficient for you; for my power is made perfect in weakness.

And a friend of a friend just wrote to me, “We’re only human. There’s no point in beating ourselves up when things don’t go right despite our best efforts.”

I have slept poorly much of the week. And it has been “my own fault.” I forgot to take some of the medications that keep my mind’s bad neighborhoods watched and calmed. My lack of meds is correlated with hyperfocus on things other than my household, on inattention, and on anxious perseveration.

In part because I haven’t remembered things (especially meds), haven’t done what I could do, haven’t paid attention, haven’t…haven’t… haven’t…I have fallen down on the job. The job, the work, of love.

And apparently love is the topic of the week here at The Way of the River!

Love is My Work, and I Fail at It

Because that work, the work of love, is the most important work in my life. For my lovely spouse, for my other family, for my friends, for myself…for people I do not know and will never meet. For you, whether I know you or not.

It is easy, so easy for me to think of myself as a Bad Guy. To think of myself as the One Who Is Always Wrong. To feel humiliated because it is my habit to feel that way.

But habits may be broken, and so I quote to you again:

“My grace is sufficient for you; for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

“We’re only human. There’s no point in beating ourselves up when things don’t go right despite our best efforts.”

Crappy Best Efforts

Sometimes—often, even—my best efforts are pretty crappy. They are, nonetheless, my best efforts. If we could have done better, we would have. I want to do better. I want to make progress, to break bad habits and replace them with virtues, to be a model spouse and citizen. To overcome my physical and mental limitations.

I will accomplish some of this work in my lifetime. Some of it, I will not.

Some of it will remain undone, and I grow teary just thinking all the ways I will not have loved as well as I imagine I could have.

But…

The Power is Love

Let us go to the first quotation, “My power is made perfect in weakness.”

Holyyyyyyy… I mean holy big deal, Batman.

My power is made perfect in weakness.

That is to say, in weakness—in all my human error and lack of foresight and forgetfulness and hurtful behavior—somehow, the Big Picture is brought into greater focus.

What?! The Big Picture? What am I talking about?

For me, the “My” in the quotation, the “Me,” is Love. The creating-destroying Love that is the Universe and that “encircles” it with Her body as we say in Stone Circle Wicca.

This is the Love that “thought up” black holes and butterflies. This is the Love that somehow caused those first atoms to get together, to embrace, if you will. To attract and repel. To burn and burn and burn.

And is the small-l love too. It is the love among friends and family. It is the love of land and of country. It is the love of puppies in a pile with their mama.

That is the Deity I worship, the Divinity to Whose altar and in Whose house I bring my sacrifice of praise, as the prophets have sung. Both big-L and small-l.

Love.

Love’s Power is Made Perfect in Weakness

Love’s power, the great powers of truth-telling and reconciliation, of blessing, of simple adoration, are made perfect in weakness.

And perfect, in this context, connotes maturity, ripeness, fullness, wholeness. Perfection is not some unattainable, truly undesirable state. It is fullness. Love is made full, grows, matures, and ripens through weakness.

Through our weaknesses and our responses to them…

Through our weaknesses and our loved ones’ responses to them…

Through our weakness, love in all its power is made perfect.

Weak

Today, I have to believe that because I have felt very, very weak. And I am relying on the love of others to help me in my weakness. I know I’ll always have weaknesses, of course—Love will always have the chance for its power to be made perfect!—but still I long for the day that will never come.

You know, the day when everything goes beautifully on all fronts, whether in my primary relationship, my other family, my household, my work, my spiritual practice, my meds, the rest of my health…

That day will never come, my friends. But Love may always be made perfect through our weakness, our attempts. And in the meantime, let’s not beat ourselves up for being the humans we are, just trying to do our best.

Finally, one last quotation—which I know you’re never supposed to do, end with a quotation, but hey, if you can’t break the rules once in a while, what’s the point? I need this right now, from Grammer and Carter’s song “Gentle Arms of Eden.”

“But I will lay my burden in the cradle of your grace
And the shining beaches of your love and the sea of your embrace.”

Yes. Tonight I will lay my burden in the cradle of Love’s grace.

August 19, 2016

Kiss Me with the Kisses of Your Mouth

Each of the following quotations is central to my understanding of the yearning I have for God Herself. And that is what I have, a yearning. Yes, a seeking. Yes, a deepening. But a longing and yearning, the attraction and pull to a lover by the beloved.

When I talk about “spiritual seeking,” sometimes I think I’m sanitizing my experience and the experiences of those who work with me. It’s not just seeking. It’s not only going on a journey, though that is certainly part of the process.

It’s about longing, and not even knowing what I’m longing for.

It’s about yearning toward SomeThing or SomeOne and feeling that yearning like doves’ fluttering wings deep inside me.

Maybe you don’t call it God, or God Herself, or the Sacred, or Spirit—all words that are comfortable for me. Maybe you don’t even call it your Deepest, Wisest Self—language I also use.

I don’t care.

I don’t care what language you use. I don’t care whether you believe in One or Many, Male-Female-Both-Neither-All. I don’t care. I only know that burn, I long, I yearn, and I think that you do too, somewhere inside you.

The Song of Songs

We begin with the passionate love of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible: “Kiss me with the kisses of Your mouth.” – The Song of Songs, Tanakh

I don’t care what you call it. All I know is that when I am paying attention, It/Her/Them/Him are inside me radiating out like romantic love. Radiating out in a gentle, ember-burning, feather-light kindness and gentleness. And sometimes in a fierce, love, a compassion that says “No!” when there is wrongness and injustice in the world, which there is all over.

The Burning Bush

“And the Bush burned and was not consumed…surely I must turn aside and see this wonder, Moses said….and the Lord said, ‘Take off your sandals for you are standing on holy ground.’”

The Bush burned and was not consumed!! Dig that! We have the opportunity to burn with delight and glory and destiny and love and simple kindness and the very Flame of the Divine and not. be. consumed. Not burned up.

Not, as Goethe writes in “The Holy Longing” (which I do also love), “You, moth, / will be burnt to a cinder!” (The word there for “moth” is usually translated “butterfly,” but I don’t know butterflies who fly into candle flames.)

This Bush is not the moth. It is not consumed. and yet it burns so brightly that Moses must turn aside to see the wonder of it.

I know that What/Who I long for is already inside me, like the flame of the Burning Bush. “Moses, Moses…you will bring My people to freedom…” The flame in the Bush is the Angel, is the God, is the holy ground, and is Moses’ heart itself. The Flame is everything. And the Flame in the Bush, the God, the angel of the Lord, told Moses a story, gave Moses a destiny, told Moses that he would be an instrument of liberation.

Liberation. Yes. Liberation.

The Divine Is within and Beyond

“Know that your seeking and yearning will not avail you unless you know that greatest of the Mysteries: That if that which you seek you find not within yourself, you shall surely never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of all desire.” Charge of the Star Goddess, after Doreen Valiente

Just as the Burning Bush and the Lord’s Word is in my own heart, so my heart contains the glory and the whispering joy of the Goddess. And when I come again to the beginning of my life and pass through the Darkened Door, I will come into her arms with no desire, only acceptance and love.

The Sacred has been with us since the inception of the Universe. Since the Beginning. I am made of stardust. The water I am drinking has hydrogen in it that was present at what we know as The Beginning. The water I am drinking came from the atmosphere and the life-giving primal seas.

I am made of stardust!

And so are you.

The elements—whether we’re talking Air, Fire, Water Earth or the Periodic Table—are the elements of Earth and Starry Heaven, of my Great Parents and of yours.

Knowing for the First Time

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T.S. Eliot

And yet, my life has always been marked by exploration for Spirit. When I found the words of the Goddess, I knew that some part of me had come home, had come to where I started when I used to gaze up at the giant crucifix in Our Lady of Victory church.

I arrived where I started, and so for a while I sought the deepening of my Spirit, my God-Soul, with an order of Roman Catholic religious sisters. And while I did not stay with them, they gave me many gifts for which I am grateful. I offer them a deep bow and many thoughts and prayers.

What I found there, most profoundly was that the One and Many, Male-Female-Both-Neither, are indeed the Lover. I am indeed the Beloved. And so are you, Beloved, so are you.

Who am I?

“We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.” Marianne Williamson

And here is a familiar quotation. Here is a quotation that we, many of us, see all over the place. But, like clichés, it is everywhere because it is powerfully true in some way. Who am I not to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? I am all these things. No, for real!

I am fat and bumpy and I make mistakes, and sometimes I bump into hurting people, and sometimes I do not use my powers for good (thank you Jonathan White). And I am brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous, nonetheless. And those things come from my seeking and yearning, my longing and lovemaking with the Sacred.

A dear friend said to me recently about the occasion of their ordination, “When I thought of someone who could bring the Holy into that space, I thought of you.” I was humbled and joyful. And I knew they were right, that it is part of my work to do these things.

My Work Given for You

This is my work—to bring the Holy, the awareness of the Holy, the deepening sense of the Holy. In ones and twos. In classes and retreats. In coaching and preaching and praying. This is my work.

This is my work—to celebrate the sacredness of the seasons, to honor the ancestors and descendants, to know and help others to know the sacredness of our own bodies and minds. This is my work.

This is my work—to pray alone and in company; to offer to others what has been given to me; to find those who long to “Kiss the Limitless,” as the title of one of T. Thorn Coyle’s books says, and to help those people come closer to those kisses. This is my work.

I long for the passionate kiss of the Divine, or the brush of lips on my brow.

I long for the featherlight touch of Mystery or the blast of the flame that burns but does not consume.

I yearn for God Herself

This is who I am. If you need me, you can find me. If you are curious, you can ask me questions. If you yearn and you’re not even sure for what, let us talk.

I love you more than I can possibly say.

~Catharine~