A New Heaven For A New Earth

 

I’ve been thinking about toxic masculinity, with questions like, what exactly are the proud boys proud of?  Then I researched them and came away sickened and soul-chilled.  Basically they are proud of being white supremacists, incredibly racist but equally, decidedly misogynist.  

 

This is what bothers me so greatly about our public discourse, or lack thereof, at the moment.  What is destroying us is a psychic paradigm at its core.  As people believe, so they do.  As they do, our shared physical reality is manifested by the consensus will of the many. But it’s a paradigm!  Another way to say it is it’s a set of beliefs made into law, not natural law, like gravity, decreed by men in charge.   

Patriarchy is big and scary in its manifestation here on earth. At least three quarters of our beautiful earth is plagued by patriarchal rule exercising various degrees of repression of women, minorities, animals and the planet itself.  Around the world, women suffer untold indignities and cruelty based on the patriarchal laws that rule them and the men who so gladly enforce them.  In our own country, we are close to losing our reproductive rights as women, therefore, our equality and autonomy as citizens of this particular patriarchy.

 

Patriarchy is based on the supremacy of one gender over the other. It is about 6 thousand years old, not coincidently, as old as Creationists say the earth is old.  Religion is the psychic enforcement of the patriarchal paradigm for society.  Patriarchal religions are all based on tomes declared sacred texts and absolute law by the patriarchs who wrote them.

 

Once patriarchy succeeded in subjugating women, it was natural for the toxic credos of might and cruelty, empowered by divine justification, to turn to the next conquest, men and women of lesser power and might around the world. Slavery is based on the patriarchal paradigm that power deserves rewards; what’s yours is mine if I can take it. 

 

The other day I was at a party hosted by dear friends.  I was talking to their lovely young college graduate son about this and that.  Something came up in our conversing that put me at a crossroads quite familiar to me; do I go there or not?  Going there means using the P word to describe how I view our social situation; the P word is patriarchy.  See, I know that word is going to be met with some form of dismissal; sure enough he repeated it, and smirked.  He felt that summed up his opinion of the topic.  He isn’t a wise-ass guy or disrespectful.  He’s a lovely young man; it’s just knee-jerk conditioning we have all endured.

 

Patriarchy’s credos are chilling; its history is one horrific blood bath after another.  We’re indoctrinated to think this is the only way that people have ever existed on this planet, which is complete bullshit.  Archeological and other scientific investigations have dispelled the blinkered views that patriarchs prefer.  Is it a coincidence that proud boys and their fraternities like to be called patriots? They’re patriarchal patriots who don’t want to see the good old days of racism and misogyny vanish and themselves out of power.

 

There are multitudes of armed to the teeth last defenders of a dying paradigm in our country.  It is the most painful reality I must acknowledge daily; an army of disgruntled white men with dangerous weapons is seething in righteous rage, ready to protect these collapsing paradigms, male supremacy and white supremacy.  

 

Yet, it is each individual that cements this ludicrous paradigm into reality by accepting the absurd imbalance between sexes, races and classes as god ordained and by having anything to do with a divinity who would ordain such a thing.  Love is the manifestation of divinity; all else is a false god and a lie.

 

There are also multitudes of people deeply committed to Love as the ultimate spirituality. I hold on to the knowledge that spirituality has a much longer shelf life than violent man-made paradigms like patriarchy.  I chose to be born into this time, this place, in a physical lifetime to learn what I need to learn and to do what I can do.  I will be exiting at some point back to the spiritual path I have followed for eons.  I know my life after this life will be pleasant and interesting because my ability to create my reality will, as it is in dreams, be much easier than it is in the physical. 

 

We create our realities, individually and collectively.  Modern dream studies have left us with little doubt. Anyone, who like myself, has pursued a dream practice for years has learned this certainty from experience.   So it would seem that a person who has created for his or herself a reality of hate, division and fear is likely to continue that path after death. No thanks.  With the bigger picture in mind, I choose Love.

 

Most of the men I know have no conscious interest in subjugating the women in their lives; most women I know respect women and love their men and children.  What is less apparent to all of us, because it’s like the air that we breathe, is that we live in an old patriarchal paradigm.  When we continue to diagnose our problems in isms and separate them one from another, we don’t see that it’s all one piece.  Nature, that’s us, cannot be divided and conquered because nobody wins. The extreme psychic imbalance that patriarchy has caused is at the heart of every crisis we face.  

 

Our unconscious devotion to the paradigm into which we have been indoctrinated hampers our metamorphosis into the most awesome human beings we can be. The paradigm we adhere to because God the Father says to is one of divisiveness; he alone is the one true it; my way or hell is patriarchal religions’ bottom line.  

 

If you’ve read the gospels you might ask yourself what would Jesus think of today’s proud boys?  Based on where and to whom he was born, he certainly was not Caucasian, European or “white” and he championed women while living in an utterly archaic patriarchy. I wonder if breaking all those taboos about menstruating women and women hearing teachings about the Torah contributed to his enemies, Jewish and Roman patriarchs, conspiring to crucify him?   

 

Jesus’ teachings do not fit in with the rigid patriarchal constructs that were built into the world’s major religions, including Christianity.  Jesus was about finding spirituality within; religion is about relying on external authorities and their dictates to tell us what our spirituality is or should be, all the while, relieving us of the responsibility of finding out ourselves. Remember the money lenders Jesus kicked out of the temple?  What would he think of these rich ass pastors with their super churches, TV shows and constant hustle?

 

We are plagued world wide, not only by a physical coronavirus, but ironically, also by a mental virus.  The vitriol and threats that are building from militant terrorists like the proud boys around the country is a sign of how desperately patriarchs want to hang on to their power.

 

But the counter weapon isn’t a bigger machine gun; it’s a change of heart and a change of mind.  It’s opening to a new possibility for a world that is wonderful in it’s magnificence and deserves to be respected.  It’s recognizing that the trappings of genitals and skin color are a thing of the physical world we’re living in together.  They don’t mean anything outside of the experience that spirit is having in that body.  Why would I choose to judge another spirit’s journey; that only diverts and stunts my own.

 

The difficulty people have in making that change, however, is that we aren’t offered much in the way of an alternative to God the Father religions. The numerous stories of goddess cultures before patriarchy were repressed and silenced; history is the story told by the conqueror, not what actually happened. 

 

But our spirituality, our soul’s longing, is a natural flow in our psyches; we long for a vessel to express it.  Embracing and including the Feminine Divine as God equal to the Masculine Divine is a good way to bring some balance to the modern psyche that has been drenched in penis worship for so long; but god/goddess is just a metaphor for what we intuit is beyond our physical senses, what lies in dimensions beyond this one.

 

Dreams can open our inner organic god/goddess given paths to all the divine knowledge we need to get by on this beautiful earth.  The First peoples of the world knew and practiced this inner searching, but our modern awareness is focused externally almost perpetually, except when we sleep.  When we stop ignoring our dreams, we begin the inner journey Home.  When we live our best dreams, we bring to the world the healing all of us here so desperately need.  

 

  

 

 

 

Fly Free; You Are Forever

In the aftermath of the waking dream that has many of us stunned, saddened and fearful, it's hard to find that silver lining.  Many of us in the consciousness/spirituality movement feel it's very important to stay positive, because despair leads to emotional catatonia, which literally gets us nowhere.

In my last post, I mentioned how one of the things that seems apparent is that we won't have a leader to turn to, so we'll need to do it ourselves, for each other and with each other.  Do what?  Make sure Love trumps hate.

Obviously that won't be easy, but the hard things seldom are.  For myself, I'm choosing the areas I most want to champion and commit my energy there, while supporting others in their endeavors to move human consciousness beyond the stagnant mental swamp of this dying patriarchal system and its death generating values.

For me, the women's movement has received a huge wake up call; too many women, white women it seems, voted for a misogynist and put their own civil liberties, their daughters' and their grand daughters in jeopardy.  Why?  Brainwashed, that's why.

That's the title song by George Harrison on his posthumously released album:

Brainwashed in our childhood
Brainwashed by the school
Brainwashed by our teachers
And brainwashed by all their rules
Brainwashed by our leaders
By our Kings and Queens
Brainwashed in the open
And brainwashed behind the scenes

God God God
A voice cries in the wilderness
God God God
It was on the longest night
God God God
An eternity of darkness
God God God
Someone turned out the spiritual light

Patriarchy is a 5-6 thousand year old paradigm that has forced humanity into this perilous period of self-destruction.  It takes many forms on the planet, physically, monarchies that are inherited or hierarchical legislative structures that are to various degrees elected, but psychologically it takes one common form.  God is male, so the male is the only suitable representative of his rule in the physical. This belief is manifest to varying degrees of severity, depending on where in the world we find ourselves.  But very few societies extant give equal voice to the Feminine Divine.  This denial of half of who we are, within and without, has created the dark paradigm, the collective dream, we're living on this physical plane.  I spoke about this in my Mother's Day Homily a few years ago in more detail.

The good news, as I've mentioned before, is that we humans have been here much longer than the patriarchal age and have experienced peaceful coexistence and egalitarian organization of societies. The myth of it's always been like this is part of the patriarchal, apocalyptic narrative.  Are the myths of Eden hinted at in this bleak story echoes of the paradise we indeed lost when god was not the war tyrant father and all that was life was the Mother? 

The challenge of the times we're in is doable; it depends on one person at a time learning to free herself/himself from the mind-forged manacles that make us conform to values that are religious rather than spiritual, exclusive rather than holistic.  The choice isn't religion or atheism; it's dogma versus experience. The realm of God/goddess is within and the path is always open to us, especially through our dreaming.  Paying attention to our dreams, our organic spirituality, can free us from the religious strictures and lies that cloud our judgments and harden our hearts with fear.

We are forever because we're spiritual beings in this present physical existence.  We've been here before and we've been elsewhere in the multi-universe, as well.  We don't have to earn our way into heaven because heaven is inside us - as is hell, if we choose it.

The question for each of us is, why am I here now?  What do I need to learn and what am I here to contribute?

A world out of whack is a world of imbalance; many teachers in the consciousness/spirituality movements of today believe that the Feminine Divine must be returned to equal status with the Male Deity that's been Ramboing us to perdition these past several millennia. The influence of the Feminine is key to achieving balance; the goddesses that all our earth centered ancestors revered informed our moral codes very differently.  Goddess respecting cultures embodied a very different paradigm, a very different consensus reality. 

We need to melt down this hateful paradigm that's imprisoned the human imagination for so long and fly free.  Patriarchal religions control through fear and coercion, just like patriarchal governments or patriarchal family structures.  But no one can control our inner freedom.

The spiritual movement of this dark patriarchal age is brighter than it has ever been, thanks to so much passionate research and writing in the last century.  Material science and metaphysical science are partners in the current conversation on what constitutes "reality."  We can take heart in that.

There is no doubt in my mind that as Jesus put it, you can't put new wine into old skins; the new skin we need to grow, to rebirth, regenerate and renew our existence on this planet is a psychic one.  We need to act as if our spiritual being is just as important as the ego being of our waking reality. It's not either/or, it's both/and, especially when the shit hits the fan.  We need to examine our beliefs, where and how we got them and whether they serve our deepest values.  We need to tune into our dream lives because that's where we find the help we need, custom tailored to our own soul, not mass produced, mass distributed and controlled by patriarchs for their own profit.

As Robert Moss teaches; "We are born to fly, and in dreams we discover that the soul has wings."

The American Dream...again

Back in June, when Donald (Drumpf) Trump announced with  unprecedented vitriol, racist hate against Mexicans, and with his  noxious self-aggrandizement, that he would once again, run for POTUS, my favorite political satirists like Jon Stewart, believed his bid a joke.  So, it got me to wondering about the people and the ethos in this country that would happily see him succeed; I asked what is the American Dream?

Now, after ten months of freak show, I have to ask it again. What is the American dream - to you?  It's a question I think each American has to answer.  The consensus answer will create our future and impact the entire planet for generations to come. But before we answer, let's remember that what brought the Pilgrims here was a search for sanctuary from religious tyranny in England.  Unfortunately, they themselves projected that huge shadow of theocratic cruelty on the indigenous peoples they met in this "sanctuary," claimed for the white-skins of Europe by the  explorer, Christopher you know who.

By way of historical correction, I thought about calling Christopher a son of a bitch, because as his historians say, he was a cruel man, but it's misogynist, as the bitch here is to blame. Then I thought to use the word, bastard, but same thing.  Bastard is an illegitimate child under many patriarchal laws around the world.  Any woman who dares have a child on her own, give it her name, dooms not only herself to social disgrace, but also her child, to varying degree, depending on the strictness of the patriarchy.  So, why should I perpetuate this subtle, psychic brainwashing by using the language that these laws have coined? I'll come up with something new: let's see; what fits?  Ah, yes.  Devil; one who worships evil, i.e., himself, and perpetuates unspeakable, unbearable and unnecessary cruelty on everything that thwarts him. 

Back to my American Dream.  You see, America, today, is a place where one is free to grow; rich is only one avenue, a rather temporal, though popular one.  However,  we live in the Age of Consciousness, the age of inner-space exploration and new quantum paradigms.  Why dream the same old dream?  

We also live in a time of great crisis and great opportunity as the wise ones have said.  We will create the reality we give our energy to, our inward and outward allegiance.  "The world is as we dream it", is at once ancient shamanic knowledge and the title of a great book by John Perkins about shamanic wisdom.

As a woman, who is also an American citizen, I'm appalled that the rights our grandmothers fought for, a fight in which they sacrificed a great deal, (as did the brave men who fought with them) should be again jeopardized by religious extremists seeking to rule. Women fought a literal war with men who denied them, who governed them, in order to win the right to vote. TO VOTE for holiness sake!  (As historical review, I recommend two recent films, "Suffragette" and "Iron Winged Angels.")  It was no tea party for our women ancestors; they had no acknowledged voice or choice in government or in society. 

Voting was just one battle; they also had to fight for reproductive freedom, for rights and protection against laws that prevent her from exercising stewardship over her own body. The battle continues to this day, in this election and around the world. Patriarchal theocracies are still seeking to control her.
How can the grand daughters and sons, the great grand daughters and sons, of those brave freedom fighting forebears, (quite literally) allow this country to once again be ruled publicly and personally by authoritarian and patriarchal theocracy and corporatacracies?

Here's my dream.  In this difficult election season that has people in conflict and on edge, we take a moment to breathe, to center and realize that Never will there be as important a time as NOW.  (Just ask one of my favorite contemporary teachers in the Consciousness Movement, Eckhart Tolle.)

After that wonderful, centering deep breath, we each connect with the heart, with what your heart truly loves.  If it's money, okay, but there's so much more!  Whatever you learn and how ever greatly you love, that goes with you; the money, property and power stays.  I dream that we dare to dream a new dream, one where losing our fear of death, we see life with new eyes and find meaning through inner as well as outer riches.  I dare to dream that amassing riches will never again be literal, ugly and world destructive, just the opposite.  We'll dream ourselves into a future we want instead of waking up in one we fear.

The story we tell ourselves is supremely important.  There's the communal patriarchal story we've been immersed in for so long which promotes fear and separation, and there's the deeper story, one that promotes hope.  I AM immortal NOW.  I'm an immortal having this experience.  I've volunteered for this stint on earth, this physical reality.  (I love how when I say say, "Sheesh, what a world, my life partner, Jim responds; "It's not the world, it's the people in it.  The world is a beautiful place.") 

The world is as we dream it; life is as we dream it.  What is our dream, collectively as Americans?  What is our vision for "the future?" Perhaps, we've all got a mission to accomplish and a lesson to learn in this present reality that we can take Home with us when we die. How should that color our collective dream?

Fear of death, of what we believe about death is another hot topic in the New Consciousness movement.  For the sake of brevity, we live in a time of exploring that final frontier. It behooves a person to come out from the fug of patriarchal paradigms, especially as they envelop spirituality, and smell the coffee; we have delicious opportunities for personal and collective growth.  Dreams are our organic spirituality and our passkey to where we came from an where we're going; both sleep dreams and waking dreams.  We can learn to use them to heal ourselves, each other and our relationship to this beautiful planet.

To dream awake is to imagine from the heart; to come from the heart is very different than to come from the wallet.  To come from fear and hate is very different than to come from love and trust.  Depending on where you come from, you'll do different things, make different choices.  Each choice matters.  If you know that you'll live after death, just the way you're living now and beyond, then it colors your choices. 

As a woman on this physical plane, I don't know about you, but I don't want to go through the shit great-grand mama did, or that generations of suffering, confined, mistreated and beleaguered women before her did, ever again.  NEVER AGAIN!  I also count on other men and women, sisters and brothers, lovers and parents, not to allow fear and mistrust to obscure the dream we create for ourselves.  For me, that dream includes freedoms that go way beyond the nearsighted grab for money that doesn't see beyond these borders, these mind forged manacles, as Blake put it. 

I dream freedom to grow as my heart tells me to grow.  It's freedom to do the job I was sent here to do in the most loving, creative way I can.  If I'm a woman, in a temporal paradigm, I want to make sure ridiculous, confining and sadistic laws don't keep me from being free.

Women, some women, have only recently enjoyed, in the patriarchal 6 thousand year global paradigm we've endured, the freedom from the legal, social and moral restraints that theocratic male rule has inflicted on them.  Case in point, I think of how one of my favorite mystery authors recently wrote  about witch burning in such a way that I know she never would have done of the more well known Jewish genocide of the mid-twentieth century: jokingly.  "Witch" was an accusation in Medieval patriarchy; it was and often, it still is. Back then, it meant death to be called a witch; you remember Salem.  What made all this unnecessary cruelty to women possible?  Religious patriarchal theocracies.

It doesn't matter if that theocracy is Christian, Muslim or Judaic, the Big Three Traditions.  If a woman is not legally, socially and personally free to do, say and be as she pleases, she is a slave.  Our great-grandmas fought bitterly to give us the right JUST TO VOTE!

My American Dream is of a land where most people are waking up to the great New Reality that includes immortality NOW.  The violence that is so prevalent, and has always been in patriarchies, will give way to kindness and creativity. We'll collectively dream ways to live that aren't the way we're living now.  We'll continue to support the basic rights of sisters and brothers to not be like us; respecting each other, we'll create new communities.  We'll open our doors to what it's possible to achieve through fearless love and wisdom; we'll support each other in our best efforts and in living our best dreams.

So dream big and vote carefully! Abigail Adams once requested of her loving, Father of Independence, husband, "Remember the ladies" when you draft your legislation.  Though her request fell on mostly deaf and mocking ears among the ruling elite, let her voice ring clearly in our vote, NOW. And let's dream a world without end, forever and ever.  Amen and Awomen. 

The Flowering of Women

In my last post I told you about Mother Nature’s S.O.S. to all dreamers.  The real and present danger to our own survival as a species if we don’t learn to value all living things above ridiculous monetary gain should be apparent to all but the most concrete embedded citizens of this planet.  So that means that most of us must know this and most of us must act to do our part.  That means there’s hope.

And where there’s hope, there are women. 

Another dream theme that is coming increasingly clear to me is that Mother Mary is indeed howling for us to wake up, especially the women. (The link will take you to my Howling Mary dream. She’s the Feminine Divine who recruited me in a dream in 1971. When Mary howled, I listened; she led me to discover the goddess and the importance of dreams as organic spirituality.) Bye, bye patriarchy; I just can’t take you seriously, anymore.

The deep, ancient understanding that the Feminine is behind all creation, all life on the planet (and perhaps beyond), that our pre-historic ancestors saw the Divine as Mother, came to me first in dreams.  Synchronicity took care of the rest; my life played out in the most interesting and parallel ways to that big dream.  Having that dream as a road map made it much easier to sort out the paths I took; dream guidance is a powerful ally. 

At the time I heard Mary howl for help in my dream, there were very few women in religious authority; the stained glass ceiling of religion is a tough one to crack for women, to this day.  Many of the women I met as fellow students in seminary in those days were challenging the ban on women priests and ministers in Christianity; most everyone but the Catholics caved.  Many got ordained; I didn't because I learned that I didn’t want to change the system from within.  The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. 

So I turned my attention from theological studies to psychological ones, after all, the word psyche in Greek means soul.  By then, I was convinced that understanding dreams and dreaming was the road to my Divine connection and so much more. I pursued studies in transpersonal psychologies and Jungian ideas.  I also studied and continue to learn about the Goddess in her many manifestations and in her great antiquity.

This brings me to the real topic of this post.  Woman’s flowering.  Perhaps, you’ve noticed that a great divide exists in this American political race regarding issues that deeply impact women. I sincerely hope many, many Americans are disturbed about the attack on women’s autonomy and full constitutional equality afoot in Republican legislation.  What is at the root of these political attacks? Religion.  Religious thinking that says our god, the great white patriarch, knows what’s best for women.  Women should have no choice about when to conceive, let alone whether to be pregnant and give birth because it's really god who's creating; she's just the incubator.  

Already, the republican anti-woman rhetoric is beyond belief, from leering disrespect to condescending religious dribble.  Looking at the horrible situations in the world today, I feel stuck between two super patriarchy’s, Christianity and Islam, who have nothing but the worst intentions for me.  “Shut up, sit down, do as I say or I’ll make you.” Do women really want to be treated this way?  No, of course not. 

There is great danger in what’s psychically implanted, because we’re controlled by our deepest beliefs.  Notice please, that in groups where the strictest religious sanctions apply to women’s behavior, women lead invisible and often miserable lives.  Religion is the corporation that handles mind control for the big patriarchies of the world.  It’s easy to spot a patriarchy, just count the women in public and religious authority.  When you've only got a male god, watch out, especially when he's petty, unfeeling and constantly demanding.

Mary was howling about the way things are done in religion and about her relegation, the Feminine Divine, to the sidelines.   In my dream, I know I have to do something to help Her; her pain is unbearable.  I snatch the chalice from the priest’s hands and the worms he was giving as communion turned to rubber bands.  What do you use rubber bands for?  I use them to hold things together.

Just as we're being called in dreaming to honor the planet and hold it together, women, and men who love women, are being called to take charge of the clean-up and transformation of human consciousness, with our hearts open to the sacred Feminine.  I think the literal manifestation of this dream is that we'll see more women in roles of leadership, leading compassionately and cooperatively with men.  The flowering of women means that we come into our full potential as equal citizens of this planet, as leaders and saviors and healers and mothers of all.  We don’t use the same methods or employ the same mentality, because on this very real eve of self-destruction, we see clearly that those methods haven’t worked.

Consider the metaphor of women being de-flowered. In patriarchy, much is made of the deflowering of women, control of women's virginity.  I’m sort of stuck in reading "Memoirs of a Geisha"; I’m at the part where her virginity is being auctioned to sleazy old men and it makes me sad.    The sado-masochistic patriarchal paradigm of sexuality is another psychic realm where deep healing is needed.  Again, it’s about woman’s role in sexuality. Was it fun for her?  Was it joyful for them?  “The only sin that passion can commit is to be joyless.” Dorothy Sayers

What would it mean to flower a woman having sex with her – to invite her out to unfold in all her pleasure and all her glory?  What would it be like if advertising treated women and men as people instead of body parts?  Would we have more joy centered, less frenzy driven or repressive sexual cultures?  

The flowering of women means the empowering of all that is Feminine.  She’s calling to us all – be the change you want to see and see to it, with all your soul, that the change happens. 

I can't help hearing that hauntingly beautiful song of solidarity, "Bread and Roses".  Here's Judy Collins version on youtube:

The World Day of Active Dreaming, 1.

I'd like to share with you what I posted on my Lita Dreaming FB page today; a miniscule moment of bliss from the great experience of bliss that was our World Day of Active Dreaming celebration in Monroe, CT, hosted at the wonderful ARC Sacred Center on May 10th, "El Diez de Mayo".

I had asked my very musically talented co-facilitator Lynette Turner (holding my right hand in the picture) to sing her incredibly beautiful song, "Believe" as a meditation at the beginning of our dream cirlcle.

http://www.broadjam.com/artists/songs.php?artistID=71737&mediaID=543393

What a wonderful experience it is to call on spiritual guides through dreams in a circle of open, heart- fueled women.  This was an all women's circle by chance, I have had the same experience with men and children in dream groups.  It's all about the dreaming, the doors and gates and paths that open when we dream together.

Also:
I give thanks on this day for the life and work of Maya Angelou; may we dream her dreams of hope forward together.

Mother's Day Homily at MUUS

I'd like to share with you the homily I gave this Mother's Day at the Mattatuck Unitarian Univer-
salist Society in Woodbury, CT, titled: "The Feminine Divine on Mother's Day." 

Today is Mother’s Day, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you about Mother. Actually, today in particular is the centennial of Mother’s Day in the US, first declared officially as the second Sunday in May by Pres. Woodrow Wilson in 1914.  This holiday, which probably has its roots in ancient Mother Goddess Spring festivals of Greece and Rome, was championed in the US by Anna Jarvis, who beginning in 1905, campaigned vigorously to establish a day where each family would honor their personal mothers in a special way at home and with church services.  Unfortunately, it took no time at all for the holiday to become so commercialized that she actually spent the rest of her life fighting to have the holiday removed from the official national roster.  Thanks, Hallmark.

What Anna Jarvis wanted was that on Mother’s Day we be reminded to celebrate the unconditional love, sacrifice, untiring care and selfless devotion of our personal mothers.    To give thanks to our mothers for having the courage to give birth to us, and thanks to every woman who after taking on that heroic biological task, in the majority of cases, did her very best to take on the moral/spiritual task of nurturing her children, as well. 

Moving from the personal to the collective, on this centennial of our national celebration of Mother’s Day, I’d like to invite you to remember with me not the personal mother of our own experience, but the archetypal mother of our collective experience as a human race, the Great Mother, the Feminine Divine. 

At the very core of our collective psyche as a human race on this beautiful, bountiful planet is the Great Mother, known throughout antiquity and across indigenous cultures as the Creator of all that is. Thanks to the work of exceptional scholars like archeologist Marija Gimbutas, we know that: “The Goddess is the most potent and persistent feature in the archeological records of the ancient world, a symbol of the unity of life in nature and the personification of all that was sacred and mysterious on earth.”

I was completely delighted to learn that Unitarian Universalists have for many years offered a very sophisticated curriculum about the ancient and indigenous Goddesses from history and diverse cultures, “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven”. I was going to spend some time with you sharing slides of many of these pre-historic and multi-cultural images of the goddess, until I realized I’d be preaching to the choir, many of you already know about HER.

Whether God as Mother is a familiar concept or a new one to you today, I’d like to invite all of us to reflect on the status of the Divine Feminine in our psyches, both personally and collectively.  Because for the last five thousand years or so, She has been persecuted, obscured, neglected and finally banished. This has had dire consequences for humanity.  The elevation of the masculine to exclusive divine status and the denigration of the feminine to subservient and inferior status has grave implications for our personal psychic health, whether we are male or female, for our cultures and for the well being of our endangered planet.

The Wisdom of the Feminine, personified in the many forms of the goddess, is essentially the understanding that Divine Light is not separate from creation, but inherent in creation, embodied and birthed over and over again by women.  For ancient peoples, woman was the matrix of creation, both literally and metaphysically. Moreover, to ancient and indigenous peoples even today, the Earth is our Mother, alive, sentient and interactive with our every thought, word and deed.  We are part of a physical and mystical web of life that is inter-dependent and inter-connected.  

History is the story as told by the conqueror and the stories we have learned are about the triumph of the masculine sky gods, giving birth without women, from Adam’s rib, the head of Zeus or even the spoken word.  Patriarchal mythologies have divorced divinity from nature, exhorting conquering, dominating and exploitive ideologies that have brought us to the very brink of our own annihilation.  It has placed divinity outside of matter and reduced matter to a mechanical science, devoid of soul. All ancient and indigenous peoples even today know this is a grave error.

But today, we are in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Enlightenedl teachers from all over the world, across cultures and disciplines are pointing to a new/old paradigm for understanding our world and our purpose in it.   From subatomic physics to new metaphysics we are hearing that we are essentially energy; we are spiritual beings participating in a physical manifestation and each of us has chosen this manifestation with a purpose in mind.  Today’s spiritual teachers point to the need to bring balance back into our psyches by once again honoring the Feminine aspects of Divinity and recognizing the sacredness of the Earth as the embodiment of the Feminine Divine.

They’re telling us that our world is in serious trouble and at the root of what ails us is the terrible psychic imbalance caused by the inflation of masculine principles and the devaluation of the feminine.  In Chinese Taoist philosophy, these principles are known as the Yin, the Feminine and the Yang, the Masculine.  Taoism teaches that these opposites are in a continual dance, an ebb and flow that results in balance; neither is superior or inferior, each has its time and its purpose.  When one becomes too pronounced, the entire system is thrown out of balance to the detriment of the whole.

Mother’s Day is a fine time to consider what the consequences of shutting the Feminine out of divinity are.  I recently wrote here about the new, celebrated Pope Francis who has firmly stated that he won’t consider finally ordaining women as priests, although he is very concerned about their level of poverty and exploitation in the world.

But it’s a Catch22; the majority of the world's poor are women because women have no status in patriarchal government, patriarchal religion nor as the Divine Archetype.  In patriarchy men rule, make all the decisions concerning women and children and God looks like one of them. In patriarchal paradigms, woman's power is stripped from her and to the degree that it’s justified by “the image of god” her situation can’t and won’t change.  You’ve only to look at the status and experience of women in the most orthodox patriarchal cultures.  As Jimmy Carter recently put it:

“The truth is that male religious leaders have had – and still have – an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women.  They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.  Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.”

To change the status of women, we have to change the paradigm that devalues women by excluding the Feminine from divinity. This work begins at the level of the individual psyche, as psychiatrist Carl Jung taught.  The fate of humanity, he said, hangs by a thread, and that thread is the psyche.  As the mystical poet, William Blake, wrote, “mind forged manacles” imprison us.  What we believe at our deepest unconscious level is what really drives our behavior.

Like most of you, I grew up with the psychic imprint of God as male, God as Father.  Jesus, though his teachings espoused rather feminine values, was also a male representation of the divine and all his earthly ministers, up until the mid 1980s, were male, as well. As an on again, off again Catholic, Mother Mary did factor in, but definitely as an obedient helpmate, not a divine equal to His Holiness, Father God, and always a Virgin, despite marriage and motherhood, because another artificial separation of this paradigm is sexuality from the sacred.

I first met the Great Mother in a dream when I was 21, way before I knew anything about Her in waking reality. She came to me as “Howling Mary”; I talk about this dream here.

I woke from seeing Mary howling in anger and pain, heart pounding and completely baffled.  I didn’t know then the value of recording my dreams, but I’ve never forgotten this one. It was a Big Dream with a Big Message for my life that proved prophetic. In a manner I’ve come to recognize from following my dreams, my waking life unfolded in a series of one meaningful coincidence after another, until the Great Mother embodied in my Psyche, out of the shadows and into the Divine Light.

Though my original plan was to go to graduate school to study literature, I went to seminary instead, campaigned to be ordained a priest in the catholic church and when I realized that wouldn’t happen, despite the many other denominations opening the ministry to women, I abandoned Catholicism for psychotherapy and Women’s Spirituality and came full circle to marry my love of HER to my love of dreaming, where I first met Her. From my perspective today, I see what Mary was howling about.

On this day of Honoring the Mother, I invite all of us to examine our paradigms, our deeply held, knee jerk beliefs inherited from our parents, family systems, cultures and belief systems.  Knowing about the Queen of Heaven is an intellectual exercise; healing the Wounded Archetypal Feminine, the Anima and the Feminine relegated to Shadow is the soul-searching challenge of our time that each of us has to accomplish individually. Recovering a reverence for the earth and all life based on a deep, intuitive understanding of our Oneness with Gaia is the test we face.

But we can’t create the new order we need using the old logic that got us into the mess we’re in.  We need to use the principles we’ve been told are inferior, heart, intuition and instinct.

Here’s an example of what I mean; close your eyes and imagine a prehistoric time, cave people, cave man, cave woman.  How do they relate to one another? Is it hard to dispel the caricature of the caveman with the club, dragging the cave woman by the hair, dominating her way back then?  At an intellectual level, we know it’s not politically correct, but is it a knee-jerk visual?  Can we imagine a pre-historic culture where women were revered for their personal magic?  A culture that deduced the Creator of humanity from observing the creator of the personal world, a culture that finds no problem in revering a Divine Mother as ultimate Creator?  In this culture, people exercise their talents for the good of the group; knowing that sticking together and loving one another is the way to survive?  Oh, and a people who are constantly in and out of psychic experience, one to whom dreaming and dream adventures meld seamlessly with waking and waking adventures?  A culture far more advanced in spiritual practices than we are today.

We are plagued by the tunnel vision of interpreting all of history, at least 40 thousand years back, through the lens of the last six thousand years.  We have a patriarchal, war obsessed mindset that tells us it always had to be this way; human nature is naturally contentious, greedy and selfish, anything else is wishful thinking.

Amazonian and Mayan shamans teach that “the world is as you dream it.”  We create the realities we live through our communal expectations. We created this paradigm when we banished the Sacred Feminine, and in order to break free of its unconscious hold on our psyche, we need to re-instate the Great Mother as she is embodied in the earth and in all feminine characteristics we have devalued.

Here’s another example of how knee jerk our denial of the Feminine Divine can be.  I taught theology in an all girls’ RC high school, back when there were enough progressive religious communities, especially among nuns, to allow me to teach a course I called, “Christian Feminism.”  On the first day of class, I asked the students; “Is God male or female?”  They were prepared, and gave me the bonafide answer from the catechism.  "God is neither, God is Spirit."  "Fine", I said, "In this classroom, for this semester, when we pray, we’re going to say, Our Mother, and when we refer to God, we’ll use the feminine pronoun, She."  They were horrified; "We can’t do that!"  "Why?" I asked; "Because God is Father," they replied. The masculine divine has been imprinted in our psyches, both personally and collectively; it’s hard to reshape that image.

Until we heal our personal psyche, we can’t heal the collective.  Until we heal the collective, we remain alienated from the resources we need to create balance.  Here’s the good news as taught by Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, a contemporary Sufi master who wrote “The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul.”

“The mystery of the divine feminine speaks to us from within her creation.  She is not a distant god in heaven, but a presence that is here with us, needing our response.  She is the divine returning to claim her creation, the real wonder of what it means to be alive.  We have forgotten her, just as we have forgotten so much of what is sacred, and yet she is always part of us.  But now she needs to be known again, not just as a myth, as a spiritual image, but as something that belongs to the blood and the breath.  She can awaken us to an expectancy in the air, to an ancient memory coming alive in a new way.  She can help us to give birth to the divine that is within us, to the oneness that is all around us.  She can help us to remember our real nature.”

How do we reconnect with the Feminine Divine?  Turn off the TV and step out into Nature. Listen deeply to what you hear within you.  Be still and know that She is Divine, alive in the beauty of the simplest flower.  Follow the counsel of your heart over your head.  Listen to your dreams, your own organic spirituality, your connection to revelation and trust that you are part of the One, you are not separate and you are not Alone. 

I wish you all a very blessed Divine Mother’s Day.