by Charlene Spretnak

Is she not singular in the entire religious imagination? Is there another human who begins as a simple village girl, experiences a direct encounter with divine presence (albeit through a delivery service, Michael), agrees to grow divine presence from her very body, cues her son that it’s time to perform his first miracle, witnesses at the foot of the cross the divine sacrifice, and then is embraced and honored by his followers, such that her spiritual presence is felt in cathedrals and roadside shrines, in grottoes and the old pagan springs, and, most significantly, in the hearts of millions over more than a thousand years? The Virgin Mary is a human who grows into her cosmological dimensions, the human possibility writ large.

Of course, her biblical story is situated in the far older religions of the Eastern Mediterranean basin: in a hidden place (a cave-like stable) she bears a special son parthenogenetically at the winter solstice who becomes a great leader; he dies and is reborn around the time of the Vernal Equinox, living on in a spiritual sphere. It is a plot line that would have been familiar to the residents of that part of the world. It may be “the greatest story ever told,” as Christians sometimes say. It is certainly situated in the oldest story: that of the sacred cosmological female.

by Amina Wadud 

One of the requirements in Islam is the five-times daily prayer.  It is something often misunderstood by non-Muslims.  For one thing, it is not personal supplication or invocation that comes to mind with the English word prayer;  It is a highly formalized ritual performance with certain prerequisites and conditions.  This does not mean thqt personal supplication is unimportant in Islam and Muslims invoke the sacred on behalf of their pesonal and immediqte circumstances like any one else and at any or all times that we are so moved, including before, after and during this formal ritual.

The word for prayer in Arabic is salat, and refers to a specific actions and words of devotion.  Because of its enduring formula and consistency, no matter where we are in the world, we can enjoy this performance in common with others and within every circumstance that we might find ourselves.  

The Qur'an speaks of the whole world as a masjid place of prostration.  In one sense this means we are always connected with the divine through the earth.  In another sense, this is a unique and yet repetitive act of reminder that we are responsible for our consciousness and the actions that follow, no matter where we are and no matter what time the sun rises, reaches it zenith, declines, sets and the stars come out.  The prayer times are synchronized with the positions of the sun.  The direction of the prayer towards a sacred shrine in the heart of Arabia is flooded at all hours of the day and night by some one, some where turning their faces towards it and observing this act of devotion.  

In Europe, I find the rising sun, but unlike in North America where I must turn east (more or less), here, I turn towards the south.  In Southeast Asia, I turn west.  But sometime each day I unite with this cosmic flow of devotion from all around the planet.  My favorite prayer is the one about one hour and a half before sunrise, fajr.  I leave my place of repose and adopt a new one: in remembrance of the holy, as it lives in me, I in It and with all else: both sacred and profane.  When I travel, my rhythm is only restored, when my body is synchronized with this particular beginning for each day.  When the sun arrives, it is as though I have already found my place in the universe and from there all else follow

(more to come...) 

by Carol P. Christ

Greek Easter fell on the last Sunday of April this year.  Though I did not attend the services, nearly every one else in my village did.  Once again I was prompted to think about survivals of pre-Christian intuitions about life and death within Greek Christianity.  This time I reflected on spring cleaning.

Greek Easter officially begins when the mid-winter carnival concludes on “Clean Monday” (note the reference to cleansing and cleanliness) and the Lenten fast begins.  In Greek practice, the fast begins with the prohibition of meat, but during its 40 days other food items including fish, milk products, and even olive oil are proscribed.  The fast is broken on Easter Saturday night with a soup made from the paschal lamb’s head and entrails followed by the Easter feast of lamb or goat grilled on the spit or as is more traditional in my village, stuffed with rice, raisins, pine nuts, and parsley and baked in the oven.  The Easter fast can be thought of as a kind of “spring cleansing” in which the toxins produced by winter feasting and lolling around are removed from the body. 

In our village the housewives practice the custom of spring cleaning the home.  They turn over mattresses, wash tablecloths and doilies, seek out every speck of dust, paint the walls if cleaning won’t do the trick, and whitewash the steps in front of their homes. 

Customs like these are as old as agriculture and the domestication of animals that ushered in settled life.  The Easter fast is connected to the life cycles of sheep and goats.  The abstention from meat-eating allows the lambs and goatlings born in early February to grow and thrive while their mothers eat the plentiful grass produced by winter rains.  By Easter-time their black and white bodies are a familiar sight among the spring flowers.  Yet as the days get warmer and the rain less frequent, the ground begins to dry out, the grasses die, and the land can no longer support all of the growing lambs.  Because they do not produce milk, the young males are the first to be sacrificed: the “paschal lamb”-- a term applied to the death of Jesus--was originally applied to the real lambs that are eaten at the spring feast.  Their death allows their mothers’ milk to be used to make cheese and yoghurt.  Their sacrifice also ensures that the land will not be overgrazed and that the cycles of birth and death can continue among their kind.

The spring cleaning of the house is based in the agricultural custom of cleaning out the granaries and all of the pots and jars used to store grain in preparation for the new harvest.  It is necessary to “begin afresh” to ensure that the old grain will not rot or ferment, thus contaminating the new.  It is good to have a clean house too as “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and as we now know cleanliness is the ground of health.  Spring is a good time to clean as the warmer days allow windows and doors to be opened, and the return of the light makes possible a thorough inspection for dirt.

In Greek Orthodox tradition Holy Week is a dramatic affair with services held every evening.  On Thursday night a cross is erected in the church and the icon of the dying Jesus is literally “hung on the cross.”  The women of the village are solemn and many of them are actually weeping.  They spend the night preparing the coffin of for Jesus whose icon continues to hang on the cross, elaborately decorating the coffin and the table upon which it rests with wildflowers from the fields (now augmented by commercial flowers).  The next morning the icon of Jesus is removed from the cross and tenderly laid to rest in the “bed” prepared by the women.  Friday night the “epitaphio,” the coffin containing the icon and the table on which it rests, are carried through the streets before being returned to the church where Jesus is symbolically buried.  Many of my friends have told me that for them, Friday night is the most important part of the Easter rituals.  The resurrection of Jesus on Saturday night does not inspire, they say, the same depth of feeling.

The emotions run high during Easter week and by Thursday night it almost seems as if each of the women has lost her own beloved son.  This public display of emotion can seem excessive, and since I do not believe in the myth being reenacted, I have often found it so.  This year something prompted me to connect the women’s emotions to Aristotle’s famous insight that watching the performance of a Greek tragedy enabled the ancient Athenians to “purge pity and fear.”  Oh, I sighed, as the light dawned:  in reenacting the story of Jesus’s death, the Greek women are “purging” their own “pity and fear.”  The Easter pageant allows them to express any feelings of loss and disappointment they have suppressed or blocked from running their course.  Thus they not only cleanse their bodies by fasting, and clean their homes with hours of elbow grease, they also purge their souls of emotions that could impede them from entering fully into the renewal of spring.

I like to make these kinds of connections between Christian rituals and rituals of the pre-Christian past, because it helps me to understand that we who worship the Goddess in the twenty-first century can learn to adapt the rituals we have inherited from Christianity, Judaism, and the other religions that have shaped our individual and collective pasts.

by Susan Reimer-Torn 

During my twenty-two years of expatriate life, I was unaware of many stateside phenomena. Along with the emergence of Wal-Mart, Oprah and HMO’s I had missed the publication of Gloria Steinem’s Revolution From Within: A Book of Self Esteem.

In the little New England village where I now have a home there is an unassuming antique store that sells $1.00 second hand books. This outdoor stand is my ouiji board: I close my eyes and allow my hand to be guided to the right book for me. This is how I discovered Steinem’s “Revolution.” I hear that this book - which marks a break with Steinem’s activist past and encourages turning inward - did not meet with a favorable reception when it appeared in 1992.

As I look through it, I am astonished to come across Steinem’s own transformative experience using Ericksonian hypnosis, a favorite technique in which I am trained. In the book, Steinem explains that the social revolutionary must be nourished by an internal revolution of consciousness, if political action is to be sustained by integrity and wisdom. She and I are certainly on the same page.

Just this past weekend, I spent two days of a hypnosis intensive revisiting Self Relations: In a safe space, participants guide and are guided through inner journeys which revisit the Self’s past wounds, clarify present desires and discover creative resources. In this weekend’s training we had a look at two diagrams posted side by side, each containing a circle representing Self.

On the left side is the vulnerable child Self, she who has inevitably been bombarded by critical, undermining messages, against which, we all agree, children are born defenseless. These negative voices are dubbed “alien thought viruses” to emphasize both their external and self-propagating nature. The unwanted by-products of their invasion are a sense of inadequacy, disconnection and dis-ease.

On the right side of the blackboard, we see the grown-up Self and the good news is that she can now choose to substitute “sponsoring thoughts” for the debilitating viruses of childhood. When Steinem talks about restoring self-esteem, she is underscoring this very healing process. The result is a return to core states such as inner peace, love, general OKness, and oneness with all being.

To get from here to there we enjoy a hypnotic journey through time and inner space. Steinem writes of her own hypnotic journey and it is the very one I embark upon this weekend. After induction into a light trance state we invite the grown-up, sponsoring Self to travel back in time and visit the child Self. Adult Self now offers that little girl whatever resources or insights she needed and lacked in the past. The intention is to help her heal the dis-ease inflicted by the alien viruses. As Steinem puts it, “Somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, rebellious, creative, daydreaming, unique child – a true self who is waiting.”

We journey into the multi-layers of our own unconscious, to the core of all spiritual representation. We see how inextricably intertwined pain has been with intimacy, how the longing for love and radical vulnerability weave a single strand. Women have their own gender-based version of this encoding. A woman’s internal reality is early on invaded by alien images of a masculine God; the stain of Female ungodliness is not easy to dissolve.

During my journey, there is a fleeting moment of utter disbelieve in the Aliens. In a flash, all that we are and always have been shines unsullied.  I see Yahweh and his emissaries reduced to ranting egoists. This is a rewrite of internal programming on the most profound level.
(During this journey, I spontaneously shudder for some of the young women I know who’ve actually reversed their mothers’ journeys. While we struggled to free ourselves from alien patriarchy, some of our grown daughters have embraced it, but this is the subject of a separate blog.)
I share Steinem’s experience and knowing. We Are What We Are and always have been. We can manifest blessing from the scabs of a curse. Revolution from within the woman wellspring detonates deepest tremors and shatters barriers, both real and imagined.

by Charlene Spretnak

                                    All things rising, all things sizing
                                    Mary sees, sympathizing
                                             With the world of good,
                                             Nature’s motherhood.

Those are probably the best known lines from the poem “The May Magnificat” by the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote it in the 1880s. He begins by wondering why the Virgin Mary is traditionally associated with the month of May. He concludes that spring’s grand fecundity – its “universal bliss” and “this ecstasy all through mother earth” – remind Mary, “the mighty mother,” of her own miraculous fecundity, her birthing of Christ. Even more, Hopkins adds, the glory of spring reminds Mary to exult in “God who was her salvation.”

Lovely. Really lovely. Of course, there are also other reasons why Mary is associated with May. I’ll just quote myself here, from Missing Mary (2004):

                       Previously, the Greeks had celebrated the goddess Artemis,
                       and the Romans the goddess Flora, in May, followed by centuries
                       of [early] medieval honoring of the pagan Queen of May.

Well, wouldn’t you know! Mary and May are yet another incidence of the Christian church’s occupation of a previously pagan site or event or association with a time of year.

The earliest record of Mary’s being associated with the month of May occurs in the thirteenth century, in Spain. Three books by Jesuits made the case in 1725, 1758, and 1785; the last was reprinted 150 times in the 19th century and several times in the 20th century. After that, it was Mary, the Queen of May all the way. Processions with her statue crowned by a wreath of flowers were elaborated into beautiful rituals in many Catholic cultures.

Whether May reminds you of the Goddess or Mary or both, it’s a glorious banquet for the senses. Again Hopkins:
                          Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
                          Grass and greenworld all together

Enjoy!