Queer
Spirituality
by Rev.
Nano Boye Nagle
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stellar
nursery
Spitzer Space Telescope image, courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech |
The Isness of the Goddess Goddessing
One day I woke up, saw the morning star and realized there is no God. I saw the moon setting and I realized there is no Goddess. No God the Father; no Great Mother; nothing. There is nothing except the isness of the Goddess and the isness of the God. There is only the Goddess being the Goddess, in all the ways that the Goddess can be the Goddess.
When I talk of the Goddess I'm not talking about a maiden on a cloud or a crone on a throne. She isn't manifest as anything like that because She is everything. She is the force behind everything. God the Father came from the Goddess Goddessing. Yet to name God the Father, the Great Mother, or any named aspect of the Goddess -- to name anything as anything -- takes away from the power of the Goddess. It takes away from the power of the Goddess because I can only experience Father and Mother through the limits of my imagined parental perfection. I can only experience anything within the parameters of its naming or the limits of my imagination.
The Goddess must be bigger than my imagination. Divinity must be bigger than I dare touch, beyond the first naming, beyond the first speaking that created matter from nothingness, beyond me. You see, the comfort of Mother and Father has very little to do with the Goddess Goddessing. Like the Tao, it cannot be spoken; as soon as I give the Goddess a gender I am in the trap of two, shackled to the mountain of either/or. The Goddess breaks through the law of physics that says, "Two things cannot exist in the same place at the same time," because the Goddess is in everything, beyond everything, between everything.
When I asked the Crone, "If the Goddess is the life force of creation; if she is everywhere, in everything, where is that which is not the Goddess?"
She said, "In the nowhere."
Rebbe Cooper(1) talks about God Godding, he says the Goddess is the breath of intent that holds the Universe together without which there would be only nothingness. That intent is the Goddessness of the Goddess we feel in the power of magic or the ecstasy of sacred dance. The Goddess is Goddessing when we look into the clear winter sky on a moonless night and bubble with awe as our eyes focus on the stars. We are being Goddessed when we look down at the stars and have faith that we will not fall off the planet, down into space. It is this faith of divine intent and responsibility that keeps the universe from becoming something else. Edna St.Vincent Millay says it with the spirit of the mystic in her poem Interim(2):
"Not Truth, but faith, it is
That keeps the world alive. If all at once
Faith were to slacken, - that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing, - the birds now flying fearless
Across, would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all governing reins
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction! O God, I see it now, and my sick brain
Staggers and swoons! How often over me
Flashes this breathlessness of sudden sight
In which I see the universe unrolled
Before me like a scroll and read thereon
Chaos and doom, where helpless planets whirl
Dizzily round and round and round and round,
Like tops across a table, gathering speed
With every spin, to waver on the edge
One instant- looking over -and the next
To shudder and lurch forward out of sight!
This wonderful vision of cosmic faith is sometimes the only thing, except my stubbornness, that keeps me going when life doesn't make sense. Without faith I experience the opposite of Goddessing bliss, I become uneasy, uncontained, and unable to see the consequences of my behavior. I begin a spiral into broken agreements, depression, and fear of economic insecurity -- for the foundation of the faithless universe is deprivation and the lack of security that follows the loss of intent.
Simply, faith is the absence of doubt. It is a knowing that everything I experience and perceive ultimately comes in the service of health and wholeness for the planet and for me. Unlike Millay, I believe that truth and faith are intrinsically linked. Faith is the embodied practice which comes from truth. Truth is the touch of Divine intent, the residue from being Goddessed. I will always have dis-ease if I build anything on a foundation of even the smallest lie.
I fuel my dreams with faith, but they too must be based upon honest intent, if they are to manifest. I can conceive an idea and incubate it with imagination and preparation, but I must let go and have faith that the universe is my midwife. In Spiral Dance(3), Starhawk talks of the role of honesty in magic. She says:
Those who would practice magic must be scrupulously honest in their personal lives. In one sense magic works on the principle that "it is so because I say it is so."...For my word to take on such force, I must be deeply and completely convinced that it is identified with truth as I know it. If I habitually lie to my lovers, steal from my boss, pilfer from supermarkets, or simply renege on my promises, I can not have that conviction.
This belief, "it is so because I say so" is the foundation of faith in myself as co-creator with the Divine. It is the belief in my capacity to Goddess my life. The Universe knows the thoughts and beliefs that are beneath the words that form the spells I cast. When we don't get what we think we want, what we asked for contradicted a belief that is hidden from our conscious mind; hidden in the shadow of our soul. This is an ongoing struggle, faith in my role, my power. Powerlessness is a seductive ally. If I think I have faith in an abundant universe bringing economic security and yet at the same time I believe on some level my only hope is to win the lottery or find a husband to support me as a mystic and an artist, I am Goddessed with a cosmic canceling out.
Faith is the fuel of creation. Faith is the Goddess manifest. Faith keeps me right-sized in my life and in relation to the Universe. Faith says have visions, dreams, and goals but let go of what they might look like. Faith says love your beloved, no matter what, and allow the relationship to move into places you previously could not have imagined. Faith says the divine presence in me bows to the divine presence in you and in the presence of that, I offer to you my attention, no matter how different from me you are or how my stories of fear attempt to prevent me. Faith whispers "Forget me and become the Goddess Goddessing. Remember your Goddessness."
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The
six grandmothers have placed in this world many things, all
of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something,
and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to
make happy. Like the grasses showing their tender faces to each
other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandmother
of the world.(4)
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Ultimately
there is no explaining the source of being. There is no explaining
why we are asked to do things that push us beyond our previous understanding
of faith. All we can hope to have is greater faith in embodied experience
and the willingness to let go of anything else. For the Goddess is
both perfection and the holes in perfection. The Goddess is all that
is and all that is not. The Goddess is the space in perfection that
allows for the continuation of creation. The practice is to live in
the world Goddessing, with Her presence in my heart(5),
and not wait for the Goddess outside of me to influence my world.
Do I feel the effect of the Morning Star or the impact of the freeway
traffic at rush hour?
Notes
(1)
Cooper, David, God is a Verb.
(2) Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Interim" (excerpt),
Collected Works, Harper Colophon 198.
(3) Starhawk, Spiral Dance, Harper San Francisco,
1979. (p. 138)
(4) Adapted from Black Elk Speaks, John G.
Neihardt Bison Books, 1932. (p. 193)
(5) Whatever that means! How would I be if I lived
that? I think I would have unreachable standards for myself and so
fail miserably. But if they weren't un-meetable surely they wouldn't
be Divine.... I guess I know the topic for the next column.
+ stellar nursery, Spitzer Space Telescope image, courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.