God's Other Half

God is...

The following is from one of Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation daily meditations: “The soul does not need answers, it just wants meaning, and then it can live.  Surprisingly, suffering itself often brings deep meaning to the surface...”

A desire to share the deep meaning brought to the surface as I struggled with my aging parents’ care needs is why I wrote “God Never Hurries,” in addition to wanting always to remember the many unique gifts I experienced during that painful time.  Soulful treks to the beach, with my buddy Bear (dog is god spelled backwards), showed me that in my churches mystical body, I really had no voice.  Then one night at choir practice, while listening to the men’s voices contrast with us women, and seeing each of us as unique, totally loved by God, and sharing our voices, let me know the importance of everyone having a voice.  And all this was helping me understand my complicity through silence in my father’s abuse.  I became keenly aware of my struggle with assertiveness and my need for voice.  I had no answers, but my soul was coming alive with meaning.

As my soul found meaning I saw how I needed to change.  Slowly, painfully, I learned to find my voice, refuse the victim role, and saw that I could no longer be “the good girl” who does what everyone else expects.  It was tough, scary work but so worth the eventual growth, freedom and understanding of what it means to be true to one’s self.  Encountering the word obdurate (hardhearted, unyielding, stubborn, obstinate) while reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes book, “Women Who Run with the Wolves,” was my first hint that I could change no one but myself.  Estes wrote:  “In ‘being good,’ a woman closes her eyes to everything obdurate, distorted, or damaging around her, and just tries to ‘live with it.’  Her attempts to accept this abnormal state further injured her wild instincts to react, point out, change, make impact on what is not right, what is not just.”

Fast forward to today.  Death eventually ended my struggle with my aging parents’ care needs. I left the church of my birth, now over ten years ago, because the struggle with my father paralleled my struggle with my church.  My hand would no longer let me write another check to an organization so discriminatory.  (I now gratefully pursue an ecumenical path.)  And although I know it is true I can change no one but myself, there is a part of me that wonders, is that enough?  I caught a few words from a speaker on public radio last week who said anyone has the right to believe anything they want to believe, but no one has the right to act upon those beliefs if they hurt others.  Oppression of women (or anyone) in the name of religion is so systemic that I think many are unaware of it.  It leaves half of God out of the blending of male and female voices and that hurts everyone.

What if we all thought about that for a while? 

Contemplative Muffins

God is...

Matthew Fox describes compassion as a creative force and also states it is critical to our and our planet’s survival.  He cites physicist Fritjof Capra's observations that all energy flows through and connects all things and one another.  Our planet and we are one in this giant web of energy.  Fox states that successful life is therefore a cooperative, interdependent venture not a competitive struggle and calls compassion the true creative life force.  He states, …there is no compassion without creativity.

Thomas Moore says it another way as I relate in my memoir as follows:  The idea of caring for myself was so foreign but I sensed it was imperative.  I read Thomas Moore’s “Care of the Soul.”  His assertion that everything has soul—people, trees, buildings, cars, etc., and each is a part of the larger world soul—let me look at everything in an exciting new dimension and feel a part of something bigger than myself.  And I experienced the sense of the world soul later on a walk to the beach.  I wrote:  Coolness was all over that early morning—overcast inland and a gray thick blanket of fog at the now warmer lake.  The water smelled heavy in the curtained air, too heavy to move.  Tall gray herons waded near the shore and seemed only a darker color of fog in the shape of stately birds.  It was easy to sense the seamless world soul in the all-encompassing softness.  …That day I learned, as part of the world’s soul, I create an atmosphere wherever I go. 

Fox cautions against too much introverted meditation and advocates for extrovert meditation saying it is centering by way of creating.  In extrovert meditation we learn to trust our deepest insights about images new and old and thus we learn from these images.  They become our teachers.  He cites the potter with clay, the musician with notes, the dancer with movement, the baker with dough, etc.  So this morning I made blueberry muffins contemplatively with my kitchen radio and TV left off.  Afterwards I washed the dishes by hand being present to the water and the task.  And the muffins I created, I shared.

What if we each tuned in to some creative extrovert meditation everyday?  Could we eventually create a just and peaceful world through our compassionate creativity?  Could we come to function cooperatively as a whole?