I wrote previously that I was effectively wandering about in a spiritual meadow, smelling the flowers, and that my spiritual director had suggested that it was in essence a dark night of the soul. Not in the sense of feeling an absence of God, but in the sense of not knowing where I’m going and asking:
What is it all about?
He has been reassuring that it is a recognised part of the journey. I have not been ready to talk about it here until now.
It started on the 19th November 2023 and the day is burned in my memory because of the trauma I experienced and the schism it caused. I’d watched a video earlier in the day of a Palestinian father cradling his dead child in his arms and crying and wailing:
How am I going to live without you?
Later in the evening, I heard my daughter enter the house screaming, holding her dead six month old puppy in her arms. He’d managed to pull himself free from her and had been hit by a car. I saw with horror, dissociative amnesia descend on her. The image was similar to a pieta, like the image of the Palestinian man earlier in the day, and a part of me was grateful that it wasn’t my child that was dead. I can’t dwell on this part of my story any more because it still causes me a great deal of distress. Suffice to say, my journey, and that of my daughter, has been difficult and painful, and I started talking to a psychotherapist to help me to cope.
But this day changed my spiritual paradigm. I first noticed it on the first day of my retreat last year at St. Beunos. Since having ME/CFS, I have found it difficult to get to mass, it being either too early or too late for me to manage physically, and when I have pushed myself, it left me exhausted. On retreat however, the chapel was just along the corridor from my room and the mass time was just inside the later part of my normal energy envelope. But the first day I went, I was exhausted. I put it down to first day retreat tiredness and went the second day. I felt even more exhausted, weary even, and I struggled to sit upright. I realised with a shock that I didn’t want to be there. What do you do when you love Him with everything you are, but you develop an aversion to going to church? I am not the first to ask this question, nor will I be the last I expect. I shared it with my retreat director and she asked:
So what happens if you don’t go? And how does God respond to it?
These are the questions I have been sitting in obscurity with. What is the root of my revulsion? And it is as strong as that, and what is the way of proceeding from here?
To sum up what I now understand but didn’t to begin with (I could identify the video and the puppy as the trigger), the root of my revulsion is the patriarchal, hierarchical structures that govern our world at large and lead to the escalation of violence and hatred that we see all over the world today. I came to understand that it wasn’t just the convergence of the video and the death of the puppy that had disturbed me so profoundly in the image of the pieta. What happened with the puppy certainly brought home the personal nature of the grief, but I was already profoundly disturbed by the video because it was a man. We are so used to the image of Mary in the pieta, of a woman, a mother; we have normalised women’s suffering to such an extent that it is shocking and deeply upsetting when we see a man in such a familiar image. We don’t expect it and we can’t dismiss it so easily because it is unfamiliar to us. At least, it is what I felt and still feel.
I’ve heard it said that if you hear the same thing said about you from three independent sources then it is probably true. Three people, independently, recommended I read The Chalice and the Blade by Raine Eisler and so I have started to read it. She describes the root of the problem as a:
Social system where the power of the blade is idealised….both men and women are taught to equate true masculinity with violence and dominance…
And that rigidly male dominant societies with a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure have a high degree of social violence and warfare.
One of my takeaways from the session on the theology of Girard that we had during my spiritual direction course is that Jesus’ crucifixion held up a mirror to the violence and cruelty in the human heart. My sense is that nonviolent protestors like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King did a similar thing. From the Spiritual Exercises themselves in the resurrection meditations of the fourth week, Jesus returned as consoler, not to gloat to His enemies.
What to do from here? The church is proudly patriarchal and hierarchical and I find that no longer acceptable to me. So my next question became: if I remove hierarchy and patriarchy, what does my spirituality look like? I remembered an imaginative prayer I did some years ago on the woman with the haemorrhage. I was this woman in the prayer, and when Jesus healed me, I immediately thought of my network of “sisters” who knew my intention for that day and were waiting for me to return. They were busy preparing a hopefully celebration dinner and laying the table.
I’ve been exploring women’s spirituality more widely and deeply, within and outwith my own context and the patriarchal mould. I’ve begun to discern where women are speaking inherently with the voice of the patriarchy and where they are not.
The image that has inspired this post is from the Rooted Women Oracle, image cards from Celtic tradition. I made my retreat at home this year and I pulled this image from the pack at the beginning of the retreat. My immediate response to the card was to think of the marriage feast at Cana, to be the servant, pouring wine for the guests. In The Cloud of Unknowing, and in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, wine is symbolic of spiritual wisdom. There is the obvious connection between the chalice and the Eucharist, and the chalice and the book I mentioned earlier. Eisler talks about the partnership model as one where:
Social relations are based on the principle of linking rather than ranking.
The commentary of The Grail Bearer card says:
…women are central to Grail mythology: they’re the bearers of the Grail, and its messengers…what’s contained in the Grail, and offered by the Grail Bearer, is the creative, generative essence of the Otherworld, which animates the land. And so the quest for the Grail, the giver and sustainer of life, is a quest to respect and restore the anima mundi, the soul of the world.
And:
All of this life that we’re a part of wants to be in relationship with us. If only we can learn how to listen and to see, we can come to understand that every bird wants to sing to us, and every flower to open for us.
This last paragraph reminds me “God in All Things”, of the Contemplatio in The Spiritual Exercises and of Rublev’s icon of The Holy Trinity.:
Second Point. The second, to look how God dwells in creatures, in the elements, giving them being, in the plants vegetating, in the animals feeling in them, in men giving them to understand: and so in me, giving me being, animating me, giving me sensation and making me to understand…
What also began to sink in as I made my home retreat this year is that here I am not necessarily the grail bearer. The grail bearers are my “sisters” and I am finding them. They are bringing their spiritual wisdom to me. I was already interested in The Beguines and in Julian of Norwich and I am exploring their spirituality more deeply. I became a Companion of Julian in May and this is the community I have attached myself to. I am continuing to explore what form spiritual practice and worship takes outside the patriarchal, hierarchical structure of the church and I am still at the beginning of that journey. I am currently exploring the writings of Hadewijch and Methchilde, as well as Julian. Although they had to be careful of accusations of heresy (cf. The Lollards and Marguerite Poirete), the voices of these early medieval women reach out from a time before the misogynistic gendering of the witch and before the industrial revolution and age of enlightenment. It is to this “herstory” that I am currently drawn.
