I’ve been reading about the women mystics. If you’re much like me, you don’t know a lot about them, as women mystics, like most influential women in history, were often silenced during their day and never given equal sharing time to their male counterparts by the men who wrote our history books. Nonetheless, these women are forces to be reckoned with. And I’m grateful to Mirabai Starr who is giving me an education about these women across time and religion who lost, then found, themselves by falling in love with “the Beloved.”
“The way of the feminine mystic
is to adore the presence of the sacred in all things…. “
– Mirabai Starr in Wild Mercy: Living the Tender and Fierce Wisdom of the Wisdom Mystics
It is no wonder that these women mystics were also earthy women. They embraced the feminine qualities of the divine which western religion had almost completely abandoned (even though Jesus himself was a beautiful blend of masculine and feminine consciousness). But the feminine values, that have long been under-valued in western society, are nonetheless alive, are being regenerated, and are desperately needed if we are to engage in co-creating a sustainable future that works for all.
By engaging the very feminine values that have been missing from our religious and political institutions: the willingness to be present, to listen, and, most of all, to allow our hearts to be moved by the suffering of our world. The great gift of the brokenhearted is a deepening of care. When we have fully faced the injustices that rage like wildfires on the margins of society and across the wildernesses of the planet, we cannot help but offer ourselves in service. We bleed for our bleeding Mother. We spontaneously rise to tend her.”
– Mirabai Starr in Wild Mercy: Living the Tender and Fierce Wisdom of the Wisdom Mystics
I became an “environmentalist” when I was in the 6th grade. I like to joke that my environmental science class ruined me. Really it was an awakening. Learning that the earth was overpopulated, that we were shooting holes in our ozone layer, that the landfills were overflowing with styrofoam, plastic, and toxins, that our breathing systems, the forests, were being clearcut… all of this information set off alarm bells in my sensitive young being, and I really have not been the same. The veil had been lifted, and I could see that we all had a role to play in its destruction and in its care. And so that year, partly for extra credit, but also for conviction’s sake, my family began recycling, composting, and allowed a new tree to be planted in our yard. I would do my part.
Women everywhere are rising to the collective call to step up and repair our broken Earth. And we are activating a paradigm shift such as the world has never seen.
– Mirabai Starr in Wild Mercy: Living the Tender and Fierce Wisdom of the Wisdom Mystics
As I’ve grown, I’ve often been quite bewildered by the fact that more individuals appear to be deaf to the alarm bells. Why do so many people go about their “business as usual,” seemingly indifferent to how their actions and their purchasing power effect life systems that we know are intricately connected? Do they not read about the environmental and human devastation of the fast fashion industry? Or the food industry that benefits a few, destroys the natural landscape, leaves small farmers in the dust, and wreaks havoc on our health? Do they not hear about the plastic mounding in the oceans, the bellies of whales, and the throats of sea turtles? Do they not care about the melting of ice caps, rising of ocean levels, the increase of wildfires, hurricanes, and droughts?
When asked what do we most need to do to save our world, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh replied, “What we most need to do is to hear within ourselves the sounds of the Earth crying.”
from Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown
I have been especially bewildered when people from the Christian faith deny the hard truths of climate change, who close their eyes to the suffering that consumerism and raping of the earth’s resources have on all of God’s children. This bewilders me because it is difficult to read the Hebrew and Christian scriptures without seeing God’s passionate love for all of creation. Part of this blindness is to be blamed on bad theology. How sad that the King James version of the Genesis account changed the intention for humans practicing stewardship of the earth to “having dominion” over the earth.
I began to recognize that there was a huge gap between the kind of exquisite attention that the biblical writers are giving to the fragile land on which they live and the kind of obliviousness that characterizes our culture, or did at that time, in respect to our use of land.
Ellen Davis, author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible
in her interview with Krista Tippet on On Being.
If people believe they are supposed to rule supreme, versus to care and tend for creation, their lifestyles will reflect dominance and exploitation. But imagine if we knew ourselves to be a part of a web of life… and that each action we take either strengthens or weakens that web. Imagine if we knew that the weaver of the web loved ALL living creatures; imagine if we remembered that humans are also creatures, that our consciousness and ability to imagine are gifts to be utilized for co-creating with the great weaver. How beautiful and exciting is that!
We are Nature,
long have we been absent
but now we return.
– Walt Whitman (quoted in Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown)
This is why I am so grateful that Mirabai Starr is inviting us, both women and men alike, to reclaim the feminine side of God… the energies of nurture, collaboration, creativity, listening, tending, mending, and healing. And why I’m so grateful for the work of Joanna Macy, inviting us to honor our pain for the world, because facing the painful realities of our planet’s health is also where we touch into our love for our world, and our calling to be co-creators in its healing… mid-wives to a world reborn.
The Vessel And what if the world is pregnant with becoming – on her way to birthing – a mother with her center spreading, stretching, space being made for something new? And what if that center is also a heart – a great, cosmic heart – and within it, visions, dreams, images, imaginings. And what if this earth is not only imploding, but despite all evidence of impending gloom, these are the birth pains for a world reborn? And what if... the dreams and dreamcatchers the image-bearers, the poets and potters, artists and meditators, what if they – what if we – not only carry these dreams, but are also, the midwives. © Annette Darity Garber
