Communion Reflection for May 26, 2022

Entering the Rose Garden

Whatever their ways,

they are all in love with you,

Each comes, by a path, to the Rose Garden

Niyazi Misri

For seven days in mid-August, 2020, I spent time in an ancient Rose Garden, an imaginal space engineered by ZOOM, offered by Ubiquity University, peopled by scholars and dancers, archaeologists of the soul, storytellers, musicians, poets and mystics whose great task is recovering and offering to those who hunger, the knowledge and awareness of the Divine Feminine. Over one hundred participants joined in from countries across the planet, a blessed side effect of COVID which had forced the Cancellation of Ubiquity’s fourteen-year tradition of a summer program in the Chartres Cathedral of France. The program was called “Madonna Rising.” Its central image was the Mystical Rose, a title honouring the Sacred Feminine in ancient cultures, such as Egypt and Sumeria. Later, it was a title given to Mary, Mother of Jesus.

On Day One, Banafsheh Sayyad greeted us from her home in California. Over the following days, Banafsheh would lead us in sacred dance, inviting us to open our lives to the Divine Feminine Presence. Banafsheh introduced the theme of "Madonna Rising" by quoting a Prophecy from the Cherokee Nation: The bird of humanity has two great wings - a masculine wing and a feminine wing. The masculine wing has been fully extended for centuries, fully expressed, while the feminine wing in all of us has been truncated, not yet fully expressed - half extended. 
 So the masculine wing in all of us has become over- muscular and over-developed and in fact violent and the bird of humanity has been flying in circles for hundreds and hundreds of years, held up only fully by the masculine wing that became over- muscular and violent. In the 21st century, however, something remarkable will happen. The feminine wing in all of us will fully extend and find its way to express and the masculine wing will relax in all of us and the bird of humanity will soar.

From her desk, Banafsheh lifted a rose. It appeared to move off- screen to be received by Anne Baring, seated in her home in England. In the first of her trilogy of presentations, Anne would begin to tell the tale of how the bird of humanity lost the power of gracious flight in its feminine wing.

Author of Dream of the Cosmos (Archive Publishing, Dorset, England, 2013) as well as The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, (1992) Anne delves for light in history, following paths not yet made, seeking the story that came before the story in pursuit of clarity about so much that has been lost to us.

Was there a story that preceded the 6th c. BCE Creation Story in the Book of Genesis of the Hebrew Bible? And if so, how was it lost? Here is what Anne’s research found:

I loved her more than health or beauty,

preferred her to the light,

since her radiance never sleeps.

(The Book of Wisdom, 7:10 Jerusalem Bible)

Solomon, to whom the Book of Wisdom is ascribed, built the First Temple in Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE. In the time of the First Temple, Israel had an ancient, shamanic, visionary tradition. Divine Wisdom was worshipped in this First Temple as the Goddess Asherah, the consort of Yahweh, co-creator of the world with him. In this tradition the Tree of life was associated with Wisdom, Queen of Heaven.

Anne then told us how all this changed:

In 621 BC, in the reign of King Josiah, a powerful group of priests called Deuteronomists took control of the Temple…. The Deuteronomists had the statue of the Goddess Asherah and the great Serpent, image of her power to regenerate life, removed from the Temple and destroyed. Her Sacred Groves were cut down. All images of her were broken. The ancient shamanic rituals of the High Priest which had honoured and communed with the Queen of Heaven as Divine Wisdom and Holy Spirit were banished, replaced by new rituals based on obedience to Yahweh’s Law. The vital communion with the inner dimensions of reality was lost; the making of images was forbidden.

(As I listened to this, I felt something inside me twist in pain. More even than the destruction of her images, the cutting down of the trees sacred to the Goddess wrenched my heart.)

Anne spoke of the long-lasting effects of this rupture:

"This is the crucially important time when I think it is possible to say that the whole foundation of Jewish and later Christian civilization became unbalanced. The Deuteronomists ensured that Yahweh was the sole Creator God. The Feminine co-creator, the Goddess Asherah, was eliminated. The Divine Feminine aspect of the god-head was banished from orthodox Judaism. The Deuteronomists went further: they demoted the Queen of Heaven – Mother of All Living – into the human figure of Eve, bestowing this title upon her. They created the Myth of the Fall in the Book of Genesis (2 & 3), with its message of sin, guilt and banishment from the Garden of Eden, severing the Tree of Life from its ancient association with the Queen of Heaven. "

Anne Baring suggests that the “heritage seeds’’ of the First Temple’s teaching were somehow preserved in the Jewish traditions of Kabbalism:

"It seems highly significant that one of the most important images of Kabbalism is the Tree of Life, which is a clear and wonderful concept describing the web of relationships which connect invisible spirit with the fabric of life in this world. At the innermost level or dimension of reality is the unmanifest, unknowable Divine Ground; at the outermost the physical forms we call nature, body and matter. Linking the two is the archetypal template of the Tree of Life— an inverted tree— whose branches grow from its roots in the divine ground and extend through many invisible worlds or dimensions until they reach this one. "

Anne describes this cosmology as one where

"Every aspect of creation, both visible and invisible, is interconnected and interwoven with every other aspect. All is one life, one cosmic symphony, one integrated whole. We participate, at this material level of creation, in the divine life which informs all these myriad levels of reality. Our human lives are therefore inseparable from the inner life of the Cosmos."

The Kabbalistic tradition is “vitally important” Anne says, "because it celebrates…the indissoluble relationship and union between the feminine and masculine aspects of the god-head— a sacred union which the three Patriarchal religions have ignored or deliberately rejected.

I will end this excerpt from Anne Baring’s first talk with a statement she makes that is both stark and striking in its clarity:

"If we want to understand the deep roots of our present environmental and spiritual crisis, we can find them in the loss of three important elements: the feminine image of spirit, the direct shamanic path of communion with spirit through visionary and shamanic experience, and the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine aspect of the God-head and the Divine Ground. Each of these was an intrinsic aspect of the lost traditions and practices of the First Temple."

(to be continued)

Communion Reflection for May 19, 2022

“How should anything be amiss?”

The winter had been long, dark, frigid, lifeless. I drove to the Galilee Retreat Centre on that late February morning in 2002 through fog that veiled the frozen Ottawa River on my left as well as the road ahead of me. As it slowly lifted, it revealed trees on either side in their winter nakedness. Suddenly I was aware of beauty: each delicate twig encased in ice, a crystal carapace that caught the rays of the morning sun, sparkling like cut glass, throwing joy through the air, across the soft roseate sky. Inside, I felt a surge of joy as my inner winter melted, as new, previously unimagined possibilities for travel, for poetry, for a fuller life danced within me.

I reached Galilee in a state of expectant joy. Yet what awaited me there was word of the overnight death of our beloved co-worker, Wendy McNamara. Her husband and two young adult sons, all of us who loved her, had walked the journey with her for over two years of cancer treatment, certain she would recover. She must get well. Any other outcome was unthinkable.

Yet the unthinkable is what happened.

Wendy had called her husband the previous morning from the hospital where she was having routine tests. She was crying, upset, so unlike our brave Wendy! “The coffee here is awful!” she told Mike. “Come, and bring me some Tim Horton’s coffee.” So he came, and spent the day with her. That night, Wendy died.

I moved through the days that followed in a state of blank incomprehension. I felt betrayed by my own trust that she would recover. I felt, as Tennyson wrote, that “someone had blunder’d”. There was no time to grieve as I was preparing to offer the Julian play to some two hundred women in Ottawa. All my time and energy was needed to rehearse. Moving through the familiar lines of James Janda’s script, I was stopped short by the words Jesus spoke to Julian:

I lead all to the end I ordained it to be from without beginning, by the same Might, Wisdom, and Love whereby I made it. How should anything be amiss?

Suddenly, I got it! This was not an error, not a blunder. It was part of the guiding love that began with Wendy’s conception, and continued to her death. The grief, the loss would not be assuaged by this, but the sense of betrayal was obliterated.

James Janda had told me that the quotations he used in his script came from a 1927 edition of Revelations of Divine Love by Dom Roger Huddleston (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne). He'd found the book in the New York Public Library. Later, as I read newer translations of Julian’s writings, I realized I had misinterpreted the word “end”. It was not, as I had thought on that February day, a reference to death (for death does not end our love relationships). Rather it means something more like “purpose”.

Brendan Doyle in Meditations with Julian of Norwich writes the passage this way: I lead everything

Toward the purpose I ordained it to

from without beginning,

By the same Power, Wisdom and Love

by which I created it.

How could anything be amiss? (p.39)

Marion Glasscoe's almost-Middle English translation reads this way:

I lede althing to the end I ordeynd it to fro withoute beginning

be the same might, wisdam and love that I made it.

How should anything be amysse? (Chapter Eleven, p. 19)

What is so heartening here is the assurance of guidance towards our purpose, for many of us today the Holy Grail. We set forth on countless quests, seeking teachers, guides, seminars, webinars, books, programs, asking, asking, asking always: “Why am I here? What is my purpose in life?”

Even our poets put that question to us. Mary Oliver writes: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Rilke reminds us that … all living things in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves at any cost and despite all opposition.

Julian teaches us that the Love that embraces us also guides us towards that purpose. We need to find, in the midst of our searching outside ourselves, time each day for quiet listening to the inner voice, the Beloved of our Soul. In sacred space, in stillness, we ask, “What is the purpose to which you are guiding me?”

We might in that quiet time also look, as Jean Houston teaches, at the recurring patterns, the fractals, to which our life returns in each new endeavour. Is it healing? writing? leadership? exploring new ideas? creating community? guiding youth? conflict resolution? peace-making? cross-cultural reconciliation? Our purpose may be written in our footsteps in the sands of our lives.

For Julian, the recurring fractal was teaching. It is what led her to devote twenty years to write for us her Revelations of Divine Love, finding ever fresh ways to express what had been revealed to her in her night of visions, continuing to reflect, to deepen her understanding so she could teach us to trust in love. Seated at her window, which opened out to one of the busiest streets in Norwich, she was listener, teacher, to those who came to her.

In my friend Wendy, I see now a similar fractal of teaching about the Love in which we are held. Wendy had at times been invited to give the homily at St. Joseph’s Parish in Ottawa. In her last talk, she had spoken with her unique infusion of gentle courage and power: “There is NOTHING you can do that will make God love you more than you are now loved!” That was the one message Wendy wanted to leave with us for always. I shall never forget her words. I know now that she was guided to fulfill the purpose ordained for her from without beginning. The joy that surged through me after her death was a parting gift.

How should anything be amysse?

Communion Reflection for May 12, 2022

image of Julian by Jane Joyner Julian's Words on Mutual Longing As I write to you today, summer has come to Calabogie. Morning coffee has become a time of bliss. On the deck, above the lake, I watch the shimmer of silver on water while soft winds play with tendrils of my hair, cooling me in the sun’s sudden fire.

We had a long cold spring. Days of rain interspersed with days when dark clouds hovered as though wondering whether to rain or not. Scarcely visible buds sat in stillness on the tall deciduous trees around my home. Yesterday they burst into leafy green abundance.

These fluctuations make me think of Julian who writes of a time of prayer when in swift succession consolation was followed by desolation, then consolation, then desolation, thirty three times! “It was a marvellous mix-up!” she comments.

Perhaps the fact of Julian is as important as her teachings in Revelations of Divine Love. That such a woman lived on this planet, experienced its rain and wind, the beauty of its flowers and trees, the song of its birds... that she experienced bliss and sorrow, seeking as we do to know God, to understand the meaning of life, to love more deeply: that’s the gift.

Julian loved us, whom she would never know, writing her book for us, longing to share with us all she had learned of Love that we might share her joy. She writes:

Everything that I say about me I mean to apply to all my fellow Christians, for I am taught that this is what our Lord intends in this spiritual revelation. And therefore I pray you all for God’s sake, and I counsel you for your own profit, that you disregard the wretch to whom it was shown, and that mightily, wisely, and meekly you contemplate upon God, who out of his courteous love and his endless goodness was willing to show it generally to the comfort of us all. For it is God’s will that you accept it with great joy and delight, as Jesus has shown it to you. (Showings Chapter Eight, 191, editors Colledge and Walsh, Paulist Press, New York, Toronto, 1978)

Today I’m choosing a few passages from Showings that speak of the way that all of life is held in love, passages that reveal how we especially are longed for and loved by the One whom Julian knew so intimately.

To any soul who sees the Creator of all things, all that is created seems very little…he who created it created everything for love, and by that same love it is preserved, and always will be without end…God is everything which is good, as I see, and the goodness which everything has is God. (Showings Chapter Eight, 190)

Julian reveals both her own longing and that of the One she seeks: I saw him and sought him, for we are now so blind and so foolish that we can never seek God until the time when he in his goodness shows himself to us. And when by grace we see something of him then we are moved by the same grace to seek with great desire to see him for our greater joy. So I saw him and sought him, and I had him and lacked him; and this is and should be our ordinary undertaking in this life, as I see it.

Once my understanding was let down into the bottom of the sea, and there I saw green hills and valleys, with the appearance of moss strewn with seaweed and gravel. Then I understood in this way: that if a man or woman were there under the wide waters, if s/he could see God, as God is continually with (us), s/he would be safe in soul and body, and come to no harm. And furthermore, s/he would have more consolation and strength than all this world can tell. For it is God’s will that we believe that we see him continually, though it seems to us that the sight be only partial; and through this belief he makes us always to gain more grace, for God wishes to be seen, and he wishes to be sought, and he wishes to be expected, and he wishes to be trusted. (Showings Chapter Ten, 193-4)

I feel drawn to take a risk today. We know that, for Julian, the Love “that moves the sun and all the other stars” (as Dante writes) was contained in the person of Jesus. I trust that Julian would allow me to rephrase her references to “God” in the way I now understand the Presence of Love in its feminine form as Sophia, the one who tells us:

Yahweh created me, when his purpose first unfolded;

before the oldest of his works….

The deep was not, when I was born;

there were no springs to gush with water….

(excerpts from Proverbs 8 in The Jerusalem Bible)

Kathleen Duffy writes that Sophia seeks to capture our attention as she peers out from behind the stars, overwhelms us with the glorious radiance of a sunset, and caresses us with a gentle breeze.

I rephrase Julian’s words to say that (Sophia) wishes to be seen, and She wishes to be sought, and She wishes to be expected, and She wishes to be trusted.

May we respond to her wishes. Communion Reflection for May 5, 2022

inside the reconstructed anchorhold in Norwich All Your Living is Prayer in My Sight

Early February, thirty years ago. I’m standing before a carved oak door beside the sanctuary in St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, England. I press my thumb down on the iron latch. When the door swings inwards, I enter the reconstructed anchorhold where Julian lived for the last forty years of her life.

The sense of her presence is so powerful that I have to sit down on the wooden bench beneath the mullioned window. I commune with this wise and kindly woman. Only later do I take in other aspects of the room. On the wall just inside the door, there is a small white card on which someone has printed in careful calligraphy Julian’s words: prayer oneth the soul to God.

What did Julian understand about prayer? What was revealed to her in the sacred intimacy of her night of “Showings”? Julian writes a great deal about prayer in the Longer Text of her Revelations of Divine Love. She writes for us, to us, that we might know the confidence and joy that she knew.

For many years, I found Julian’s writing difficult to read. I felt as though I were being spun around in circles. Until the invention of moveable type by Johann Gutenberg in 1450 (thirty years after Julian’s death), the compression of thought we associate with the written text was undeveloped. People wrote as they spoke, expressing an idea, repeating it, underscoring it to be sure it was understood. Julian was writing at a time when the English language was just coming to birth. Her words and expressions are fresh, sometimes invented for her purposes.

I was slow to read and appreciate the full richness of her thought. In reparation, I offer Julian’s own words on prayer. From among the several different translations of Julian’s Showings, I choose Not for the Wise (Darton, Longman and Todd, London 1994), by Ritamary Bradley, Professor Emerita at St. Ambrose University in Iowa. This translation is based on Marion Glasscoe’s Middle English edition of A Revelation of Love. Julian leads into the theme of Prayer by assuring us that we are greatly loved:

Then I understood truly that all manner of thing is made ready for us

- by the great goodness of God

To the degree that whenever we are ourselves in peace and love

-we are, in fact, saved.

But since we may not have this in fullness while we are here

it behooves us always to live

- in sweet prayer

-in lovely longing,

with our Lord Jesus.

For he longs to bring us to fullness of joy…

God is love and teaches us to do as he does.

He wants us to be like him

-in wholeness of endless love

- for ourselves- and for our even-Christians.

Just as God’s love for us is never broken because of our sins,

In the same way God wills that our love

- for ourselves

- and for our even-Christians

should never be broken.

This word that God said is an endless comfort:

“I keep you securely.”

(Chapter Forty: Fourteenth Showing)

After this, our Lord showed me about prayer.

In this showing I saw there are two conditions our Lord intends for it:

- one is that we pray aright;

-the other is that we have unwavering trust.

But oftentimes we do not trust completely,

for we are not sure that God hears us, as we think

- either because we are unworthy

- or because we feel absolutely nothing.

- for we are as sterile and dry oftentimes after our prayer as before.

And this, in our feeling and our folly, is the cause of our weakness.

At times I have felt this way myself.

Our Lord brought all of this (about trust)

suddenly to my mind, and said:

“I am the ground of your beseeching.

- first, it is my will that you should have it;

- and since I make you to want it

- and you do ask for it,

how should it then be that you should not have what you ask?”

….where he says: “And you do ask for it”,

he shows a very great pleasure,

and the endless reward he will give us for our petitioning.

And in the part where he says: “How should it then be that you should not have what you ask?” he is indicating that this is impossible.

For it is a most impossible thing that we should ask for

- mercy and grace

and not have it.

For all these things that our good Lord makes us to ask for, God has already ordained to give us from the beginning.

Glad and merry is Christ over our prayer.

He awaits it, and he wants it.

For with his grace

- he makes us like to himself

- in our hearts

-as we already are in our humanity.

This is his blessed will.

Here is what Christ says:

“Pray earnestly -though you have no taste for it, as you think.

"For it does you good

- though you do not feel that it does;

- though you see nothing;

- yes, even though you think you are powerless.

“For when you are dry and empty, sick and frail, then your prayer is most pleasing to me

-though there seems to you to be little pleasure in it.

And thus all your living is prayer in my sight.”

Thanking also belongs to prayer.

Thanking is a new, inward, knowing

Accompanied with great reverence and loving awe

- inclining us to do, with our whole strength, what the good Lord draws us towards;

- and inwardly

- to give thanks

- and to enjoy.

Sometimes, in its abundance, thanking breaks out into words, and we say:

“Good Lord, grant us mercy. Blessed may you be!”

(Chapter 41 Fourteenth Showing)

Thou art enough to me

Communion Reflection on Julian of Norwich

April 28, 2022

Julian’s words of guidance in her book Revelations of Divine Love (also called Showings) were written out of love for us, whom she considered her “even Christians”, or “kindred spirits”. Five of these words leapt out at me on that February day in 1992 when, entering the reconstructed anchorhold in the tiny Church of St. Julian in Norwich, I saw incised in a marble slab: Thou art enough to me.

Looking back to that moment now, I wonder that I did not immediately turn around and exit by the door through which I’d just entered. Those five words struck me to the heart, challenging me to make a complete turn-around in my life, to let go of what I had until that moment considered necessary. I had left a place, a ministry and a friendship that had been the threefold source of my life’s happiness. Now I faced a future without all three. There was no way that I could accept that Julian’s unseen “Thou” could be enough. I see now that I understood almost nothing of the One Julian addressed as “Thou” and even less of the meaning of “enough”. Later, as I prepared to offerJulian’s words to others through James Janda’s play, I found the context for those words:

For this is the loving yearning of the soul through the touch of the Holy Spirit, from the understanding which I have in this revelation: “God, of your goodness give me yourself, for you are enough for me, and I can ask for nothing which is less which can give you full worship. And if I ask anything which is less, always I am in want; but only in you do I have everything.” (Showings Colledge and Walsh, p. 184)

Look now at the same words in a different translation. Marion Glasscoe’s Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love is my personal favourite among the dozens of newer renderings of Julian’s “Showings” because it comes closest to the Middle English of Julian’s time (sending my spell-check into orbit): For this is the kinde yernings of the soule by the touching of the Holy Ghost, as be the understondyng that I have in this shewing: “ God, of thy goodnesse, give me thyselfe; for thou art enow to me and I may nothing aske that is less that may be full worshippe to thee. And if I aske anything that is lesse, ever me wantith, but only in thee I have all.” (Glasscoe pp.7-8)

Julian is not asking us to set aside our desires; she is not saying that to find God we must relinquish everything for which we long. Quite the opposite. Julian is saying that the deepest yearning of our souls will only be satisfied when we know the One who both made us to yearn and can alone fill that yearning. What Julian found for herself she wants us to know: Only in you (to whom we entrust our longings) do I have everything, or in the Glasscoe translation: only in thee I have all.

This is a startling revelation for Julian, for each of us. As Julian says in Janda's play: Some of us believe that God is Almighty

And may do all,

And that God is All-Wisdom,

And can do all,

But that God is All-Love and will do all…..

There we stop short.

The Presence of Love that we in the 21st Century are coming to know as permeating all of life in the metaverse, as well as in the depths of our own souls, our very being, may be differently imaged for us than it was for Julian. Yet our experience of that all-pervading Love within our lives is very like Julian’s. However we name that Love, however we call upon it, we can know ourselves held safe in its embrace. Our deepest yearnings are for Love, for knowing our life has meaning, that we matter to that Love, that our longings are not only understood, but even prompted by that same Love.

Our task then, is to journey within those longings to find how they are drawing us into the embrace of the One who can satisfy them, who can fill us with the kind of joy that might lead us one day to say with Julian: Thou art enough to me.

In that same passage, Julian goes on to say: And these words of the goodness of God are very dear to the soul, and very close to touching our Lord’s will, for his goodness fills all his creatures and all his blessed works full, and endlessly overflows in them. For he is everlastingness, and he made us only for himself, and restored us by his precious Passion and always preserves us in his blessed love; and all this of his goodness. (Colledge and Walsh, 184)

The Glasscoe text reads this way: And these words are full lovesome to the soule and full nere touchen the will of God and his goodness; for his goodness comprehendith all his creatures and all his blissid works and overpassith without end, for he is the endleshede. And he hath made us only to himselfe and restorid us be his blissid passion and kepith us in his blissid love. And all this is of his goodness. (Glasscoe, p. 8)

May we stay safely, joyfully within that "blissid love".

Communion Reflection for April 21, 2022

The Easter Mystery: Communion Reflection April 14, 2022

Through the cold, quiet nighttime of the grave underground,

The earth concentrated on him with complete longing

Until his sleep could recall the dark from beyond

To enfold memory lost in the requiem of mind.

The moon stirs a wave of brightening in the stone.

He rises clothed in the young colours of dawn.

(John O’Donohue “Resurrection”)

The Easter Mystery of life-death-life is at the heart of the universe, at the heart of life on our planet, in the deep heart of our own lives. From its birth out of the womb of a dying star, through its daily cycle of day/dusk/ night/dawn, its yearly cycle of summer/autumn/ winter/spring, the earth teaches us to live within the paschal mystery. Ancient peoples understood this mystery. Through their careful observations they constructed buildings such as the mound in Newgrange Ireland where a tiny lintel receives the first rays of dawn only on the winter solstice.

The ancients wove their understanding of life/death/life into their mythologies: the Egyptian story of Osiris, whose severed body was put together piece by piece by his wife Isis, then reawakened; the Sumerians tell of the great queen Inanna who descended to the underworld to visit her sister Erishkigal. There she was stripped of all her royal robes and insignia, and murdered by her sister who then hung her lifeless body on a hook. Three days later, Inanna was restored to life, all her honour returned to her.

The people of Jesus’ time would have known these and other great myths of the ancient Near East. What was so stunningly different in the Jesus story was that the mystery of life-death-life was incarnated in a historical person. The Resurrection of Jesus is at the heart of the Christian faith. As Paul wrote, “If Christ be not risen then our faith is in vain.”

In our lifetime, the illumination of new science shows us the life/death/mystery at the heart of the universe. Like the stars, whose explosive endings give birth to new planets, our lives are continuously being rebirthed into a deeper more joyous existence. By allowing the death within ourselves of old habits, old mindsets, narrow ideas of who or what we may be, we open ourselves to the possibility of new life being birthed within us. As Jesus told his friends, “You will do what I do. You will do even greater things”.

“Resurrection is about being pulsed into new patterns appropriate to our new time and place,” Jean Houston writes in Godseed. For this to happen, we need to open ourselves in our deep core to “the Heart of existence and the Love that knows no limits....to allow for the Glory of Love to have its way with us, to encounter and surrender to That which is forever seeking us, and from this to conceive the Godseed”.

“The need for resurrection has increased in our time,” Jean continues. “We are living at the very edge of history, at a time when the whole planet is heading toward a global passion play, a planetary crucifixion.” Yet “the longing with which we yearn for God is the same longing with which God yearns for us…. the strength of that mutual longing can give us the evolutionary passion to roll away the stone, the stumbling blocks that keep us sealed away and dead to the renewal of life”. (Godseed pp.129-130)

The yearly miracle of Spring awakens within us the confidence and joy that this same rebirth is ours to accept and to live. We know our call to green our lives, our times, our planet:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age (Dylan Thomas)

Where in my life do I most experience the need for a rebirth?

What old habits and beliefs would I have to let die in order for this new life to be born?

How does it change my life to know that my longing for God is the same longing with which God yearns for me?

What would a resurrected life look like, feel like, for me? for those with whom my life is woven? for our planet?

May Sophia, the feminine presence of Sacred Wisdom, guide us through the death of what no longer serves us into the joy of the rebirth for which our hearts yearn.