Entering the Rose Garden Part Two

Communion Reflection for February 23, 2023

Whatever their ways,

they are all in love with you,

Each comes, by a path, to the Rose Garden

Niyazi Misri

Anne Baring finds in the richness of Kabbalistic teachings and traditions traces of the luminous period of the First Temple in Israel. Thanks to her generosity in making her lecture notes available to those who participated in Ubiquity University’s online program “Madonna Rises”, I have Anne Baring’s own words to rely on. Short quotes are in quotation marks, longer ones designated by the use of italics.

Last week, we reflected on The Tree of Life as an image of the soul of the cosmos. “Every aspect of creation, both visible and invisible, is interconnected and interwoven with every other aspect.” In the Tree of Life there exists “one cosmic symphony”.

The Tree of Life is no hierarchical descent from invisible to visible. Rather it is “an image of worlds nesting within worlds, dimensions within dimensions emanating…from within outwards…the tapestry of relationships which connect invisible spirit with the visible fabric of this world…. At the innermost level is the unknowable source or god-head, at the outermost the physical forms of matter.”

And who or where are we in this “one unified web of life: one energy, one spirit, one single cosmic entity”?

Anne Baring responds: “According to this Tradition, we are, each one of us, that life, that energy, that spirit.”

There is something still more wonderful: an intermediary between “the unknowable source” and “the physical forms of matter”: the Shekinah:

The Shekinah is the image of the Divine Feminine or the Feminine Face of God as it was conceived in this mystical tradition of Judaism. In the image and cosmology of the Shekinah, we encounter the most complete description of Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit as the indissoluble relationship between the two primary aspects of the god-head that have been lost or hidden for centuries.

The Shekinah- the feminine co-creator- is the Voice or Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Glory of God, the Compassion of God, the Active Presence of God: intermediary between the mystery of the unknowable source or ground and this world of its ultimate manifestation.

The concept of the Shekinah as Divine Wisdom and Holy Spirit ….transmutes all creation, including the apparent insignificance and ordinariness of everyday life, into something to be loved, embraced, honoured and celebrated because it is the epiphany or shining forth of the divine intelligence and love that has brought it into being and dwells hidden within it.

The elimination of the image of the Great Mother took away from us the concept that “the whole of nature was ensouled with spirit and therefore sacred”. People living through the millennia of Patriarchal religions lost “their age-old sense of participation in a Sacred Order.”

The Shekinah, named as Divine Wisdom and Holy Spirit- divinity present and active in the world- supplies the missing imagery of divine immanence which is absent from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And this mystical tradition brings together heaven and earth, the divine and the human, in a coherent and seamless vision of their essential relationship.

How would the recovery of the Shekinah as the feminine aspect of the god-head, as Mother, Beloved, Sister and Bride transform our image of God? of Nature? of ourselves?

Anne Baring states that “the Shekinah gives woman what she has lacked throughout the last two thousand years in western civilization—a sacred image of the Divine Feminine that is reflected at the human level in herself.”

Yet prior to this in the ancient world Wisdom was always associated with the image of a Goddess: Inanna in Sumeria, Isis and Ma’at in Egypt, Athena in Greece... Anne Baring celebrates the recovery of these ancient images with the even greater richness of the Shekinah’s role in the web of Life:

The Bronze Age imagery of the Great Goddesses returns to life in the extraordinary beauty and power of the descriptions of the Shekinah, and in the gender endings of nouns which describe the feminine dimension of the divine. But the Divine Feminine is now defined as a limitless connecting web of life, as the invisible Soul of the Cosmos, as the intermediary between the unknowable god-head and life in this dimension. The Shekinah brings together heaven and earth, the invisible and visible dimensions of reality in a resplendent vision of their essential relationship and union.

Another aspect of this tradition preserves the image from the Bronze Age of the Sacred Marriage. Rather than a Father God there is a Mother-Father who are “one in their eternal embrace, one in their ground, one in their emanation, one in their ecstatic and continual act of creation through all the dimensions they bring into being and sustain.”

Anne Baring comments:"From the perspective of divine immanence, there is no essential separation between spirit and nature or spirit and matter."

In a burst of poetic praise, Anne Baring adds: "No other cosmology offers the same breath-taking vision in such exquisite poetic imagery of the union of male and female energies in the One that is both.

Not surprisingly, the kabbalists, in contemplating the mystery of this divine union, turned for inspiration to “The Song of Songs”.

(to be continued) Entering the Rose Garden: One

Whatever their ways,

they are all in love with you,

Each comes, by a path, to the Rose Garden

Niyazi Misri

In these times of planetary crisis on so many levels, we need the wisdom, support, guidance of the Sacred Feminine Presence. It's time to revisit the Rose Garden, Her symbol for millennia, with this series of writings from 2020. Anne Kathleen 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. The garden was peopled by scholars, archaeologists of the soul, dancers, storytellers, musicians, poets and mystics. Their great task is recovering, and offering to those who hunger for it, the knowledge and awareness of the Divine Feminine.

When COVID made Ubiquity’s fourteen-year tradition of a summer program in the Chartres Cathedral of France impossible, Madonna Rising took its place. More than one hundred participants joined in from countries across the planet. The central image for the program was the Mystical Rose, a title honouring the Sacred Feminine in ancient cultures, such as Egypt and Sumeria. Later, that title was given to Mary, Mother of Jesus.

On Day One we were greeted by Banafsheh Sayyad from her home in Southern 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 offering 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. The bird of humanity has been flying in circles for hundreds and hundreds of years, held up only fully by the masculine wing...

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 and the 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 and 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)

Preparing to Celebrate Brigid's Feast Communion Reflection for January 26, 2023

“The dance of life is coming back….we’re rebuilding our internal structures”. Jean Houston

The Feast of Samhain, November 1st, was celebrated by the Celtic Peoples as the birth of a new year. The ancient wise ones understood that life comes from darkness. Through these dark days, these short nights, we’ve been in a time of gestation. Seeds of new life have been planted within us, though we do not yet know the shape/colour/scent of what is to emerge…

On Brigid’s Feast in Ireland, the snowdrops and crocuses begin to emerge from the earth. Here in North America, the only snowdrops we shall see for many weeks are those that fall from the sky, falling now, even as I write these words.

And yet, with the eyes of wisdom, we may already sense new life emerging within us…

In the very heart of Samhain darkness, Jean Houston offered a ZOOM program on “The Mystic Path” integrating the classic teachings of Evelyn Underhill on the stages of mysticism with the astounding discoveries of Quantum Science, opening what might once have been thought a call to the few into a possible path for each of us who long for oneness with all of life. Jean commented that the Hero/Heroine’s Journey may now be the interior journey. “The dance of life is coming back,” Jean said. “We’re rebuilding our internal structures.”

The newness that is happening may not be evident in externals. Human suffering is everywhere, violence and war still lead the news stories, followed closely by worsening economic predictions, and yet… Look deeper, look nearer to home where small local efforts to light the darkness are rising up everywhere. Listen to the music being composed in our time: music that celebrates hope and beauty; music often inspired by ancient melodies from musicians such as Hildegard of Bingen. Look at the values portrayed in some of the best of modern films. “Avatar: The Way of Water” honours an imagined race of people so deeply at home on their planet that their understanding of birth, life and death is cyclic; they swim in the depths of the ocean, communing with plants and sea creatures whom they honour… they offer a home to strangers whose coming puts their own lives at risk.

Listen to the news for the small changes that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago: a meeting of the city council in Ottawa this week began with a land acknowledgement stating that Canada’s Capital, stands on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Peoples, that our indigenous peoples, including Inuit and Metis, are honoured. A sign of that honouring is that four newly announced projects in Canada for the preservation of forests, water and wetlands are to be managed by Indigenous leaders whose people have cared for them for thousands of years. CBC radio news quoted Pope Francis speaking out against laws that ”criminalize homosexuality”. The Pope urged Catholic Bishops who support such laws to recognize the dignity of everyone, to welcome LGBTQ people into the church.

As well, look into your own heart. Find where newness is emerging within your life, where “the dance of life” is stirring anew. When you make your “Visit to Sophia” in this week’s Gathering Space, ask how the new life that you carry might be nurtured.

Next week, on Brigid’s Feast, you are invited to renew or to make for the first time a one- year commitment to the Communion. This is an invitation to both give and receive nourishment for the new life within each of us as companions in the Communion of Creative Fire.

A copy of the Commitment Form for you to read and reflect upon in the days leading towards Brigid’s Feast is attached to the email sent to you on January 26, 2023.