“Listening is the first and most important step for maintaining a storytelling tradition, and as such, we must practice it daily.” Felicia Rose Chavez
If we are to begin listening to one another, what should we listen for? What stories are craving to be told? It’s interesting to think about who gets to tell a tale and who must listen. I was raised in the shadows of both a Lutheran and Catholic faith. In my family, there was one story to be told and whoever had the power, told it. The tales we spun were mind bending to the point that anyone listening needed ears so elastic they were capable of hearing multiple plot changes and blistering subtexts between each line.
So, to consider Chavez’s words of listening, I’ve had to start with unlearning the idea of a single truth. Martin Prechtel says that the more we listen to one another’s stories, the smaller they become – more banal and pettier. Up close, we can hear one another burp, stumble, and speak too loudly for own concerns. Yet, grateful for the story, we listen for the details because it’s where the plot lines thicken. Prechtel says up close, we can see the grief of the divine in one another.
In most stories there are no extras. It may seem like there are unnecessary roles, but that’s probably because the main characters often steal the show. It could be because they are more attractive, more clever, more exciting. But I have found that the hidden characters usually have a lot to say.
I’m told the Goddess used to be around before patriarchal religions arrived. We used to honor her more vociferously because just as swiftly as she brings in life, she takes it.
Tara, for example has a good story tell. She is a Goddess who shows up in many Buddhist stories and is often known for her no-thingness. She teaches of natural compassion – that we don’t have to sit and think about our connection with one another, we can simply feel it. A teacher I know calls the goddess Kali, pregnant nothingness. Hers is a story of paradox. She’s so full because she’s everything and everywhere, and yet so full that she’s nothing and nowhere.
The great mother, the Goddess in many world stories and myths, is beyond a single religious identity, yet she is often an emblem of freedom that calls to each one of us. She is a reminder to the fullness of who we are. Symbols and imagery of her often reflect an inward turning of the self toward a deeper awareness of our connection to all sentient and non-sentient beings. The sacred feminine is a phrase of duality, a plural expression, an emblem of culture and diversity. The Goddess across many traditions is a reminder that the materiality of our bodies is sacred. She teaches us that all of our earthly existence is worth honoring.
Goddess stories remind me of freedom. But to understand the kind of freedom I’m storying here means I must first begin by examining the word, freedom. There is external freedom – freedom for political, economic, social, and religious desires. There is internal freedom – freedom for emotional, psychological, and spiritual desires. There is freedom’s opposite – imprisonment, captivity, enslavement – all of which come in many shapes and sizes. Then there is the ultimate freedom, that final freedom that is often found somewhere else, or in martyrs and those burned at the stake.
The tale I hope to weave today about freedom and the Goddess, is not that the divine feminine is somewhere else, but she is here and now. In all our bodies, in every place, at all times.
Which brings me to another story. The feminine is often contained in hierarchically organized and structured narratives imposing throughlines of fear. But the goddess is nothing to fear. In many Native American stories, she is Pachamama, mother earth. She is Shinto, a religion of the forest in Japan. She is not gendered, gender is what people impart.
For the Sami in northern Europe, the sun is a Goddess. For the Shipibo in South America, Bari, the sun is a God. Goddess stories are fascinating because we are often reminded that it is just our language which holds our beliefs.
The Egyptian Goddess Maat is a portrayal of justice and fairness and is known for her balancing of the scales. She regulates the stars and seasons. Her scales are in constant motion, moving with the speed of action and interaction between mortals and deities alike. For her, justice could never be captured in a single tale. I suspect a choose your own adventure story is a better fit for her craft. If she were to write a book, I think it may remind us to be vigilant to one another – to listen for injustices and the unjust actions we may impart upon one another.
Stories of Ixchel, a Mayan Goddess of the moon are often woven into tales of love and gestation. Bodhisattva and goddess of compassion Guan Yin is a tale that has been called upon during times of struggle, despair, and pain to bring about strength and good fortune. And fierce Kali, known as the womb of the great mother, embodies both the power of creation and destruction. Imagine their stories of collective healing.
In many philosophical stories today, we organize fear of the body, female, and matter, together. A dualism that reflects a similar reductive tale found in rationalist science. The binary journey pits a planetary crisis on one side and theology on the other. Dualist tales spin up spectrums with a ladder that places Female, flesh, earthly materiality, Devil, black, hell and evil near the bottom, and Male, God, Spirit, mind, light, soul, white, heaven and good near the top. The seeds we sow in these chronicles lead to colonialism, racism, transphobia, imperialism.
But if we change the arc of the story, if we remove the linear frame, we might fill it with the symbol of the yin and yang – a Buddhist tradition which often serves as a reminder of duality. Stories of yin yang remove the emphasis of hierarchy and replace it with balance. The yin yang symbol has a kind of feminine thing going for it. It’s not gender though, because everyone has it. Instead of organizing vertically, both sides emerge from the void – the great mother of no-thingness emerges again.
The earliest figurines of the great mother date back to the upper paleolithic times between 30,000 – 7000 BCE. The time of the Goddess is perhaps before any great misunderstanding of separation between masculine and feminine, mind and body, human and nature.
With the introduction of God, however we built a myth from a very male gendered story. Woven into the throughline is a desire to escape the body and defeat biology. It is the same dualism found in rationalist science. It is the same myth that has brought about so much devastation, because held within it, we must separate ourselves from the source of life. Life which comes from and through the divine feminine – an aspect that lives in all of us.
Patriarchal monotheism is a story of a God in people’s mind – a God that is alone, almighty, and righteous. Connecting our increasingly divided world with the righteous and almighty might bring one to consider the conflicts and divisions within ourselves. If we want to bring a greater sense of unity, I come back around to Chavez and listening. Perhaps the work begins by seeking to resolve the idea of an ultimate story, a single tale that wins out at the end of the day. Conflicting stories may highlight a split. But the divide also secretly points to our much needed healing at a deeper level.
Rilke reminds us to listen because God might very well be learning from the stories we dismiss. “Take your well-discipline strengths and stretch them between two opposing poles. Because inside human beings is where God learns.”
We are always in a radical situation of having to learn and unlearn on many levels – from the practical to the divine. We are collectively and individually weaving tales of numerous extremes where the rift between truth and lie continue to intensify.
But Rilke is telling us to stretch those poles! Stretch our stories to the fullest because pulling them intensifies such that the unity, or wholeness of life can be found again. If we look for stories of the goddess, we may be disheartened to find that the divine feminine is missing from so much of today. But searching for stories of her might just make us reach to find the interior arches of our own imagination where the beauty of the sacred goddess is secretly hiding in the divisions that seem to tear us apart.
Comments