The Half of the One

It was as long ago as 1979 that I began to feel uneasy that the feminist tide was losing sight of something that we really must not lose. It seems to me that those who struggle against Biological destiny simply have not taken the biology seriously enough. The theology of “in the image of God, male and female created He them” contains powerful understandings of who we are, and how we create. Confining the creativity of love to procreation is to dismiss some of our most basic likenesses to the Holy. While I shall never forget the sight of a woman in a Chasuble on the cover of Ms Magazine, and the affect that had on me, and while Women’s spirituality was important to me, still more important I felt, was the way we were losing out to the pronouns. To go from Masculine weighted words straight to non gender specific language leads us to lose sight of many therapeutic realities, and that is only the beginning.  I knew in my gut that womanly values and characteristics are as prevalent in males as they are in females, but in the non gender specific language of the new translations we were losing the ability to see them as part of being fully human. Come to that, womanly vices are similarly present in many males too. Nastiness is a part of life and of spiritual awareness, part of the Real, and therefore part of the way we see, and of the way we write – as such it appears readily in all forms of the psalms that are not practically gutless.

As a contemplative I found the gender issues dissolved when I prayed, and the Him pronouns were glyphs that I didn’t struggle with. But, because of the values and weight of  ‘woman words’ I began to write and rewrite old prayers, and some new ones. Over and over again I was conscious that I wasn’t speaking of a Goddess, but of Being Who is both  transcendent and immanent. What I was doing was to begin to be able to say “I also am in the image of God”, a process which is still not ended. When I shared those prayers, mostly by reading them over the phone, at least one of the women I read to began to cry. When she wanted to use them in Church, she was advised to find something more suitable in the writing of Hildegard of Bingen, and of St Julian of Norwich.

I continued to investigate women’s spirituality, from what was, for me, a new wilderness, filled with despair and joy, cut off from the nourishment I was used to. I had a baby son, the then Archbishop of Canterbury visited Auckland, and the Reverend Heather Brunton became a weekly visitor, intellectual companion, and mainstay. I began to re-read the psalms and to write, if you will, the other half of them, a shadow perhaps. I read them as I wrote them, to Heather, by phone, morning by morning. I shared them in xerox form with the late Anton Everts, but then laid them aside. I had felt and began to behave as if, I were an outsider. I continued to pray with and for the Church I love, and, more particularly, for the people I met and loved, but it felt like a largely unaffirmed, hidden, life.

Earlier this year I began to help put together a new community office book. This entails using the new offices until we settle on something that works, but it led also to the idea that we should perhaps look at some of the early Christian songs for one of the daily offices. Something like the Odes of Solomon.  I had found several books of psalms that moved me particularly, beginning with the Brandt translations and ending with A Woman’s Book of Psalms by Betty Jean Steinshouer (which are so good they deserve to be read and used more widely). While shuffling through the papers I found the old book of ‘She Psalms’: not 150, but not so far off that. Every so often I would use one of them for Morning or Evening Prayer, and I began to think – Oh I know it is all passe now, and things that were definitely not appreciated when I was younger are now practically mainstream – but maybe someone else might find them of use or interest. I can’t imagine who. But what if? What if?

The loss of seventeen years worth of poems, many of which never saw the light of any day, the difficulty of picking up the pieces of the Meditations of my Heart, the Sanctuary site, and the Poetry site, without the computer which was the last in the line to contain the documents that made then up, lead me to think that perhaps putting these into electronic form, one by one, and then backing them up, might be a way, not only to retrieve them, but perhaps to start me off once more.

You may be wondering why I have called this blog ‘The half of the One’. The Answer? Simply because I don’t believe ‘God had a wife’. True spouses are never halves of each other, they are One to the Power of One when they are a working creative marriage. In G*d, neither male nor female, never less, but very much more than either; intermeshed in Being itself, aspects that are like currents weaving together in the ocean, or layers of air tumbling through each other in the atmosphere. The very word Elohim looks as if it is multifaceted in gender. So is the Tetragrammaton, with its combination of male and female letters. Someone once asked me, in irritation, ‘Who was the great goddess?’ I couldn’t answer. Di-ana, great goddess? I-dea Goddess within? None of the above, all of the above. Heck. Is Baal a god of light? A God of light isn’t Being itself, it just doesn’t sit well with what we experience when we sit on what Cynthia Bourgeault calls ‘the meditation cushion’.

That is the reason that you will see the word Godde. It is pronounced God and is an old form of the word to describe the transcendent immanence which has been described as ‘good’ and as ‘being’ and as no-thing and as alle-thing. Woman is real enough, hearty enough and respectful enough. Lady – meaning bread giver – is no dainty gentility, but rather a deep roaring joy, lordly, but not quite.  I am hoping that the ‘feel’ of these words will build into a different and perhaps spiritual understanding. I could go on – of course – but there are psalms to type out and thoughts to review. I wonder who will read? What you will make of this?

Primeval Lady,
in whom all hearts are cherished
all longing understood
all secrets shared
Cleanse the instincts of our hearts
in the nurture of your Holy spirit
that every thought and impulse of our days
may be refreshed in praise of You!